Public institutions in the social media arena: Searching for citizens’ attention. Zoom on Romania’s particularities

Abstract

Social media is taking up increasingly more space in the government’s media toolbox. In Romania, both local and central public organizations are getting savvier in communicating through these channels, intuitively thought of as the playground of teens and startups. By analyzing the social media pages of some of the more active (on social media) Romanian public institutions, and by interviewing the people in charge with the their online communication, we tried to find the amount importance these new forms of communication are given by the public sector - usually seen as more cumbersome and slower to adapt to changing media landscapes. One other goal was to find out how formalized the role of ‘online media communicator’ is in the Romanian public administration.