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Many early-career researchers (ECR) are motivated by the prospect of creating knowledge that is useful, not just within but also beyond the academic community. Although research facilities, funders and academic journals praise this eagerness for societal impact, the path toward such contributions is by no means straightforward. In this essay, we address five common concerns faced by ECRs when they strive for societal impact. We discuss the opportunity costs associated with impact work, the fuzziness of current impact measurement, the challenge of incremental results, the actionability of research findings, and the risk of saying something wrong in public. We reflect on these concerns in light of our own experience with impact work and conclude by suggesting a “post-heroic” perspective on impact, whereby seemingly mundane activities are linked in a meaningful way.

This research aims to investigate the impact of the use of social media on the organizational form and function in selected local governments of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

This research used quantitative and qualitative methods. The researchers not only conducted comparative– explanatory studies among the three ASEAN cities but also used multiple-informant and secondary data analyses. All variables are operationalized into indicators and transformed into a questionnaire in three languages: English, Indonesian and Thai. Primary data for the research were collected using a cross-sectional survey conducted in Bandung City, Indonesia; Iligan City, the Philippines; and Pukhet City, Thailand.

This research found that social media use has not yet affected the internal organizational processes in the three cities. Also, social media use is not appropriated as a space for citizen–government interaction. It is used for only information dissemination to the public; social media seems to have been used for only collecting information from citizens but not for involving them in the decision-making process.

This research covers only three cities in the ASEAN countries, and the findings cannot be generalized to others. Moreover, this research looks at the supply-side dimension or government organization side only. However, the findings confirm that findings of previous research studies that social media use in the local government is only for information dissemination.

Legal bases for social media use could be an urgent matter to address to advance more fundamental changes in government processes.

There is no prior comparative study on the use of social media by local governments in the ASEAN countries. Social media owing to its sense of personalization or sense of community improves communication between citizens and government better than e-government sites; however, as articulated by Mirchandani et al. (2008), social media may hinder rather than facilitate the delivery of services (Mirchandani et al., 2008). This is due to the absence of a legal basis of its use, as well as agreements on the manner of its use, which prevents full integration of social media into the governance process, particularly in the cases of the cities of Iligan, the Philippines, and Phuket, Thailand.