Communication Patterns of Government Public Relation in the Digital Era: A Content Analysis on Twitter Account of the Directorate General of Taxes

Abstract

The headway of information and communication technology has brought into the world a digital era with the emergence of new media such as Twitter social media. Nowadays social media is increasingly used by the community and can support various activities. This condition has also encouraged a new approach to public relations activities known as online public relations (online PR). This online PR activity is very important in addition to traditional PR activities, Grunig (2009) argues that new media has the potential to make public relations more strategic and global. Currently, Twitter is increasingly being used by government public relations, the Directorate General of Tax (DGT) public relations is no exception. But so far there has been no research related to aspects of communication patterns on DGT’s official Twitter account, so research needs to be carried out as input and evaluation material. This study aims to determine the communication pattern based on Grunig and Hunt’s public relations models in a message or tweet delivered by DGT public relations (Taxmin) on DGT’s official Twitter account (@DitjenPajakRI) by referring to the research conducted by Waters and Williams (2011) at government agencies in the USA. The method used in this study is a quantitative method, with a content analysis approach. This study will analyze the content of tweets in the period of July-August 2018. The results of this study found that overall DGT public relation still relies on one-way communication rather than two-way communication. From 565 taxmin tweets, 70.3% public information, 15.8% two-way symmetry, 12.2% publicity, and 1.8% two-way asymmetry. These results indicate that DGT public relation has used all four public relations models together, although it is not yet ideal, which Taxmin is using public information pattern more than other communication patterns.