The Social Value of Public Relations in the Romanian Book Sector

The aim of the present article is to identify the social and cultural value of Public Relations in the Romanian book sector. Our approach overpasses the functionalist perspective of Public Relations as an organizational discipline and considers Public Relations as a discipline that institutionalizes relationships and discourses that are commonly practiced in the society by mutual and tacit agreement. We investigate the current communication practices used by three Romanian publishing houses in order to generate and to increase the symbolic value of the book. In order to analyze the uses and practices of Public Relations of generating literary sociability at the level of Romanian society, we analysed the communication management through owned new media (websites, blogs, Facebook) that three of the publishing houses in Romania have developed since their foundation. We analyzed the conversational competency in the online environment, using a complex methodology: starting from three Romanian publishing houses, selected on the basis of dimension, financial capacity and consumer perception of reputation, we have analyzed the content produced on the main owned-media channels used for public communication (websites, blogs, social media pages and accounts – Facebook, Twitter) between June – October 2014. We also analyzed the quality of interaction, by taking into account the number of positive reactions to a post, the number of replies and the number of comments.