Samenvatting

Social media plays a big role in today’s communication especially between organizations and their publics.
The Opening Up project; which is the commissioning party of this research, seeks to unravel new approaches that can contribute towards improving service delivery of businesses and governments […] in the NSR to its citizens via social media. The potential of the North Sea Region is backed by economic activities which through the utilization of natural resources in the member countries could potentially result in environmental issues. Evidently, the earthquakes in the in the Groningen gas fields as a result of gas extraction in the region is a seamless example (Tagliabue, 2014). One which has seen the inhabitants of the region suffer the consequences of earthquake exposure for over a decade, up until the August 2012 earthquake, the worst of its kind, which was largely talked about on social media forcing the Dutch government to make a decision to reduce gas extraction by NAM (Donovan, 2013). The epicenter of the August 2012 earthquake recording a magnitude of 3.6 on the Richter scale was near the village of Loppersum which is one of the worst hit villages in the region (Statistics Netherlands , 2014).
Mixed methods of data collection are therefore used to conduct research, grounded by various theoretical aspects in the field of corporate public relations, social media theories as well as theories on how to measure relationships between stakeholders and its publics.
The ultimate outcome of this practice-oriented research therefore is to provide knowledge for the Opening Up project that could be beneficial in finding new ways of using social media among their governments and businesses to improve service delivery to its citizens by using the Groningen gas fields as a case study. Service delivery in this case, is used in reference to how the government and NAM have handled the giving and receiving of information to and from the affected inhabitants. Therefore, an evaluation of service delivery of the government and NAM via social media to the affected inhabitants following the 2013 Groningen earthquake in the village of Loppersum is conducted. This report culminates in an advice whose findings are generated by a total of 159 respondents to an internet mediated questionnaire administered to the affected inhabitants of Loppersum.