Abstract

In recent years, the use of various social media applications has received growing attention from local government agencies. This is because social media applications have the potential to offer public value to those agencies as well as citizens through enhancing public engagement and public services innovation. Despite the growth in the literature on social media, there is still a limited understanding of how the key stakeholders of local government agencies, around the world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular, can receive public value created through us-ing various social media applications. To address this concern, this proposed study is initiated to develop a model for investigating public value creation using social media applications. The model is influenced by multiple theoretical lenses (e.g. trust in social media, social media capability, public engagement, public services innovation, public value theory, and stakeholder theory). This proposed research is based on a qualitative methodology with several phases of research (e.g. pilot study, multiple-case study and domain expert panel) for the Saudi Arabian local government context. The expected contribution of this research is a model with constructive associations between several variables identified from multiple streams of literature (e.g. social media, information systems literature and public administration literature). Furthermore, a classification of public services innovation associated with four types of public value are proposed. The findings of the study are expected to benefit public managers as well as citizens to better utilise social media for public value creation. Keywords: Trust in social media, social media capability, public engagement, public service innovation, public value, stakeholder theory.

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