This thesis Public Relations Effectiveness in the Czech Presidential Elections 2013 analyzes the effectiveness of public relations tools that have a key influence in building of positive image of candidates in political elections, and on the particular case of the Karel Schwarzenbergs election campaign in first ever presidential election in the Czech Republic. The first part deals with the theoretical definition of public relations in general and subsequently in the narrower sense in relation to politics, adaptation to the specific needs of political communication for example in endorsement or positive and negative campaigns in electoral contests. Attention is also paid to the possibilities of cooperation with the media, agenda setting and framing. In the second practical part is first introduced the background of the presidential election together with a detailed profile of Karel Schwarzenberg, followed by an analysis of his electoral campaign between August 2012 and January 2013, and in terms of effectiveness of various public relations tools that were used in the campaign and their success in projecting into the media content.

This thesis discusses the development of the Czech media market after 1989 in context of political economy of the media. Its author observes the main trends in development of the commercial media market - especially print media market - in the Czech Republic and abroad, as these trends had a crucial influence on the development of Czech media after disruption of the Soviet Bloc and when the democratic and market environment has been established. Besides that, the work searches for the particular economic aspects of the media market defined by the leading critics in the media research sphere and, at the same time it tries to apply them on the Czech print media market. All of these findings are summarized into hypothesis at the last chapter, which are tested by quantitative media content analysis and columns and supplements analysis on the sample of Czech dailies. The results confirm the aspects of this influence and brings a new subjects to the further research which could describe a particular examples of influence of commercial sphere on media more in depth. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The aim of this study was to investigate how selected municipalities’ use social media, with a focus on how they are working to increase the dialogue between municipalities’ and residents. To answer the purpose of the study three questions has been formulated: how do the communicators use social media in their daily work? What opportunities and challenges are the municipalities’ experiencing with Facebook? How do they work with Facebook to increase dialogue with citizens? The theories that has been used in this study is Cutlip’s and Grunig’s public relations theories, Shannon and weavers communication model, Cutlip’s and Heath’s theory of issue management and Jenkins theory of convergence culture. The method that has been used in this study is qualitative semi-structured interviews and the analysis is done with a thematic text analysis. The material of this study contained interviews of four communicator officers that are responsible for social media in the municipalities’.    The results of the semi-structured interviews showed that the communicator officers used social media to quickly, easily and cheaply connect many citizens in comparison with the traditional media. The biggest opportunity with Facebook for municipalities’ was to improve issue management by spreading the information faster and have an improved dialog with the citizens. The biggest challenge was to think more strategically how to enhance the use of Facebook. The communicator officers try to invite citizens to dialogue by presenting information that citizens want comment and debate about. Municipalities’ also will have meetings with PR agencies to improve the dialog with the citizens in Facebook.