Strategy and Tactics in Strategic Communication: Examining their Intersection with Social Media Use

While public relations industry leaders have proposed a strategic approach to social media, industry research has found that social media practices may be more tactical than strategic. Likewise, scholarly research has focused more on specific parts of strategic planning, such as message—and channel-level communication in social media, but little research has been done to understand program-level communication planning. The purpose of this study was to examine the confluence of current trends in social media use with strategic communication processes through in-depth interviews and a national survey of public relations practitioners. The in-depth interviews revealed two overarching themes: (1) social media use should be guided by strategic planning and (2) social media tactics should revolve around conversations. The survey results showed that practitioners are involved in social media strategy development and tactical implementation, yet see their involvement as linked mostly to their organizations’ strategic rather than tactical social media activities. In addition, practitioners delineate social media strategies and tactics differently than theoretical conceptualizations.     

Zuhause im Netz

This study focuses on the relevance of the Internet to everyday life and the factors that influence Internet usage, based on an investigation of typical patterns of use and motives for use. The empirical basis of the study consists of 102 in-depth interviews with German Internet users aged 14–67 years. The sample was selected by applying the method of theoretical saturation, while the theoretical background was based on the uses-and-gratifications approach and the sociology of Bourdieu. The findings demonstrate that the Internet is indeed integrated in the everyday lives of the interviewees and that most of them cannot imagine life without the Internet. The interviews also reveal that the use of online applications varies with age, sex and social position: Whereas older online users and those with a small social network and low motivation for professional advancement use the Internet to satisfy mainly day-to-day needs (facilitating everyday life, contacting relatives and establishing strong ties), younger people (those under 30 years of age), men and members of the workforce (especially the self-employed and executives) use a wider variety of online applications.     

Strategic Use of Social Media for Stakeholder Engagement in Startup Companies in China

This study examined the strategic use of social media for stakeholder engagement in startup companies in China. Guided by the theoretical framework of stakeholder engagement, in-depth interviews were conducted with 28 entrepreneurs in China, and a content analysis was performed with 419 corporate social media posts on Weibo and WeChat. Findings suggest that generating awareness, along with information sharing and word-of-mouth, cultivating long-term relationships, developing new businesses, and building image and reputation, are the primary purposes for stakeholder engagement. Thought leadership building, co-branding, and influencer endorsement were identified as new social media engagement strategies for startups. Message tactics and appeals utilized by startups and measurement and evaluation issues were also examined. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Exploring the Perceptual and Behavioral Outcomes of Public Engagement on Mobile Phones and Social Media

Mobile technology and social media exert a substantial impact on our society and daily lives. Employing a survey of 633 college students in the United States, this study examined the effects of college students’ public engagement on mobile phones and social media on their organizational identification and attachment and positive electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) communication. Findings suggested that college students’ public engagement with mobile phones and social media significantly impacted their attachment toward and identification with the university. Moreover, this study found that students’ public engagement and university identification strongly predicted their positive e-WOM communication about their university. Furthermore, students’ mobile phone engagement indirectly influenced positive e-WOM communication through organizational identification. The theoretical and practical implications of this study were also discussed.     

Motivations,Consumption Emotions,and Temporal Orientations in Social Media Use: A Strategic Approach to Engaging Stakeholders Across Platforms

How to engage stakeholders effectively with different social media platforms is an important topic in strategic communication research. Grounded in uses and gratifications theory, consumption emotion theory, and temporal orientation framework, this study conducted an online survey among social media users in the United States (N = 940) to examine how individuals’ motivations, emotions, and temporal orientations in social media use might differ by multi-platform usage groups (i.e., Facebook+Instagram users vs. Facebook+Pinterset users). Our findings indicate that Facebook+Instagram users focus more on self-status seeking and entertainment, while Facebook+Pinterest users are more information-seeking driven and future-oriented. In addition, more optimism is detected among Facebook+Pinterest users. Implications for strategic communication theory development as well as insights for organization-stakeholder engagement on social media are discussed.     

Am Tage schaue ich nicht fern!

Although the share of older people in our society increases, the media sciences rarely examine this group of media users. Existing studies often limit themselves to chronological age and neglect a more theoretical approach. This study includes theoretical references from gerontological research, which describes aging as a multidimensional process, and links them to user-oriented perspectives of mass communication research. Referring to qualitative data from interviews with elderly people, the study achieves to identify prospects, appraisals and resources, which influence media use of people in the process of aging.     

Parasoziale Meinungsführerschaft

In a democratic society, the media operate as a public space in which political and social topics are discussed. As media communicators influence and restrict both the topics of discussion and the amount of information available from in the media, they exert a substantial influence on the recipients’ formation of political opinion. The present study examines this impact by integrating the theoretical concepts of opinion leadership and parasocial relationship, resulting in a phenomenon referred to as parasocial opinion leadership. Based on the results of a qualitative survey of recipients, the concept was then substantiated. Parasocial opinion leadership is based on viewer’s perceptions and comes into existence, if (1) a recipient ascribes certain attributes to a media communicator based on a parasocial relationship; which (2) allows for a gradual influence of the media personality on the recipient’s opinions and attitudes by fulfilling at least one of the three functions information and reduction of complexity, orientation or arousal of interest.     

Publikumsvorstellungen im Rezeptionsprozess

This article addresses the question of how individual media users, who are part of a mass media audience, perceive their co-audience. We approached this question from an empirical social scientific communication research perspective by introducing a theoretical model of (situational) audience conceptions that might arise in the context of an anonymous, imperceptible mass audience. According to the model, both subjective media theories held by people and cues from the media content influence the users’ impression formation about their anonymous co-audience during media consumption. Audience conceptions would include assumptions on size, simultaneity, social structure and the experience of other consumers. We assume that, as soon as conceptions of the co-audience are formulated, they could influence cognitive and affective aspects of a person’s reception experience. The model states that the more the conception of the audience is salient in a viewer’s mind the stronger its influence on subsequent experiences will be. Possible effects on reception phenomena including social comparison processes and feelings of embarrassment are discussed exemplarily to illustrate fields the model could be fruitfully applied to. Finally, the concept of audience conception is illustrated in a model and brought into context with existing research.     

Examining the Impact of Public Engagement and Presidential Leadership Communication on Social Media in China: Implications for Government-Public Relationship Cultivation

This study examined how public positive and negative social media (i.e., WeChat) discussion about President Xi Jinping in China, along with Xi’s leadership communication styles of assertiveness, responsiveness, and authenticity on social media influence publics’ evaluation of his leadership effectiveness, which in turn, influences public trust and satisfaction with the government. Through a quantitative online survey of 396 WeChat users in China, randomly selected via an international sampling firm and a structural equation modeling analysis, the results show that publics’ political discussion about Xi on social media in China significantly influences the perceived leadership effectiveness of the president. Specifically, the more the publics engage in positive discussion about the president on social media, the more they perceive him to be a better political leader, and vice-versa. The president’s leadership communication attributes of responsiveness and authenticity strongly and positively influenced perceived leadership effectiveness and the quality of government-public relationships. Publics’ evaluation of the president’s leadership effectiveness directly contributed to public trust and satisfaction toward the government. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.     

Ko-Evolution von Public Relations und Journalismus: Ein erster Beitrag zu ihrer systematischen Aufarbeitung

There are many research findings and some theoretical models in regard of the interaction between journalism and public relations (PR). But hardly any research has so far looked at this relationship from an historical perspective, an endeavor also called the ‘co-evolution’ of PR and journalism. The aim of this article is to make a first step into the analysis of this co-evolution with a focus on the emergence of PR and based on literature about the history of PR. The analysis shows that the rise of PR in the second half of the 19th century was a reaction to the development of journalism, which had become increasingly polemic. Thus for many social protagonists and organizations the barriers to enter the public arena were raised. At the same time the importance of the mass media and furthermore the pressure on social protagonists and organizations to legitimize their interests in a changing society were growing. These results support a theoretical concept that describes the development of mass communication as processes of rationalization of societal communication, which can be linked with theories of social systems.     

Mobile Corporate Social Responsibility (mCSR): Examining Publics’ Responses to CSR-Based Initiatives in Natural Disasters

As social media use on mobile devices has been integrated in people’s daily lives, corporations began to target the publics on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on mobile devices. In the context of a natural disaster, this study examines how publics respond to CSR-based initiatives by way of mobile corporate social responsibility (mCSR), including gratifications, social media engagement, perceived CSR motives, and the relationship outcomes as associated with mCSR practice. An online survey was conducted by sampling with 1,433 nationally representative adults in the United States. Findings indicated that four broad types of gratification, such as technological convenience, social interaction, recreation, and information exchange, significantly influenced relationship outcomes such as satisfaction, commitment, distrust, trust, and control mutuality. Results also demonstrated that perceived CSR motives and social media engagement on mobile devices were significantly related to relationship outcomes, providing empirical evidence for the important role that potential mCSR communications can play in engaging publics and cultivating relationships during natural disasters.     

Where Does My Money Go? How Online Comments on a Donation Campaign Influence the Perceived Trustworthiness of a Nonprofit Organization

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly using social media to spread campaigns. Little research has focused on the influence of user comments on trust in NPOs regarding campaigns in social media. Stakeholders’ trust is seen as important for NPOs. Two experimental studies examine the influence of user comments with different connotations concerning campaigns that were published on the social networking site Facebook. The first experiment focused on the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The second experiment applied to a fictitious NPO, to avoid reputational influence. Irrespective of the NPO’s reputation, the results show that user comments in social media influence the perceived trustworthiness of NPOs. Negative comments resulted in a lower level of perceived trustworthiness. Positive comments, a balanced mixture of positive and negative comments, and the absence of any comments at all resulted in a higher level of perceived trustworthiness. In addition, the likelihood of an act of trust in the form of a donation or a recommendation of the campaign to others increased if the NPO was perceived as trustworthy. Finally, we were able to demonstrate the link between reputation and trustworthiness as two distinct constructs. Implications for the management of campaigns via social media are derived.     

Wissenschaftsjournalismus und Wissenschafts-PR im Wandel

People’s interest in science topics is increasing — as is the coverage of science topics in the media. New popular science magazines and science pages are founded, and science programmes are launched on television. This trend stems from the fact that science topics increasingly affect developments in society and people’s everyday lives, and that they arouse emotions and influence other social systems such as politics, the economy, culture, religion and sports. This article offers an analysis of current changes in science journalism and the public relations of science. A market analysis served as basis for telephone interviews with editorial executives and heads of public relations departments. The interviews focused on respondents’ views on the future of science communication, the handling of science topics in newsrooms, and on future qualifications of science communicators. Evidently, science journalism is becoming more current, more controversial and more entertaining. The study formed the basis of a concept of an interdisciplinary bachelor’s program. This is why the article also deals with the consequences for journalism education.     

Kognitive Dissonanz »Revisited«

Using the theory of cognitive dissonance, this study investigates whether users of an online magazine prefer contents that agrees to their attitudes to political issues. In contrast to earlier studies, dissonance is defined issue-specifically rather than by party identification. Moreover, personal relevance is also included. In a two-step data collection, attitudes and relevance assessments were measured first. Participants were asked in a second session to look at an online magazine. Background software recorded the selection of and the time spent with specific contents as participants looked at the magazine. Results show that users spent more time with attitude-consistent information. This was, however, mostly due to persons who had rated issue relevance high. Users with low or moderate rating for issue relevance spent significantly less time with attitude-consistent content and significantly more time with attitude-inconsistent information, as compared with users with high relevance ratings. The influence of issue relevance is discussed as an explanation of contradictory results on cognitive dissonance and media use.     

Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication: A Conceptual Framework for Strategic Social Media Influencer Communication

ABSTRACT

Strategic social media influencer communication has become a major topic in strategic communication. However, despite the growing relevance of this new strategic communication instrument, research has paid only limited attention to elaborating its basic concepts. In this article, we adopt a strategic communication perspective to develop a conceptual framework for strategic social media influencer communication. Particularly, we draw on research findings that identify the external resources social media influencers contribute to organization-influencer cooperation. We use these findings to systematically develop functional definitions of social media influencers and of strategic social media influencer communication. We define social media influencers as third-party actors who have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web. Subsequently, we define strategic social media communication as the purposeful use of communication by organizations or social media influencers in which social media influencers are addressed or perform activities with strategic significance to organizational goals. We then situate these definitions within the broader framework of strategic communication by discussing related concepts and by describing the strategic action field that has emerged around strategic social media influencer communication.     

Activists’ Strategic Communication in an Authoritarian Setting: Integrating Social Movement Framing into Issues Management

Triangulating 18 in-depth interviews with activists and campaign participants, news coverage, and social media content related to the campaign “6,700 people for 6,700 trees,” this study integrates social movement framing theory and issues management framework to examine activists’ strategic communications in an authoritarian setting. Results indicate activists’ sophisticated use of framing strategies following different stages of the issue life cycle to legitimately form an issue and successfully manage the issue in order to achieve their goals. This study offers meaningful theoretical implications for examining strategic communication in social movement campaigns. It also discusses practical lessons for applying these strategies to foster social change in similar contexts.     

Die Wirkung „guter“ Argumente

Starting from a discursive perspective on public communication, we ask whether the deliberative quality of journalistic articles on policy topics influences the amount of user participation on news websites. The theory of deliberative democracy often serves as a source of normatively desirable discursive requirements. Here, however, we present empirically verifiable assumptions that we combine with explanations about media content from the spiral of silence theory and explanations of user behavior from the civic voluntarism model and the construct of self-efficacy. The spiral of silence theory assumes that people do not express their opinions in public when they feel their opinions belong to the minority, because they fear to be socially isolated. The media play a crucial role in this process, as their depiction of public discourses influences the perception of public opinion. Furthermore, the theory assumes that mass media form a media tenor, presenting similar representations of opinion distributions. In online contexts, we argue, we can no longer expect to observe a single media tenor, but we must define more individually perceived, selection-based media tenors. Thus, users are only to be expected to fear isolation in cases where a majority opinion is presented in online contents they selected which stand against their opinions. Based on the civic voluntarism model and previous literature, we understand writing comments as a form of participation that is most likely to be carried out by persons who are interested in politics, have a high level of self-efficacy and feel stimulated to participate by the immediate environment, i.?e., the journalistic article and the comment section.We therefore assume that the more representatives of the opposition, civil society and ordinary citizens are presented in the media, the more users will participate in the comment section (H1). Furthermore, we also expect articles containing conflicting and counterarguing utterances to lead to more participants than articles without this kind of utterances (H2). Regarding the rationality of the discourse, we suppose that the presence of justifications of arguments also increases users’ participation (H3). Articles often report on current debates that aim to lead to a decision. Considering self-efficacy assumptions and the relatability of a debate for the users, we assume that participation rates will be higher when decisions are discussed that lie in the future (H4a), whereas decisions that have already been taken are expected to reduce participation rates (H4b). Furthermore, we also expect articles with a reference to German domestic politics to attract higher participation rates (H5).In order to test our hypotheses, we conducted a content analysis of 400 online newspaper articles. We selected two national (WELT Online and ZEIT Online) and two regional (Rheinische Post Online and Tagesspiegel Online) online newspaper outlets, one of each belonging to the left-wing liberal and one to the conservative journalism spectrum. From the politics news feeds of the four online newspaper outlets between January 1, and March 31, 2016, we selected a systematic random sample of articles with enabled comment sections. The deliberative criteria were measured either on the level of a value-based utterance made by a representative of the government, the opposition, civil society or an ordinary citizen or on the level of the news article. Utterance-based criteria were then aggregated to the news article level. Furthermore, we measured the number of users that participated in the discussion in the comment section. We then estimated a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model in order to predict the number of participating users.Results show that the majority of deliberative criteria serve to increase the amount of user participation. The more opposition politicians are cited in a news article, the more users participate in the comment section which hints to the conclusion that discursive equality triggers participation. Regarding the reciprocity of discourses, conflicting and counterarguing utterances also increase the number of users who participate in a discussion. Another explanation of a higher number of commentators is the presence of justified arguments, i.?e., when the discourse can be classified as rational. While future decisions did not show any effect on user participation, past decisions in fact reduced the amount of participation. Furthermore, if the topic was related to domestic German politics, participation rates also increased, which represents relatability for people’s lives.All in all, we conclude that discourse-related criteria should be integrated more often into the analysis of the conditions of user participation, as they can add to explaining when people feel motivated to write comments. They are connected to considerations about opinion climates both as depicted by the journalistic article and as present in the comment section itself as discussed in the spiral of silence theory. The more opinions journalists present in an article and the better the underlying discourse, the more we can expect users to participate in the discussion. We have also seen that articles on decisions that have already been taken are not as frequently commented on, and that a relation to domestic topics leads to a more active participation. Taken together, we argue that user comments can be a meaningful addition to deliberation research, because they can serve as a measure of the effects of deliberative content, e.?g., in the news.This study focused on the contents of the journalistic articles, while the contents of user comments were not integrated into the analysis. In future studies, this gap should be closed with content analyses of user comments. Furthermore, the assumptions we made about users’ motivations and behavior also need to be confirmed in experimental designs and surveys.     

Paid,Earned, Shared and Owned Media From the Perspective of Advertising and Public Relations Agencies: Comparing China and the United States

Despite the existence of the “great firewall,” advertising and public relations practitioners in China, much like in the United States, are embracing and enacting social media and digital strategies on behalf of their clients. In this study, we conducted 42 in-depth interviews with advertising and public relations practitioners in the United States and mainland China to explore how emerging media and integrated marketing communication (IMC) are impacting advertising and public relations agencies in the two countries. This cross-cultural comparison revealed several critical insights, which were examined through the lenses of IMC and dimensions of culture. We found that emerging media lead to converging trends in various aspects of agency performance. The blurring of paid, earned, shared, and owned media (PESO) was evidentially observed in how executives of both countries defined and used media. Chinese agencies were media agnostic, concerned more with effectiveness of media practices. The U.S. agencies embraced collaboration and information technology better compared to their Chinese peers. This research contributes to the body of knowledge in strategic communication via providing empirical evidence of how Chinese and U.S. agencies coordinate IMC and perceive PESO media relative and in response to emerging media practices.     

Live Streamers on Twitch.tv as Social Media Influencers: Chances and Challenges for Strategic Communication

ABSTRACT

Twitch.tv is one of the most successful online live streaming platforms in the world, with 200 million viewers, 2 million regular “streamers,” and a market value of over $1billion. In this paper, we offer a first conceptualization of streamers as social media influencers, and how effectively they can perform strategic communication for sponsors. We draw on extensive ethnographic research and over a hundred semi-structured interviews with streamers to address two questions: first, how does Twitch operate as a platform for strategic communication; second, what skills do streamers need to be successful influencers? In the first case, we show Twitch is well suited to influencing, in large part due to its integration of data analytics, while streamers are using these tools to adopt a business-oriented mindset; in the second case, we show the importance of authenticity to both streamers and clients, and how channels of different sizes offer strategic communication opportunities. The article contributes to the emerging literature on Twitch, developing insights from influencing and strategic communication, but given the increasing scope of live streaming, we also argue the phenomenon – particularly when combined with the economic dynamics of influencing – is just as important for making sense of the wider media landscape today.