A tale of two cities A comparative study of government use of social media

in New York City and Shanghai

Hong Shen[CAS587:Cuture As Data]

Twitter VS Sina WeiboTwitter Weibo

started July 2006 August 2009

users 500 million worldwide 324 million in China

character count

140 characters - amounting to one short

sentence

140 Chinese characters – the equivalent of around 70

– 80 wordsContent

of tweets Including text and links Including text, pictures, videos, links and long posts

Questions• What types of information are shared by

the cities governments on Twitter/Weibo?• What are the similarities/differences?• Discussion: How the differences of the

two social media platforms have influenced the ways in which the two cities’ governments use the social media as a new way to implement e-government?

nycgov@twitter

shanghaicity@weibo

Method: content analysis

Data collection:Tweets/posts on both accounts from Aug 1st to Aug 31st in 2012

NYC: 167 tweetsShanghai: 524 posts

Non-exclusive Categories: • Service

information• Traffic Information• Weather

Information• City life/culture

broadcasting• Reply/Mention• Retweet• Links• Others

Open codingapproach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998)

Main observations• Reply/mention are extremely common

on both accounts• NYC has more tweets containing links.• While NYC has more tweets on service

information; Shanghai has more posts about city culture/life broadcasting

• Shanghai has more posts on traffic/weather information

Discussion• Language: English VS Chinese• Interface and functionalities: Sina

Weibo is much more complex than Twitter

• While NYC’s use of social media focuses more on information sharing, social media works more like a promotional/branding tool for Shanghai