The Social Media era redefining Corporate PR

Traditional public relations before the social media era, were mostly about building relationships with media and endorsers. One other important point includes the marketing part, using integrated marketing communication. Public relations professionals belonging to this era think they “can control what messages members of publics are exposed to”. The new era or social media comes to challenge that (Grunig, 2009). With the new era of social media, media, advertising and public relations spheres have evolved, we are now talking about ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘analytics’, ‘twitter sentiment’, big data for facebook, ‘twitter outrage’, ‘facebook backlash’, among other emerging curious internet-related casualties.

Even though social media brought up questionable influencers who seem to be considered legitimate according to metrics of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, this new way of living in a connected world also changed for the better the way corporations communicate. As Grunig explains, corporation PR practitioners used to ‘target’ ‘audiences’ instead of ‘communicating with their followers’ (Grunig, 2009). For Grunig, the use of semantics make a difference, and social media taught companies that the control of a reputation comes less with what we think we communicate, and more with how we are trustworthy and committed in our communications.

The use of public relations in this new era however tends to go further than talking about “reputation, brands, impressions, perceptions” with a purpose to “help all management functions including (…) to build relationships with their stakeholders” (Grunig, 2009). Building relationships with the public rather than just the media is now tremendously important for the corporate PR practitioner. The goal of an organisation remains to sell but its purpose is all about the image it built, the image that the stakeholders like and decide to contribute to. Organisations thus have to “anticipate and (…) highly communicate with publics at all stages of the process”, the corporations that succeed in doing so, “should be more likely to develop relationships with their publics”.

Netflix could be a case study to highlight the importance for a company to communicate both ways, by listening to their stakeholders and answering back to their concerns. When the company decided to raise their service cost without communicating about it, Netflix customers and even employees started to share their resentment on the company social media accounts. The brand suffered from that omission in terms of subscriptions numbers. If social media added elements to the current paradigm of communications we live in, it seems that they still did not change the codes of our mediatized society. If anything, social media made situations more dramatic and massive. And perhaps that is a reminder to corporations that stakeholders are the one holding the company together, and can decide to remove the stake at anytime.  

References 

Grunig, J. E. (2009). Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation. PRism 6(2): http://praxis.massey.ac.nz/prism_on-line_journ.html