Social Media and How it is Impacting on Public Relations (Part Two)

This is PART TWO of a guest post by strategic public relations professional and blogger, Craig Pearce (below). His views and news on PR can be found at Public relations and managing reputation: better business and society. 

 In the second post of this three-part series (READ PART ONE HERE), issues discussed will include the participation required to utilise social media to its full effect, the dialectic between reputation and engagement for organisational stakeholders and social media as an issues management activity. The third and final post will flag the importance of social media to organisational stakeholders, its word-of-mouth impact and what public relations needs to do to leverage the opportunity that social media is presenting it with.

 What are your thoughts on Grunig’s propositions? 

Can PR folk be effective at their highest level without a clear understanding of two-way symmetrical communication? 

Do you try to control target audiences/stakeholder? How have you fared?

Participation and engagement in a digital environment: implications for public relations 

The internet and social media has empowered communities, or stakeholder groups, “in a way that is truly revolutionary,” according to Professor James Grunig. It has not, however, evolved the essential model of his best practice PR theory, two-way symmetrical communication.

Social media possesses, however, “properties that make them perfectly suited for a strategic management paradigm of public relations – properties that one would think would force public relations practitioners to abandon their traditional one-way, message-oriented, asymmetrical and ethnocentric paradigm of practice.”

Grunig, the world’s leading authority on public relations, recently said, in an article entitled 'Paradigms of Global Public Relations in an Age of Digitalisation', that social media has, “the potential to truly revolutionalise public relations.” This post – the second of a three-part series – discusses certain elements of the article that I think are of interest and relevance to the profession.

The notion of ‘participation’ (as exemplified to an almost poetic degree by social media) is directly analogous to public relations, which is one reason why PR owns social media and discussions such as Grunig’s are ones we must pay a great amount of attention to.

One of the crusading themes of Grunig’s career has been to get PR practitioners thinking and acting more strategically, as well as encouraging the profession to make its presence felt more assertively within business and society (and probably academia, too!). Social media, he says, will not be utilised to its full potential until this occurs. It will be used as a dumping ground, a channel for one-way communication that does not truly engage with stakeholders.

Engagement and reputation for public relations

Grunig makes the interesting proposition, if I read his discussion correctly, that reputation is irrelevant to organisational stakeholders who are engaged with it. “I believe that organisations have reputational relationships only with people for whom the organisation has no consequences,” he says. “These audiences have little importance to an organisation.”

 This notion will surely challenge a few brand-driven marketers. Stakeholders who are truly engaged with an organisation are ones, “who might be affected by management decisions or who might affect those decisions – such as employees or community residents.”

These active groups of stakeholders will, “make issues out of the consequences of organisational decisions.” This makes it particularly important for communication with stakeholders to occur before decisions are made. This is the approach that will be most effective in resolving potential issues in a negative environment, but also how to leverage the positive dimensions of a situation, even on a topic as prosaic as what washing powder constituents are most likely to prompt a customer to buy it.

An essential element of this is that ongoing market research and environmental scanning are an intrinsic element of strategic public relations. PR needs to be proactive, ahead of the game and issues management-driven to achieve the best possible result for an organisation and its stakeholders.

Social media participation: inherently an issues management tactic

An involvement in social media facilitates effective issues management. One oversight in Grunig’s suppositions is, I think, that he misses the issues identification and reputation protection dimension of an ongoing involvement in social media.

He mentions using scanning tools like Google alerts, but this is, really, a reactive mechanism. It is not a participatory or engaging one. Involvement in social media is an almost inadvertent means of environmental scanning and/or issues management.

Social media activity is an issues management behaviour because it is an example of relating to publics in a proactive, sharing, organic contributing manner. It is a behaviour that is in front of the issue, a part of it, not playing catch up with it. Social media’s potential will not be realised just by watching and a low-level participation. Ongoing and meaningful giving (as defined by stakeholders and the organisation) and conversation is required.

 Many, including me, have discussed how Involvement in social media helps manage reputational crises and there are two elements of this that are relevant to this discussion. 

The first is that when a crisis hits, an organisation will already have a number of connections that/who it can communicate with. A network has already been set up. This facilitates an organisation getting its own position on the crisis out into the environment.

The second element has two dimensions. Both are relevant to the relationship that effective engagement through social media will have generated. The first is simply that this relationship exists. 

Stakeholders are listening. They are engaging, just as the organisation is.

The other dimension is that because of this relationship the stakeholders will be:

·       more willing to listen to the organisation

·       more willing to forgive it (if, indeed, it has actually done something ‘wrong’, or not aligned with its own or its stakeholders’ values)

·       more amenable to distributing information relevant to the organisation’s crisis response to their social media (and offline, for that matter) connections.

Those stakeholders it has involved with in a social media context may even advocate/support the organisation’s perspective, largely because of the positive relationship they had with it pre-crisis.

Trust had been developed between the organisation and its stakeholders – facilitated by the mutually meaningful and valuable social media-centric relationship!

Crisis management programs that have utilised social media have been, to date, dominated by organisations that are, in the main, using social media in a meaningful way for the first time during the crisis. And this approach has been valuable.

How much better would the result have been if it had actually engaged (and I mean truly, profoundly interacted/gave/etc) in social media before the crisis began?! You would have to think much better.

In the first post of this three-part series, issues discussed included how social media has complicated stakeholder targeting and communication, the notion of ‘giving’ that characterises both public relations and social media and the lack of control that organisations have over their stakeholders. The final post flags the importance of social media to organisational stakeholders, its word-of-mouth impact and what public relations needs to do to leverage the opportunity that social media is presenting it with. 

What are your thoughts on Grunig’s thoughts? Is organisational reputation irrelevant for those who are engaged with it? 

Do you think it is feasible for an organisation’s pre-crisis engagement in social media to mitigate the crisis’s effect on the organisation?

THE THIRD AND FINAL POST IN THIS SERIES WILL BE POSTED NEXT WEEK ON CRAIG'S BLOG: Public Relations and Managing Reputation | Better Business and Society.