Cumbie et al. Social Media in County Government Twentieth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Savannah, 2014 1 Socially Awkward: Social Media Usage in County-Level Government Research-in-Progress Barry A. Cumbie, Ph.D. The University of Southern Mississippi barry.cumbie@usm.edu Bandana Kar, Ph.D. The University of Southern Mississippi bandana.kar@usm.edu This study proposes to investigate the presence and use of social media, and impact of citizens’ demographic factors on social media use and demand in county governments. Despite its transformative potential, e-government growth has been sluggish. Social media is transforming the nature of interaction between individuals and organizations, but its presence and use has been lackluster in local governments as revealed by this pilot study. Understanding if, how, and to what end are governments harnessing social media will help make e-government a citizen-driven, democratic, transparent, and trustworthy platform. County governments in particular are challenged by their size and resource availability in addition to a heterogeneous service area (both urban and rural) and varying population density. These limitations prevent attaining a critical mass of users necessary for online success. By exploring social media’s role in e-government and citizen participation, this study will provide a comparison between county and municipal governments and address the gap in county e-government research to further address the efficacy of meeting citizen’s needs by social media in local government. Keywords (Required) E-government, county-level government, social media, citizen participation, demography Introduction E-government is a global phenomenon of critical and strategic importance (Oyedele & Koong, 2005). E- government is the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the public sector as a means to deliver government services (Marchionini, Samet, & Brandt, 2003), but also includes improved service quality, integrated service, and market development (Grant & Chau, 2004). Common components of e-government identified from literature include the technology, the stakeholders, and the outcomes (Chiang & Liao, 2009; Morgeson & Mithas, 2009; Roy, 2006; Teo, Srivastava, & Jiang, 2008; Grönlund & Horan, 2004). The successful interaction of these three components are considered to have far-reaching transformative potential: providing two-way transitive services, being a one-stop shop for all government services, empowering citizens by increased participation and public discourse, and reducing corruption by increasing transparency and citizen trust in government (Teo et al. 2008; Macintosh, 2004; Grönlund & Horan, 2004; Ho, 2002). Despite the transformative potential and the available technologies, governments seem unable to move past the most basic e-government functions (Bonsón, et al., 2012; Norris & Reddic, 2013). As Cumbie and Kar (2014) revealed, even at local level, e-government sites are non-existent or are non-inclusive, which means, citizens do not have the ability to participate in the decision-making process. Social media has emerged as a potential technology to advance the development of e-government and bridge the divide of interaction between citizen and government. Social media as a vehicle for user-generated content published online, micro-blogging (e.g., status updates and tweets), establishing public and private communication and sharing networks, and extended to