Managing Public Trust by Barbara Kożuch Sławomir J. Magala & Joanna Paliszkiewicz

Author:Barbara Kożuch, Sławomir J. Magala & Joanna Paliszkiewicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

9.6 Chapter Summary

Social media is an important platform for public discourse, the participants of which consist of not only individual members of social media but also the employees and associates of public organizations. An organization’s purpose in leading a discourse is the acquisition and production of credible knowledge that influences the creation of public opinion and citizens’ attitudes, such as those expressed during elections by means of voting. Effective building and maintenance as well as an effective analysis of trust in social media are important when conducting a public activity.

This chapter examined trust building on Twitter during the participatory budgeting process of City Halls in Poland. The analysis of public trust on Twitter revealed certain patterns that aim to build and maintain trust toward public institutions. If a local government presents information associated with the submission of budget projects or informs about meeting dates, the text is usually more complex and the language style tends to be more official. The text complexity level is usually connected with the style. For example, the City Halls that communicated in an unofficial manner had a lower FOG index than those that utilized the official style. Most of the City Halls focused on the communication of uniform values. For example, Łódź focused on the resulting happiness from the realized budgets, Kraków focused on helping citizens in need, Gdańsk focused on changing the surroundings, and Katowice focused on the involvement of the local society.

Our analysis also aimed to identify the linguistic mechanisms used by selected City Halls to build trust on Twitter; this allowed us to determine the most commonly used mechanisms by Polish City Halls. To build trust, Polish authorities tried to avoid using the official language, simplify their communication, and add audiovisual material to the textual information. They wanted to be understood by most of the platform’s users. However, they did not want to abandon accuracy in transmitting the most important procedural information, which accounts for the appearance, albeit much less often, of messages that were much more complicated but also more precise. Local government units appear to be moving away from the official style in an attempt to shorten the distance between the sender and the receiver by using emoticons and pictograms.

Importantly, the Polish authorities provided coherent communications about their most important values. In 90 percent of the analyzed material, the most important values for the given units could be determined. In summary, the most important linguistic trust-building mechanisms on Twitter were as follows: (1) simplifying communication while ensuring the accuracy of the information being conveyed; (2) improving the linguistic content through the use of audiovisual material, usually illustrating the most important projects (the spoken language used there is usually easier to recognize); (3) departing from the linguistic structures of the official style, which are not always understandable; (4) coherently communicating about the most important values for the City Hall (associated with the civic budgeting process).

The indication of interest (benevolence), as manifested through the engagement in the dialogue, seems to be an inseparable element of communication in social media.

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