In the present world, the lifetime of a company depends on how well it adapts to the changing requirements of their customers. Thus companies across various industries use a variety of methods to get information about the changing requirements of the customers and what people think about their brand. Social Media Monitoring is one such method that is being used by companies to get the necessary information.
Social Media Monitoring also known as Social Media Measurement involves monitoring of various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, online forums etc. for getting information about a brand and governing the volume and opinions of people about the brand online. As tons of conversations, articles and reviews are available online, monitoring social media provides the companies insight of the public’s opinion for their products/services and they will be able to anticipate the people’s expectation.
With the capability to reflect public opinions on various topics, social media monitoring finds its application in many places. Should smart cities be one such platform that make use of it?
Smart cities are urban regions that have advanced infrastructure, assured electricity supply and efficient transportation facilities. Multiple information and communication technology (ICT) solutions are integrated into a smart city to manage different organizations and their services in the city.
One of the major goals of a smart city is to involve the citizens in governance. Social media comes into the picture here. As most of the communications and discussions are happening over the social media platforms, using these platforms for involving the citizens in governance is a viable solution. Using this, cities can involve their citizens in several governing decisions like building and planning process, efficient urban mobility, health and education etc. The citizens can be involved in taking decisions that influence them.
The cities can also make use of social media monitoring to know whether their policies are generating a positive or negative response among the common mass, they can get feedback from the citizens on various issues and act accordingly.
The impact of social media monitoring in smart cities can best be explained by the experiment called Smart Santander. Santander is a city on Spain’s north coast with a population of 0.18 million. The Santander testbed is composed of several devices and sensors deployed at various locations. Through the deployed testbed, many services have been implemented. Some of them include:
Outdoor parking area management: Around 400 parking sensors were deployed at the main parking areas in the city. As a result, available parking sites were detected and citizens were given the information of them from time to time.
Santander City Brain: It enabled the people to share their ideas with other citizens. The citizens were also able to report about accidents, potholes or broken streetlights directly to the city hall.
Santander city experiment demonstrated the advantages of the IoT and social media monitoring by providing the residents with real time information about bus delays, parking availability etc. The citizens were made a part of the city’s governance using the social media as a platform. For better management and organising in the city and to make citizens involved in governance, social media monitoring could be made a part of smart cities.
Dereddy SabrinathReddy
Batch 2016-2018
Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management
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