This study revealed that organisations are communicating in diverse ways. Organisations’ interactive and engaging communication was positively associated with relationship cultivation strategies and relational outcomes as defined in PR literature. These findings confirm that social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook are ideal communication channels for New Zealand organisations to build and maintain relationships with their publics.
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This study’s first research question addressed how Facebook was being used by organisations as a general communication tool:
RQ1: How are the Facebook pages of selected New Zealand organisations being used as a communication tool?
The research revealed that fan activity far outweighed organisations’ activity on the Facebook pages. This finding was not initially a major consideration at the beginning of the research; however this study found fan communication affected the way organisations communicated on their Facebook pages. The different communication strategies of the organisations – particularly their response strategies to fan communication– raised important considerations for PR practitioners regarding the cost-benefit of communicating in social media spaces. This observation highlights the need to measure the effectiveness of organisation’s social media communication strategies in future research: not just relational outcomes, but also the communication’s effect on fans’ behavioural outcomes.
Fan communication was similar to Men and Tsai’s (2011) findings, but further observations from this study revealed that organisation’s pages were not only spaces for fans to engage with the organisation, but also with each other, highlighting a new stakeholder dynamic (customer to customer) for PR practitioners to manage. Of course, there has always been customer to
customer communication, but social media provides a space for organisations to observe this communication and take advantage of this visibility.
Organisations used varied communication strategies, but it was clear that Facebook was being used more as a PR channel than a marketing channel. Although advertising and promotion were common, elements of interactive, interpersonal communication were being exchanged
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more frequently between organisations and their fans. This is the first PR-focused study researching commercial organisation’s Facebook pages that has directly compared PR and marketing activities and shows that further studies would be productive in determining whether organisation’s Facebook pages are more effective as a PR-focused, or marketing-focused
communication channel. This could be particularly insightful if this direction of research was also applied to different social media platforms such as twitter.
The use of multimedia and media relations-type activities was not frequently used; however, observations of the data suggest that the use of multimedia and media-relations-type material such as interactive elements may not be as important to utilising Facebook and building relationships as some literature suggests. This conclusion supports other studies, which have found organisations do not take full advantage of media release usage and linking opportunities in social media spaces (Bortree & Seltzer, 2009; Ingenhoff & Koelling, 2009; Men & Tsai, 2011; Waters et al., 2009); however, this study revealed that some organisations in this study are using written announcements and reputation-building posts that may be substituting traditional “relationship-building” media such as disseminating an official press release, linking to an external news story or linking to official information on the website. This finding highlights the need for research to further examine alternative media relations-type activities in social media spaces, and identify whether these alternative activities may be more effective in social media spaces than the traditional press release or links to news items.
This research also found that the majority of Facebook posts could– by their word length – be posted on the 140 character-limiting platform, Twitter. This finding demonstrates that – although Facebook does not restrict posts with word limits, organisations are adhering to brief, fragmented communication. Like studies measuring organisations’ communication on Twitter
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(Waters & Williams, 2011; Wigand, 2010; Zhao & Rosson, 2009), it appears that communication brevity and fragmentation of messages do not limit the power to cultivate relationships with online publics in social media spaces.
This study found that one third of sampled posts were made outside of office hours. Unlike other social media like Twitter and Blogs, organisations – at the time of this research – cannot plan and delay posts on Facebook ahead of time. Of the twelve organisations sampled, only three organisations did not post on their Facebook pages outside of general office hours. This suggests PR practitioners are likely to continue engaging with publics and representing their organisation in their own time, and this raises issues of cost-benefit considerations and resources for
organisations.
Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) four models of PR were applied to this study at a micro- communication level; however the models did not fit consistently with these four models. Instead, the findings revealed that one-way and two-way communication could asymmetrically benefit the fan at a micro-communication level, and could even mutually benefit the organisation and fans through one-way communication. It is likely that such results would be skewed when looking at them more holistically –for example, while the immediate communication may only have immediate benefits for the fan, it could inevitably build stronger organisation-public relationships (OPRs), which have lasting effects for the organisation in the future. Nevertheless, the high percentage of mutual communication displayed in the results of this study combined with the observed relational outcomes suggests that two-way, balanced communication does have a role to play in relationship management.
Results did not show significant patterns between different types of organisations and their loosely partnered competition. This lack of significance is likely to be from the small sample size,
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and further research with larger sample sizes could result in significant findings. Differences between SBOs and PBOs were only significantly found within Marketing Activities. This confirms that using service-based and product-based marketing differentiators in PR do not need to be considered when considering communication and relationship-building strategies, although further research of the differences between SBO’s and PBO’s Facebook pages from a marketing perspective could be worthwhile.
RQ2: How do the communication strategies of selected New Zealand organisations relate to specific relationship cultivation and relational outcome measures as identified in PR literature?
The second research question in this study sought to relate the findings of the research with previous literature that defines relationship cultivation and relational outcome measures. This study found that organisations used relationship cultivation strategies such as disclosure, information dissemination and interactivity to a large extent, but not necessarily in the form that relationship cultivation strategies traditionally identify. For example, text-based announcement posts would sometimes be used to inform publics instead of links to official information sources such as a news story or press release. Organisations and their fans’ communication activities were also found to compare with successful relationship outcomes of satisfaction, commitment, control mutuality, and relationship exchange and communality as defined by PR literature.
This study supports the notion that SNS are ideal platforms to engage and interact with publics to build and maintain relationships. The study concludes that – in relation to relationship cultivation studies, relational outcomes and relationship management theory – the organisations’
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pages are producing communication that appears to cultivate relationships with positive relational outcomes; however, there is a lack of understanding in PR literature surrounding whether developing “successful” OPRs online is valuable for organisations, and further research into how online OPRs create value for organisations needs to be undertaken.