Transformations, Opportunities and Challenges: How Government Copes with Online Public Opinion in Big Data Era

Abstract

With the popularization of portable terminal equipment and cyber social contact media, there are fewer and fewer barriers against expression of public opinion, which has led to tremendous structural changes in public opinion field. Online public opinion monitoring in government has, therefore, undergone a dramatic transformation in working methods, managerial concepts and data analysis technologies in order to keep pace with the times. For this purpose, the paper tries to offer a new insight into transformation and challenges of online public opinion in the big data era and puts forward some countermeasures as follows: 1) Construct a government platform for online public opinion to improve information collection. 2) Employ an open data policy to enhance the government’s public credibility. 3) Cultivate more professionals and maintain a sustainable development in research and development as well as technology innovation. 4) Improve government officials’ media literacy and strengthen their awareness of online public relations. 5) Build various types of case data analysis database to extract and purify the will of people, to gather in one place the wisdom of people and to construct a think tank of all the people for decision making.