Web 2.0 technologies are no longer new to governments in the region, although some are still concerned by their risks, many agencies and public sector organisations in the Asia Pacific region have already established online presence to reach out to the increasing population of netizens.

From simple conversations between government officials and citizens, more and more government processes have moved to social media. Crowdsourcing has become more popular and eventually part of the official process of establishing government vision, policy making, and even amending a constitution .

A handful has effectively used the popular tools as more than just two-way communication platforms, hence the emergence of collaborative governments. And as more governments head to this direction, few explore what comes after social media; what is the next step?

We have seen amazing creativity from governments, not only to keep up with the fast developing technology, but also with the changing behaviour of the citizens.

Australia definitely went out of the box with their 2011 Census Twitter account, using satire and humour to catch citizens’ interest. Completely different from the 2011 Census official website, the candid tweets aim to ease the burden of the census as a responsibility, instead, making it something citizens would want to be part of.

Jin Zhongyi, Director of Justice Bureau at China’s eastern city of Haining, has mandated that all government document exchanges (with the exceptions of confidential ones, of course) to be conducted over Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter. “Complete transparency by default” - as he puts it. The policy casued huge uproar in the country when he first announced it, scepticism abound. And after almost half a year - you know what? - not only has the transparency initiative gone through, microblogging has also become a habit for almost every employee of the bureau, taking lots of praises from the public.

In the meantime, sentiment analysis or, on a higher level, social media analytics is making its way fast to government agencies. Mining and analysing social media conversations is becoming the new trend and key to keeping up with the changing variables in citizen engagement.

Seoul has incorporated social media analytics into its �?Smart Seoul 2015’ vision, as the City’s CIO, Jung-Song Hwang, recently told my colleague Clarice Africa.

The tool helps agencies identify areas of improvement, in order to maintain, if not improve, engagement levels. Not only that, this type of analysis has now found its use for security as the US Government did.

The Hong Kong Government Youth Portal, launched three years ago by the Government’s Efficiency Unit, will soon be overhauled, with citizens’ sentiments as a major consideration, incorporating new technologies for better user experience.

Engagement is taking another leap, now, to be much more meaningful than simply listening and communicating.

It is a difficult task to match the pace of technology, more so with the users’ behaviour in mind, that’s why it is vital that government agencies recognise the need to keep their platforms up to date and interesting to continue engaging with citizens effectively.