Kamusal Halkla İlişkiler ve Dijital İletişim Uygulamaları: İstanbul İlçe Belediyeleri Üzerine Bir Araştırma

The rapid digitalization process in today's world has led to changes in a variety of fields. Public relations is one of the fields that has been most affected by such transformation. It has been observed that, in order to attain their public relations goals, public institutions employ digital communication practices in many processes, ranging their way of conducting business to their relations with their target audiences. In recent years, it is notable, particularly from the standpoint of governmental public relations, that the municipalities have been involved in activities aimed at adapting to the digitalization process and have demonstrated a proclivity to use digital communication practices. This study has been planned to present the purpose and importance of governmental public relations activities for municipalities, as basic public institutions, as well as to determine the extent to which they employ digi-tal communication practices in their governmental public relations activities. In line with the objectives of this study, a research has been conducted utilizing the inter- view technique, which is one of the qualitative research techniques, with the purpose of reaching findings about the extent to which İstanbul District Municipalities employ digital communication practices. The research has revealed findings about the purpose of the use of digital communication practices by municipalities, as well as the contributions of digital communication practices to the public relations activities carried out by municipalities. According to the findings of the study, municipalities have begun to prefer digital communication extensively in governmental public re-lations activities due to its numerous advantages such as removing time and space constraints and enabling fast and dialogue-based communication.