Twittering local governments in Japan

With Twitter showing little sign of adoption in Japan, and TwitterPoli, a site tracking Japanese politicians’ Tweets, having just 10 local officals and 6 national politicians being tracked, this recent survey from MyVoice looking at local government Tweeting (and other related topics) seems a bit pointless, quite frankly.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 27th of July 2009 562 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.0% of the sample were male, 34.5% in their twenties, 32.9% in their thirties, and 32.6% in their forties.

What Japan Thinks can be found on Twitter; most of the content is just automated Tweeting of my posts, but two or three times a week or so I post one-liner survey translations that don’t make it to the main blog.

Note that the Twitter usage rate of 6.2% in this survey versus 2.3% in the previously-mentioned survey can be ascribed to iShare having a more technically-minded audience; the simple fact that the survey respondent pool comes from people using an email forwarding service demonstrates this.

The two local authorities mentioned in Q4 can be read on Twitter; the links are Aomori Prefectural Office (ooh, nice background!) and Hokkaido Rikubetsucho.

Research results

Q1: Have you ever viewed a personal or commercial blog? (Sample size=562)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=247
Yes	56.2%	50.5%	63.6%
No	43.8%	49.5%	36.4%

Q2: Do you know the micro-blogging service Twitter? (Sample size=562)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=247
Yes	33.8%	36.5%	30.4%
No	66.2%	63.5%	69.9%

Q3: Have you ever used Twitter? (Sample size=562)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=247
Yes	6.2%	7.0%	5.3%
No	93.8%	93.0%	94.7%

Q4: On the 13th of July 2009 the Aomori Prefectural Office started using Twitter, and a day later Hokkaido Rikubetsucho also started broadcasting information on events and updates to their web site, etc. What do you think about this sort of use of Twitter and other internet services by governmental bodies? (Sample size=562)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=247
Very good idea	25.3%	24.4%	26.3%
Good idea	57.7%	55.6%	60.3%
Poor idea	11.7%	13.0%	10.1%
Very poor idea	5.3%	7.0%	3.2%

Q5: If you used Twitter, what kind of person would you most want to follow? If you already use Twitter, what kind of person do you follow the closest? (Sample size=562)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=247
People with similar hobbies	18.1%	15.6%	21.5%
Celebrities	8.5%	8.6%	8.5%
Politicians	8.0%	7.0%	9.3%
Real-life friends	5.9%	6.3%	5.3%
People in a similar job to mine	5.3%	3.5%	7.7%
Local authorities	3.4%	3.2%	3.6%
Media companies (newspapers, broadcasters, etc)	2.8%	2.2%	3.6%
Corporations	2.0%	2.2%	1.6%
Boyfriend/girlfriend	1.6%	1.3%	2.0%
Family	0.7%	1.3%	0.0%
Famous blogger (other than celebrity)	1.2%	1.3%	1.2%
Other	2.3%	2.5%	2.0%
Don’t think I want to follow anyone	40.0%	45.1%	33.6%