Gearing toward excellence in corporate social media communications: Understanding the why and how of public engagement

Abstract

Given the ubiquity and dominance of social media, it is no longer an issue whether organizations should include social media in their communication channels, but how they can strategically use social media to engage digital-savvy stakeholders. Trade publications have reported that when publics search for information on a company, brand, or product, they now use social media more frequently than corporate websites (Dei Worldwide, 2008). In fact, many new businesses today rely solely on social media for their online presence (Goodfellow, 2014). Unlike the corporate “controlled” media, the open and crowdsourced social media enable individual users to serve as media gatekeepers and content-creators who collaboratively shape corporate image and reputation through “likes,” “posts,” and “shares” across online communities (Muntinga, Moorman, & Smith, 2011). For public relations, Web 2.0 technologies have triggered paradigm shifts in communication and relationship management, bringing unprecedented challenges and opportunities for organizations to engage publics in meaningful conversations and interactions. Not surprisingly, social media and the related implications have received atremendous amount of research attention. Early studies examined the common social communication strategies employed by organizations via content analyses (e.g., Men & Tsai, 2012) and interviews with public relations practitioners (e.g., Sweetser & Kelleher, 2011). Research has also examined publics’ motivations of using social media in general (e.g., Phillips, 2008). Different social media stakeholders, including their salience and influence, are identified based on dimensions of connectivity and shared content (Sedereviciute & Valentini, 2011). Strategies for cultivating relationships via social media have also been explored (e.g., Levenshus, 2010). As the use of social media in public relations becomes more sophisticatedbeyond the early function of information distribution, recent studies have adopted various theoretical frameworks to understand the mechanisms underlying publics’ interactions with organizations on social media. For instance, Lee,Kim, and Kim (2011) examined the roles of social identification and intrinsic motives of altruism in driving publics’ involvement with user-initiated brand communities. Focusing on organization-public relationships (OPRs), Himelboim et al. (2014) identified different types of social mediators that connect organizations and their publics and their corresponding roles in mediating OPRs. Additionally, within the constantly evolving and diversifying social medialandscape, social networking sites (SNSs) (e.g., Facebook) are viewed as the dominant drivers of the media revolution (Vogt & Knapman, 2008). Recent media surveys report that Internet users spent the most time on SNSs (Fox, 2013). With the revolutionary advantages of a collaborative, communal, and democratizing communication process (Muntinga, et al., 2011), SNSs have fundamentally changed how organizations communicate and engage with stakeholders. Based on empirical findings of several studies, this chapter focuses on publics’ engagement with organizations on corporate SNS pages to offer a normative model to address the following key questions concerning publics’ social engagement: What is public-organization social media engagement? Why does social media engagement matter for organizations? How can companies effectively engage publics on social media?