Promoting Nation’s Soft Power: How U.S. and Korea Use Public Diplomacy in Nation Branding in Social Media

Public diplomacy becomes concerned more about maintaining relationship with domestic and foreign audiences than delivering messages (Fitzpatrick 2007; Hayden 2009), and its increasing appearance in public relations and branding literature reflects its importance (Manheim 1994). In public diplomacy, soft power (e.g., tourism, culture) appears to function more critically in relational perspectives, compared to hard power (e.g., politics, economics) (Grunig et al. 2002). This study aims to empirically investigate how nations execute a public diplomacy using soft/hard power. To better understand specific strategies and its impacts on nations, this study adopts Stafford and Canary’s Relationship Maintenance Theory and Anholt’s Nation Branding Index. Also, reflecting the importance of social media as a tool of public diplomacy (Zaharna and Rugh 2012), social media activities, Facebook in particular, are considered. Specifically, the objectives of this study are to (1) identify differences of public diplomacy efforts between nations with strong (the U.S.) and weak (Korea) brands; and (2) investigate the relationships between the brand strength and the power focused in public diplomacy. The result of content analysis of 883 Facebook messages showed that the U.S. implemented the asymmetrical one-way relationships by delivering hard power while Korea built mutual relationships by focusing on soft power.