Online Services and Social Media Use in Romanian Cities: Can We See a Pattern?

Abstract

E-government services are increasingly seen, even in Romania, as part of the public institution’s raison d’etre. More than half of Romanians use the internet on a regular basis, and most of the new connections to the internet are made from mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). Being able to interact with public administration from anywhere, and with ease, is something that people (especially young people) expect. This is particularly evident in big cities, where over 70% of people use the internet. This trend of demanding more and better services is intertwined with changes in media consumption patterns. More and more people use social media as one of the most important (if not the most important) source of information. Aside from that, social media sites offer something that the traditional media could not provide: easy two-way interaction and constant updating. The old media paradigm of one-to-many is blown away by hundreds of millions of users, connected through a bewilderingly complex network, many of them plugged-in round the clock. In this paper, we tried to gauge the importance that the Romanian County Capital Cities plus those of the 6 Bucharest Sectors give to e-government; for this we evaluated the online services offered to citizens as well as to companies and created an index of e-government development in Romanian cities. We also analyzed the Facebook accounts of these cities to assess the way in which social media is used on their official accounts. We compared these two datasets as well, to see if there is any correlation between the stage of e-government implementation and the proficiency of social media use.