Beyond Traditional Diplomacy: Public Relations Strategies in Digital Engagement by Foreign Ambassadors on X in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

In the digital communication era ambassadors and diplomats use different methods of practicing diplomacy which take an approach based on direct communication for building relationship with the audience, rather than only communicating with government or through traditional media to reach out to the public. The overlap between public diplomacy and public relations in terms of the theoretical and the practical made scholars think that it might be useful to adopt public relations models and theories in public diplomacy research. Putting diplomacy in the context of building relationships as a key goal may help to move public diplomacy from a normative to practical paradigm. This dissertation project draws on an organizational public relations model which consists of three stages. The researcher adopted a model of cultivation relationship with stages that consists of six strategies: access, positivity, openness, networking, sharing of tasks, and assurance. The researcher used these strategies to analysis the tweets of five foreign ambassadors in Saudi Arabia to explore how do they cultivate relationships when communicating with the public on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) using qualitative content analysis. The research reveals that all ambassadors studied used more than one strategy in one tweet. The most frequently used strategy by the Djiboutian ambassador was networking, while the French and Japanese ambassadors used positivity most frequently. A cultural theme dominated the content of most ambassadors’ tweets; however, the Djibouti ambassador’s tweets focused primarily on political issues. This research contributes to the theoretical body of relationship-building literature in the context of digital diplomacy; additionally, concepts like care-based relationship building models and nation branding emerged.