Leveraging European Union Policy Community through Advanced Exploitation of Social Media.

The first generations of social media exploitation by government were oriented towards the general public. Evaluations of them have shown that they can provide some insights into the perceptions of the general public, however in order to achieve the required higher levels of quality, depth and elaboration it is necessary to target specific communities having strong interest and good knowledge on the particular topic under discussion. The research presented in this paper makes a contribution in this direction. It develops a novel approach to social media exploitation by the European Union (EU), which aims at leveraging its policy community, which consists of a big network of individuals/policy stakeholders having various policy related roles and capacities, geographically dispersed all over Europe. Its theoretical foundation is policy networks theory. Based on a series of workshops, in which a large number of such individuals participated, the structure of the EU policy community is initially analysed, then the proposed approach is formulated and elaborated, and finally the fuctional architecture of an ICT platform for supporting it is designed. Their main pillars are: important policy stakeholders' profiles and reputation management, relevant documents' repository and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them.