The blogosphere and public relations: Investigating practitioners’ roles and blog use
This paper is discussed about the use of blog among public relations practitioners. The authors also discussed on the public relations practitioner perception about blog, how they use a blog, and they ways female practitioners use the blog. This research employed an online multi-page survey to answer the research questions and the respondents are randomly selected. The PR practitioners use the internet when they want to handle issues management, relationship management, environmental scanning and etc. This paper also has discovered marked differences in how different types of practitioners use communication technologies (Porter et al., 2001; Porter and Sallot, 2003). In late 1990s, males were more likely to use online databases than females (Perter et al., 2010). In the early 1990s, blog have become more popular and more than 57 million people read blogs (Lenhart, 2006). Nowadays, the PR professional also use a blog as a communication tools. Practitioners use blogs for more passive research tasks or sometime they also hosting an organizational blog. Blog provide an opportunity for communication professionals to monitor the feedback from their clients. They also use a blog to maintain and improve the good relationship with their target publics (internal and external publics).
Blogs are very useful because it offer practitioners a way to target specialized publics. In addition, this paper states that, the use of blog among PR practitioners appears to be on par with the general population. Therefore, we cannot say that public relations professionals insulate behind in adopting blogs. Even so, it is evident that the use of blogging as a professional tool has not yet become a staple – even among these “early adopters” of the technology. That is, the findings indicate that 70 percent of those surveyed who said they blogged actually maintained a personal blog. Interestingly, the blog adoption mean scores for reading and interacting on blogs were very low, but the perception items about the future of blogs and the use of blogs as a standard public relations tool were higher. The professionals believe blogs are important but they are not yet ready to tactically employ them in public relations. Professionals become aware of technologies and believe it important, but seem to put off adopting the technologies before they see a broad adoption among the general public.
Practitioners also using blogs passively for research purposes, and have not yet strategically developed blogs across the profession. This research found women and man using blogs equally. Usually, they use blog to increase productivity and efficiency in their work but also for communication purposes. The only area in which men are using blogs more frequently is for issues management. As in previous work by Porter and Sallot (2003), these findings are not a function of their professional roles as there were no significant interaction effects between gender and roles. However, this finding shows that women are not thinking about blogs as strategically as men in communications, which may have important implications for their future advancement in the profession. It can be conclude that, the practitioners seem to follow
Posted by: Akmariela bt Ahmad Sayuti (2008285676)
Reference:
Porter, L., Sweetser, K., & Chung, D. (2009), “The blogosphere and public relations:
Investigating practitioners’ roles and blog use”, Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 250-267.
Obtained online at www.emeraldinsight.com
