Fang Wang and Ying Wang
perspective.“ Local government has become more adept at the use of promotional techniques, though it must now operate under strict legal guidelines to prevent political bias in the information it provides”( Walsh, 1994). In the field of e‐commerce, website promotion means a continuing process to attract potential consumers to visit a website. Skills such as search engine optimization( SEO), web content development and search engine submission are introduced in related handbooks, e. g. Galon( 1999), Lee and Seda( 2009), etc. However, definitions of concepts such as promotion, marketing and optimization involved in government websites are still ambiguous. Few academic studies have been conducted on government website promotion. A single perspective is not enough for exploring the comprehensive problem of low utilization of government websites( Wang & Chen, 2012). Online discussions about government website promotion remain scattered and fragmental in general. An in‐depth academic study is necessary. This study intends to explore the mechanism of government website promotion in a holistic way. Around the main target of this study, five research questions are put forward:
( 1) How do citizens find government websites?( 2) What are the standpoints of government agencies on website promotion?( 3) What internal and external factors influence the promotion of government websites?( 4) What are the core theoretical elements of government website promotion?( 5) What are the appropriate promotion tactics for government websites?
2. Research procedure
“ The goal of grounded theory is to generate a theory that accounts for a pattern of behavior which is relevant and problematic for those involved.”( Glaser, 1992, pp. 93). Considering that theories for internet marketing are not completely applicable in public sector, and theories of marketing in public sector are not mature enough for empirically studying the present problem, a grounded theory approach is selected.
2.1 Data collection
Data were collected mainly by interviews. 48 interviewees were selected, including 24 government employees who were in charge of government websites at different levels of China governments, 22 Chinese citizens and one technician from a company for website service provision. 24 government employees comprise 5 females and 19 males. 19 citizens are registered blog users on the Science Net( http:// blog. sciencenet. cn /), who are professors or doctoral candidates. The other four includes two farmers, an officer of a university and a manager of a private clinic. All the interviewees have experiences with the internet. 45 of them have at least a college education.
The interview outline for government employees covers but is not limited to following four aspects:( 1) How do you evaluate the utilization rate of your site?( e. g. Who from where visit the site? What are their main purposes of visiting the site? What functions of the site do they use most or least?)( 2) What factors do you think influence the utilization of your website?( 3) Do you think that it is necessary to improve the utilization of government websites? Why? What measures have you adopted to attract visits?( 4) What factors do you think influence the promotion of your website? The questions for citizens are:( 1) Have you ever visited government websites? What was your purpose? How do you know them for the first time?( 2) How do you evaluate the utilization rate of government websites? Do you think that it is necessary to improve the utilization of government websites? Why?( 3) What measures do you think are good for promoting government websites? And the questions for the technician from the company are:( 1) Do you have any technical solutions for improving the utilization of governmental websites?( 2) How did your previous customers improve the utilization of their websites?( 3) Are there any experiences from businesses for reference?
From August 2011 to June 2012, online communication, face‐to‐face talks and telephone calls were conducted with interviewees. Online interviews were mainly carried out through Tencent QQ( an instant message tool) and the blog of ScienceNet. Face‐to‐face interviews were finished mainly by one‐to‐one talks during two largesized national conferences for persons in charge of government websites. All the interviews were recorded and audio records were transformed into text format within 24 hours. Besides, online discussions on government website promotion, as well as experiences of users with government websites, were collected as supplemental data. 30 pieces of data in total were collected from forums, blogs and websites related to website operations.
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