In DC, Social-Media Surveillance Pays Off

For many District of Columbia government officials, the first e-mail they read at 6 a.m. has long been the overnight police report. But now there is new competition: finding out what citizens said about them the day before.

The local government in the nation's capital is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a startup to gather comments on Twitter, Facebook and other online message boards as well as the government's own website. The data help form a letter grade for the bureaucracies that handle drivers licenses, building permits and the like. These social-media analytics services are already common for businesses such as restaurants and hotel chains that want to go beyond the comment cards most customers ignore. The D.C. experiment suggests governments are beginning to mirror the private sector in seeking real-time unvarnished feedback.