Social Media and Public Relations

Fake Friends and Powerful Publics

Judy Motion, Robert L. Heath, Shirley Leitch

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135005986
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business General

Social media is having a profound, but not yet fully understood impact on public relations. In the 24/7 world of perpetually connected publics, will public relations function as a dark art that spins (or tweets) self-interested variations of the truth for credulous audiences? Or does the full glare of the internet and the increasing expectations of powerful publics motivate it to more honestly engage to serve the public interest?

The purpose of this book is to examine the role of PR by exploring the myriad ways that social media is reshaping its conceptualization, strategies, and tactics. In particular, it explores the dichotomies of fake and authentic, powerless and powerful, meaningless and meaningful. It exposes transgressions committed by practitioners—the paucity of digital literacy, the lack of understanding of the norms of social media, naivety about corporate identity risks, and the overarching emphasis on spin over authentic engagement. But it also shows the power that closely networked social media users have to insert information and opinion into discussions and force "false PR friends" to be less so.

This timely, challenging, and fascinating book will be of interest to all students, researchers, and practitioners in Public Relations, Media, and Communication Studies.

Winner of the 2016 NCA PRIDE Award for best book

1 Identify the problems

Social media and public relations

DOI: 10.4324/9780203727799-1

Social media has opened up new possibilities and raised many questions for public relations practitioners and academics. In the world of perpetually connected publics, is public relations to be a dark art that spins (or tweets) the truth for credulous publics? Or is this the time to conceptualize public relations under the full glare of the Internet and the expectations of increasingly powerful publics? These questions speak to both the continuing relevance and ethical basis of public relations. Answering them depends upon our better understanding of the fundamental shifts that social media has wrought. Such analysis also must be cautious to examine actual changes in practices and influences, and not merely get caught up in designer or practitioner promotions of what social media are and can accomplish.

The purpose of this book is to increase our understanding of the role of public relations in social media through an exploration of the myriad ways that social media is reshaping the core concepts and practices of public relations. These concepts include authenticity, power, knowledge, social capital, dialogue, relationships, sharing, meaning, risk, transparency, and truth, as they are played out in a social media contexts. Our intention is not to create a series of dialectics that pit one notion or definition against another. Instead, we seek to offer a series of problematizations and multiple theoretical insights into the implications of changes that have been driven by working in social media ecologies for public relations practice, scholarship, and pedagogy.

Problematization is a method of inquiry, interrogation and interpretation that we adopt to query how particular meanings and practices have come to dominate. The aim of problematization is to examine the “assumptions, the familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought that we accept” (Foucault, 1988, p. 154). One such problematization is considering whether social media are just another channel or a unique channel. Also, we can muse about social media with a lens provided by Marshall McLuhan: Is social media a message or merely a medium?

A starting point for adopting problematization as our mode of inquiry and critique is questioning our ways of thinking about and making sense of the relationship between public relations and social media. Here we pose a set of questions that are designed to open up possibilities, identify vulnerabilities and examine common transgressions:

• What is the nature of the relationship between public relations and social media?
• How do power relations play out within the practices of public relations in social media?
• What are the implications of public relations practices within social media contexts for identity and relationships?
• In what ways does social media open up or reconfigure discursive possibilities for public relations?
• Does social media increase transparency or merely give it one more kalei-doscopic twist?

The potential for an improved, engaged form of public relations within social media spaces needs to be considered in conjunction with contemporary scholarship. Public relations, Heath (2001) suggested, is a rhetorical practice concerned with influencing meaning production and sense-making. Meaning oriented approaches have primarily interpreted public relations efforts as attempts to fix certain meanings and overturn others (Motion and Leitch, 1996). In contrast, relational approaches (Ferguson, 1984; Hutton, 1999; Ledingham and Bruning, 1999) have interpreted public relations as a strategic relationship building and management process. Within both of these approaches public relations is often theorized as an instrumental resource for corporate advancement; either from functionalist perspectives in which the role of public relations is understood to be about improving the effectiveness of public relations at achieving strategic goals, or from critical perspectives that aim to identify and change inequitable power relations (Trujillo and Toth, 1987). Functionalist perspectives are criticized for serving the interests of status quo, elitist power relations, falling into the trap of isolating problems from their societal contexts, and attempting to achieve a type of “scientific” certainty, which is illusory. Critical perspectives are accused of unconstructive negativity and of lacking relevance and utility for public relations practice. The problem with these generalizations is that although they capture the weaknesses of each approach, they do not acknowledge that increasingly the boundaries between these two approaches are blurring and shifting as scholars work across multiple theories and themes (Motion et al., 2013).

More recently, Heath (2010, p. 1) identified three dominant paradigms of public relations that he termed “management adjustive, discourse engagement and normative/critical/ethical.” These conceptualizations of public relations, we suggest, may be usefully applied to understand the role of public relations in social media. The management adjustive paradigm takes into consideration current developments in the very dynamic nature of managerial theory and practice about organizational responsiveness to complexity and chaos. Do organizations organize to communicate or communicate to organize? An issues management approach underpins the paradigm and emphasizes a pro-active philosophy that aligns multidimensional, layered and textual interests to develop mutually beneficial relationships through managerial processes and societal engagements.

Within the discourse engagement paradigm, public relations strategies are increasingly played out within engagement and participative communication processes that open up dialogic spaces and allow publics to reframe and debate salient issues ( De Bussey, 2010; Hughes and Demetrious, 2006; Motion and Leitch, 2008). Key ideas that are applied within the discourse engagement paradigm include change, power relations, legitimacy, and cocreated meanings. The discourse engagement paradigm challenges the pseudoscientific promotional practices that seek to close down debate and generate acceptance or acquiescence. Engagement theory forces academics and practitioners to abandon a prevailing assumption that dominant coalitions’ elites can dominate discourse processes to predetermined ends. Such linear thinking is giving way to a much more fluid paradigm that sees public relations as flow through engagement.

Within the normative/critical/ethical paradigm an emphasis is placed on the responsibilities and societal obligations of public relations and the potential for building harmony and resolving discord. A significant corpus of public relations research now focuses beyond the organization to individual, national, and societal imperatives that intersect historical, philosophical, political, cultural, technological and environmental concerns. Emergent multidisciplinary and multidimensional approaches include, for example, postmodern (Holtzhausen, 2000; McKie 2001, 2010), poststructuralist ( Motion and Leitch, 2009), and postcolonial critiques ( McKie and Munshi, 2007), themes of power, globalization, diversity and change ( Bardhah and Weaver, 2011; Curtin and Gaither, 2007; Edwards and Hodges, 2011; Heath et al., 2010; Sriramesh and Verčič, 2009), and ethics and corporate responsibility ( Cheney and Christensen, 2001; L'Etang, 1995). The guiding principles of proactive adjustment, collaborative communication, and responsible behavior that Heath (2010) identified for public relations practice also apply to participation in social media spaces. Heath's (2010) suggestion that an organization should reflectively adjust its behavior to focus on mutual interests and benefits that meet societal ideals and expectations, communicate collaboratively through discourse to develop shared meanings, and behave ethically, could form philosophical guidelines for organizations seeking to develop social media policies and open up significant possibilities for expanding what is understood as public relations and how it is practiced in these spaces.

Defining social media

Teasing out terminological distinctions and deploying current social media expressions is essential for public relations professionals, scholars and educators. Social media terminology is constantly changing as technologies evolve and practices change—what was once known as Web 2.0 or “new media” is now commonly referred to as social media or, more formally, social network sites (boyd and Ellison, 2008). The evolution of Web 2.0 into an assemblage of Internet applications that facilitate “participation, connectivity, user-generation, information sharing, and collaboration” (Henderson and Bowley, 2010) informs many of the definitions of social media. The technologies, platforms and applications that underpin social media may also be itemized to provide an integrated, inventory-oriented definition, for example:

The notion of social media is associated with new digital media phenomena such as blogs, social networking sites, location-based services, microblogs, photo- and video-sharing sites, etc., in which ordinary users (i.e. not only media professionals) can communicate with each other and create and share content with others online through their personal networked computers and digital mobile devices.

(Bechmann and Lomborg, 2013, p. 767)

The interactive, participatory characteristics of social media may prove a more useful and stable definitional feature; definitions that itemize the technologies, platforms and applications have the potential to rapidly date.

The social meaning of digital technologies, according to Stadler (2012, p. 242) is “shaped and reshaped by how they are embedded into social life” . Conversely, Castells (2009) observed that digital technologies are transforming the way that society is organized and characterized the reorganized structure as a networked society. For public relations professionals, engagement with networks that operate in a mediated space requires an understanding of networked practices and how they fit into a wider societal context (boyd, 2007). Within social media spaces users form or join networked communities to engage in social interactions and share and filter content such as textual information or conversations, photos, pictures or videos (boyd, 2007). Social media is, fundamentally, a space for connecting and conversing with people.

In addition to understanding the implications of a restructured, networked social life, public relations professionals need to take into account deinstitutionalization, user-driven content, networked interactive communities and Web 2.0 features (Bechmann and Lomborg, 2013). Media organizations no longer control content delivery and channels of distribution, a phenomenon that is referred to as deinstitutionalization. Bechmann and Lomborg (2013) explained that “most theories of social media suggest some degree of collapse or oscillation between producer and audience when users create content”—in contrast to the “media producer-text-audience model” (p. 766). As a consequence, user-created content is reconfiguring the role (and possibly power) of traditional media institutions such as print or television news organizations. The role of intermediaries has become less significant or is changing, and (as will be discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to authenticity) may actually lead publics to devalue communications as inauthentic precisely because intermediaries are involved. The sources and types of value that public relations may offer for users within deinstitutionalized social media spaces is therefore problematic. However, although the decentralized structure has impacted on traditional media, Castells (2009) notes that deinstitutionalization is only partial—social media spaces are owned and controlled by corporate social media institutions. The notion that deinstitutionalization has created an empowered user or powerful publics is therefore also open to question.

Bechmann and Lomborg (2013) distinguish between user-centric and industry centric perspectives:

Social media are either addressed in terms economic and socio-political value creation in an industry perspective, that is, power, exploitation and business revenues, or in terms of value creation as sense making in a user–centric perspective, that is creative explorations of self and the management of social relationships in everyday life.

(Bechmann and Lomborg, 2013, p. 766)

They argue that these two perspectives operate with very different conceptions of producer/user nexus, stating that, as a result, “the user is simultaneously an empowered, productive agent, and a target for companies to exploit” (Bechmann and Lomborg, 2013, p. 767). Exploitation of this duality enables public relations to continue to operate as a persuasive mechanism rather than capitalizing on the deliberative and democratic features of social media. The disparity between the ways in which public relations practitioners imagine their publics and the reality of how these publics see themselves and actually behave is another emerging issue. Rosen (2006) suggested that “the people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable.”

Contests for online presence and power have been further complicated by this dramatic shift from spectatorship to participation and the increased expectations of publics in the interactive environment of web 2.0. Castells (2009) suggested that within this era of mass self-communication the forms of power in networked society are being fundamentally transformed. Public relations content producers may have even less control than when journalists mediated their messages. Social media participants are not passive or...