Abstract
Traditional diplomacy saw a shift in paradigm when it entered the digital realm and a new series of challenges generated by the fundamentally different modus operandi of the Internet and diplomatic institutions; the former demands transparency, decentralisation, an informal, emotional style, interactivity, and real-time management, while the latter is accustomed to ambiguity, confidentiality, politeness, hierarchy, and rational arguments, often delivered in a top-down approach (Bjola, Elcano Royal Institute 113:1–8, 2018b).
Digital diplomacy has the difficult task of reconciling the opposites and adapting traditional diplomatic communication to the digital public sphere. Such endeavours deliver mixed results, but sometimes manage to achieve spectacular ones. This chapter explores such a case: on September 03, 2019, the Embassy of Sweden in Bucharest, Romania, announced on its Facebook page that at the recent Swedish Diplomatic Reunion it received the “Facebook Influencer” distinction due to the fact that the reach of its posts surpassed that of the posts of all the other Swedish embassies and missions, globally, combined. The research presented in this chapter uses content analysis and covers almost 700 Facebook page posts over a period of 14 months in order to identify and analyse the characteristics of successful digital diplomacy on Facebook.
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Anton, A., Lăcătuș, M. (2022). Digital Diplomacy: The Case of the Embassy of Sweden in Bucharest. In: Sebastião, S.P., Spínola, S.d.C. (eds) Diplomacy, Organisations and Citizens. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81877-7_12
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