Team
Members
Introduction
Research Questions
Methodology
Findings

The research concerns itself with civil servant use of social media in the Netherlands, beginning with LinkedIn, which has 3 million Dutch users. The research commenced by creating a LinkedIn researcher account (in September 2012). The researcher searched LinkedIn for [ministerie], which returned Ministry groups, with a number of members per group. The ministries and the number of members are listed below.

Ministry membership numbers on LinkedIn per September 2012
Ministerie van Defensie (3035)
Ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie (2929)
Ministerie van Economische Zaken, Landbouw en Innovatie (1749)
Ministerie van BZK (1732)
Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Milieu (1642)
Openbaar Ministerie (868)
Ministerie van Financiën (650)
Ministerie van OCW (629)
Rijkswaterstaat (542)
Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid (527)
Ministerie van VWS (517)

By December 2012 we made 190 connections with Ministry employees, which is how we have narrowed the scope of civil servant. The number of connections is somewhat low, owing to constraints we encountered with using LinkedIn, and their terms of service. Our connection requests gradually declined, and eventually were halted, for LinkedIn no longer allowed making connections with people who are not known to us, without entering an email address. Apparently too many users with whom we sought connection clicked 'ignore' when a connection was requested. The research account at that stage was warned, with an alert reminding us that we should only connect with people we already know, attend university or worked with. We were asked to confirm the terms of service. Since we now had to enter the LinkedIn user's email address if we wished to connect, and we did not have email addresses, we subsequently subscribed to LinkedIn, paying for an executive account. The account enabled us to send InMail, some 75 in total. It is akin to emailing within LinkedIn. A small number of LinkedIn users connected with us after they received an InMail.

The number of connections with civil servants totalled 190. The accounts were polled, and the data associated with the account (on the mobile version of LinkedIn) was collected. The following fields are listed in the database, separated in two categories, the demographic and the so-called postdemographic or the fields that are more specific to the medium:

Demographics
country code
industry
postal code
(education)
(experience)
location (the area in the Netherlands)

Postdemographics
-hasPicture
-Customheadline (has a custom headline)
-isJobSeeker (actively seeks a job)
-isSubscriber (uses LinkedIn paid services)
-showFullLastName (there's a privacy setting to hide your full last name)
-headline (their "headline", comparable with the Twitter profile line)
-maidenNameVisibility (show your maiden name yes/no)
-Links to all the profile pictures

We also are interested in the characteristics of the network:

- 34,006 nodes 

- 46,926 connections

- 21% of the users have more than one connection in the network (2nd degree).

-7183 nodes (21.12%)

-21,352 connections between them (44.9%)

The average path length is 3.55. Since we do not have all edges in the network, we expect that figure to decline. i.e, that the network will be even more 'connected'. In layman's terms an average path length of 3.55 means that each individual is three handshakes or three via-via introductions away from each other. We are also in interested in a series of characteristics of the users, their ministries and the network.

Questions put to the network are:

Network of relations
1. Inter-ministry relations (closeness and betweenness)
2. Inter-industry relations (closeness and betweenness)
3. Ministry-industry relations (closeness and betweenness)

Postdemographics
1. Profile completeness (full name? / has picture? / customheadline?)
2. Exposure twitter / uses maiden name
3. Levels of usage (uses paid service)
All of the above per ministry and per industry
(There is also a percentage of users who have misspelled or otherwise misstated the name of their ministry, also per ministry.)

Demographics
1. Level of experience per ministry and per industry
2. Level of education per ministry and per industry
3. Skills per ministry (and across ministries)

Postdemographics findings
Profile completeness: Profile completeness = haspicture, hasfullname and has custom headline Ministerie van Financien: 76.9379844961
Ministerie van LNV: 73.5042735043
Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties: 83.8214783822
Ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie: 80.2133333333
Ministerie van Economische Zaken: 84.5484221981
Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Milieu: 83.5140018067
Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid: 80.9378185525
Ministerie van Defensie: 82.1924603175
Ministerie van Algemene Zaken: 83.950617284
Openbaar Ministerie: 76.1764705882
Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport: 78.6163522013
Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: 78.3783783784
Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap: 78.547008547

Demographics
Skills of Ministry employees
Dutch (5324) Change Management (5033) Coaching (4617)Interim Management (4327) Government (3839)Management Consulting (3413) ICT (2862) English (2540) VIR (2007) VIRBI (2004)Process Management (1811) Organizational Development (1728) Policy (1707) Program Management (1675)Project Management (1604) Politics (1519) Public Sector (1517) Information Management (1377) Business Strategy (1350)Personal Development (1336) Research (1252) Sustainability (1244) Management (1232) Non-profits (1198) Public Policy (1094)Governance (1074) Management Development (1055) Consultancy (1040) Public Administration (1036) Public Relations (1022)PRINCE2 (994) Marketing Communications (994) Corporate Communications (981) ITIL (963) Teaching (929) Local Government (920)Team Building (911) Executive Coaching (897) International Relations (882) Microsoft Office (846) Operations Management (784) New Business Development (750) Leadership Development (736) Policy Analysis (723) Sustainable Development (694) Account Management (672) German (666)Writing (631) Event Management (629) Process Improvement (624) Military (618) Strategic Communications (598) Marketing Strategy (577) Editing (532)Sales Management (531) Internal Communications (525) Analysis (524) Risk Management (519) Talent Management (512) Entrepreneurship (503) Defence (490)HR Consulting (489) New Media (484) Service Management (477) Public Speaking (476) Journalism (471) Outsourcing (469) Outplacement (461) European Union (455)

* Education_level.pdf: Ministry levels of education * Ministerie_Ministry_Graph.pdf: Ministry relations