Lessons from America's experience

By Bernard Rowan

As of 2010, there were 200 social media websites with billions of users worldwide. It is important to note that for some time now, the private sector has been capitalizing on social media, deploying the best and brightest to link branding, marketing and advertising campaigns and sales of products and services to social media users, applications, and websites.

My paper outlines American federal government development of social media as a technology for public participation to increase trust.

After defining and conceptualizing social media in a democratic context, it discusses benefits of and concerns about social media and presents illustrative examples in American government.

It then analyzes the need for use policies, summarizes challenges for local governments, and comments on the relationship between social media and trust.

Realities and challenges of social media

By Song Hee-joon

Social media has become an important part of our daily lives. It provides the government an opportunity to improve the way of "hong bo," the Korean expression of public relations, which has had negative connotations for several decades.

After the Lee Myung-bak administration witnessed massive candlelight vigils in 2008, social media has been utilized to facilitate direct communication between the government and citizens.

It becomes an evolutionary application of e-government with the fundamental values of openness, participation and sharing.

A survey on the realities of social media applications of 47 central government agencies shows a vivid deployment and links of major channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and mobile applications.

The Office of the President, for example, had about 80,000 Twitter followers on June 10, 2012, and 387,000 "Likes" on Facebook on June 17, 2012, leading other agencies.

In spite of these efforts, the government faces several challenges. Some agencies maintain a "silo mentality," lacking links to major social networking sites.

Moreover, most are still not that "social" as they prefer a one-way flow of the information they want to provide.

Use of social media by Japanese government

By Michio Kitamura

The use of social media by ministries and agencies in Japan rapidly spread following the Great East Japan Earthquake, which struck on March 11, 2011.

While many disadvantages have been noted, the expanded use of social media is desirable for the development of new avenues of communication with the citizenry.

In order to heighten the reliability of governmental public relations activities through social media, the following measures of governance are important:

A clear definition of social media objectives and tools; improvement of security in social media use and operation; and construction of the best channel mix of social media and other media.

To put the governance outlined above into effect, the ministries and agencies ought to formulate policy on operation of social media and utilize these media in accordance with this policy.

The determination of both internal and external policy on operation of social media will presumably improve the reliability of its use by ministries and agencies.

Global PR strategy for Korea

By Park Sung-min

In order to manage and deliver global public relations services in Korea, the Presidential Council on Nation Branding was established in 2009.

In addition, the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and the Korean Culture and Information Service focus on branding and producing public relations strategies through nurturing Korean culture whereas the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Korea Foundation put a new emphasis on developing a "public diplomacy" approach.

One of the structural weaknesses of the Korean public relations service delivery system is that there is the lack of main government agencies which could play a pivotal role as a control tower of global public relations on behalf of the whole country.

Hence, some strategies to streamline and integrate global public relations service delivery systems in a more efficient manner are required.

Growing role of PR in Russia

By Vladimir Shamakhov

Public relations (PR) activity recently has become a very important part of the democratization processes in the contemporary Russian Federation providing interaction between public authorities and various groups of the population.

The Russian Federation's PR stakeholders, institutions, units, experts continue to share the best world practice in this particular field specifying achievements of other countries to the circumstances of Russian economy, social and political environment and system as well as to the Russian national mentality, values and attitudes.

Public relations is a very important service for citizens because it provides good information flow about politics, policy and managerial decisions, but at the same time it is an important service for the public authorities themselves because public relations provides feedback from citizens.

It became a very important sector of public administration as well.

Considering the number of PR units in public authorities and rising number of their employees this area requires more and more professionally well educated personnel in order to fulfill many complicated goals and PR objectives.

In Russia, PR became an important segment of the service market. I can even say that today is it a well-developed service industry that involves many organizations and people with significant cash flow and employment.

Building Trust in gov't in 21st century

By Ihar Hancharonak

I would like to present my paper with an abstract from the speech of the head of the Presidential Administration of the Republic of Belarus made this year

What is this new era? Philosophers and scientists have different names for it: post-modernity, multi-polar world, postindustrial society, modern information society.

We have become witnesses to the world's dramatic transformation. However, it turns out that humanity is largely unprepared for those changes.

Our thinking hasn't caught up with material transformations. Thus, old and tried recipes do not work anymore in this fast-changing environment while new ones haven't yet evolved.

Today we can see that a free hand given to the flows of commodities, capital, information and the workforce is also bound with a deep stratification of the human kind. This stratification happens both territorially and socially.

Modern society can now be depicted as a network of free choice connections. It is characterized by a network individualism and growing communication privacy.

The true value of the network lies not just in data processing but rather in fostering community development where volunteer groups replace faceless masses.

We are facing a challenge: by whom and for what purposes the energy of these network communities will be handled and is there a danger that the minds of network members will be manipulated by wrong-doers.