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Designing a Social Media Analytics Dashboard for Government Agency Crisis Communications

Social media have become a valuable source for extracting data about societal crises and an important outlet to disseminate official information. Government agencies are increasingly turning to social media to use it as a mouthpiece in times of crisis. Gaining intelligence through social media analytics, however, remains a challenge for government agencies, e.g. due to a lack of training and instruments. To mitigate this shortcoming, government agencies need tools that support them in analysing social media data for the public good. This paper presents a design science research approach that guides the development of a social media analytics dashboard for a regional government agency. Preliminary results from a workshop and the resulting design of a first prototype are reported. A user-friendly and responsive design that is secure, flexible, and quick in use could identified as requirements, as well as information display of regional discussion statistics, sentiment, and emerging topics.