Facebook has been attempting to ensure that it can provide a sort of a bridge to the public and the government — or more strictly speaking, the elected representatives. The company has launched a slew of features towards the same, including Town Hall and more recently, a feature that would let people share the contact information of their elected representatives right within their posts.
The company has now launched a new feature that works the other way around as well. This particular feature will allow government representatives to connect with members of their constituencies and engage in meaningful communications with the same.
To facilitate the same, Facebook is rolling out three brand new features: constituent badges, constituent insights, and district targeting.
So first up are the constituent badges. What they do is that they let people identify themselves as members of a particular constituency that is represented by a particular elected rep. The social networking platform will itself determine whether or not you are a member of the constituency based upon your address.
To prevent people from pretending to be a resident of the constituency, Facebook will likely limit the number of times you can change your address of residence through the Town Hall. This way, elected representatives will be able to signal out concerns elucidated by members of their constituency and pay greater attention to them.
Next up is a feature that will help the elected representatives learn about stories that are popular between residents of their areas, and hopefully act on them. This feature is called constituent insights and the insights themselves will be made available to representatives via a new page that will feature all trending stories from their areas.
Finally, with district targeting, these elected officials will be able to generate feedback from members of their district through posts and polls. The best thing about these polls and posts is that they will only appear to people who actually live in the said districts.
The features have the potential to be seriously effective and provide an instantaneous line of communication between the elected reps and the people he/she represents. With them, Facebook is handing the public as well as the representatives all the tools they would need to find and act on problems and issues important to the public. Now it is up to the public and more importantly, to the elected representatives to use them to their advantage.
