Public Relations Outcomes Research Articles

Beyond the code: The impact of AI algorithm transparency signaling on user trust and relational satisfaction

This study investigates the effectiveness of AI-algorithm transparency signaling as a strategy to enhance organization-public relationships (OPRs) in AI-assisted communications. Building upon signaling theory and trust transfer theory, the study examines whether the AI algorithm transparency influences trust in AI systems by users and this trust can be transferred into trust in AI systems’ parent company, which in turn, influences the relational satisfaction with the company. An online experiment with 537 participants demonstrated that transparency signaling significantly improves users’ relational satisfaction with the AI parent company. However, this effect is mediated by trust in both the AI system and the parent company, rather than a direct relationship. Our findings offer practical guidelines for AI domain experts and public relations practitioners to deliberately convey the true essence of transparency in AI-mediated communication and ensure accountability in AI adoption, thereby improving public relations outcomes.

Guidelines for sponsorship signaling within socially complex markets

Organizations use sponsorships to influence various marketing, financial, and public relations outcomes. Sponsorship communications occur in socially complex markets where messages diffuse quickly. Such messages are also widely accessible to and influenced by various audiences, which can be supportive, neutral, skeptical, or decisively antagonistic. These conditions require managers to adopt nuanced and holistically integrated ways of making their messages acceptable and engaging for a wide variety of audiences, while also being robust to scrutiny. The article addresses this challenge by drawing on signaling theory to present a process model and guidelines for managing sponsorships within socially complex markets. Specifically, it outlines how different message content and sponsorship characteristics combine to influence signal reception, market responses, and feedback. The model is then merged with research on sponsorship authenticity to guide managerial application. Initially, sponsors establish the signal content and primary target audiences through selecting sponsee partners with whom they have authentic fit (Guideline 1). Sponsors can then develop specific characteristics of commitment, observability, and credibility (Guidelines 2–4). Finally, sponsors should conduct prelaunch and postlaunch assessments to adapt to how the sponsorship is received by various audiences and subgroups on an ongoing basis (Guideline 5).

A public health crisis in the university: Impact of crisis response strategies on universities’ transparency and post-crisis relationships during COVID 19 pandemic

During the COVID 19 pandemic, one of the most critical tasks of the university was to effectively communicate with students, faculty, and staff members. This study aims to explore perceived universities’ crisis response messages during the pandemic and examine the effectiveness of each response strategy on public relations outcomes. A survey with 346 university students in the U.S., results showed how defensive and accommodative response strategies differently affected PR outcomes. Accommodative strategies generated higher OPR and greater perceived transparency efforts among students, while several defensive strategies affected students’ negative evaluations on post-crisis OPR and perceived transparency of their universities. Such results revealed valuable insights that make significant contributions to theory and practices in university crisis communication and management, especially when dealing with public health crises that are seen as external locus of control.

Harnessing the power of chatbot social conversation for organizational listening: The impact on perceived transparency and organization-public relationships

ABSTRACT This study presents one of the earliest empirical investigations on how to harness the power of chatbots for improving key public relations outcomes. Specifically, this study integrates the construct of social presence that has been widely studied in the computer-mediated communication literature with the concept of conversational human voice in public relations to conceptualize chatbots’ social conversation. We evaluate chatbots’ social conversation as an important antecedent driving user perception, not only of chatbots’ listening capability, but also of the organizations’ listening efforts, which, in turn, enhance the essential perceptual outcomes of organizational transparency and organization-public relationships. Our theoretical model was tested through an online survey of 778 adult Facebook users in the US, who were directed to have a 5-minute conversation with a real chatbot. The study results advance the organizational listening literature and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on artificial intelligence in public relations.

Responding to public health crises

This paper examines how the cognitive framework of collective mindfulness complements tenets of user experience in public health crisis communication. Collective mindfulness attunes an organization into preemptively identifying and avoiding potential failures that can have adverse safety and public relations outcomes. To illustrate the connection between this cognitive framework and user experience, this article shares findings from a case study with the 2014 Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, whose primary goals were to improve the usability of Ebola personal protective equipment protocols and to prepare healthcare providers for a U.S. Ebola crisis. Based on a grounded theory investigation, this article suggests that the collective mindfulness principles of deference to expertise, resilience, and refusal to simplify complex procedures informed the team's ability to avoid a catastrophic communication failure. Additionally, these principles allowed the team to attune to key user experience principles, including addressing user context and user limitations.

Use of affect in blog communication: Trust, Credibility, and Authenticity

The purpose of this study was to test the compelling-arguments hypothesis in an agenda-building framework, focusing on the role of affect in blog communication. Conducting a 3×3 factorial experiment with two manipulated independent variables (valence and arousal), this investigation examined the influences of these variables on public relations outcomes (credibility, trust, and authenticity) as potential consequences of agenda-building relationships. Our findings showed main effects of both independent variables on perceived trust and authenticity.

Team leaders’ perceptions of public influence in the US Forest Service: exploring the difference between doing and using public involvement

Individuals and public groups generally participate in public involvement events in an effort to gain influence over decisions that affect them. However, not much is known about how the process actually results in the public gaining influence over agency decisions. This paper reports the results of an online survey completed by 489 Forest Service National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) team leaders. Respondents reported how much influence they thought the public should have during the NEPA process, how much influence they thought the public generally had, and how much influence the public had on a specific NEPA process at different points in the process. Sixty per cent of the respondents believed the public should have greater influence than they do. Respondents reported that more public influence should and does happen at earlier stages in the process. Early public influence and substantive comments appear to be related to positive perceptions of the public involvement process and public relations outcomes.

Exposure to sided media coverage of an organization, subsequent group conversations, and public relations outcomes

We experimentally found a negative effect of subsequent group conversations after media exposure on the audience's attitudes toward the covered organization, while we found sided media exposure to predict both attitudes and behavioral intentions relevant to the covered organization. The extent of conversational engagement immediately following media exposure also helped predict future word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions. These results highlight the roles of interpersonal interactions after media exposure to explain and predict public relations outcomes.

Decision making, procedural compliance, and outcomes definition in U.S. forest service planning processes

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) dictates a process of analyzing and disclosing the likely impacts of proposed agency actions on the human environment. This study addresses two key questions related to NEPA implementation in the U.S. Forest Service: 1) how do Interdisciplinary (ID) team leaders and decision makers conceptualize the outcomes of NEPA processes? And 2), how does NEPA relate to agency decision making? We address these questions through two separate online surveys that posed questions about recently completed NEPA processes – the first with the ID team leaders tasked with carrying out the processes, and the second with the line officers responsible for making the processes' final decisions. Outcomes of NEPA processes include impacts on public relations, on employee morale and team functioning, on the achievement of agency goals, and on the achievement of NEPA's procedural requirements (disclosure) and substantive intent (minimizing negative environmental impacts). Although both tended to view public relations outcomes as important, decision makers' perceptions of favorable outcomes were more closely linked to the achievement of agency goals and process efficiency than was the case for ID team leaders. While ID team leaders' responses suggest that they see decision making closely integrated with the NEPA process, decision makers more commonly decoupled decision making from the NEPA process. These findings suggest a philosophical difference between ID team leaders and decision makers that may pose challenges for both the implementation and the evaluation of agency NEPA. We discuss the pros and cons of integrating NEPA with decision making or separating the two. We conclude that detaching NEPA from decision making poses greater risks than integrating them.

Conversational Voice, Communicated Commitment, and Public Relations Outcomes in Interactive Online Communication

Organizations face unique challenges in communicating interactively online with publics that comprise dauntingly large numbers of individuals. This online survey examined the perceptions of people who had experienced interactive communication with a large consumer-tech-industry company via organizational blogs. Those reporting the greatest exposure to the blogs in this study were more likely to perceive the organization as communicating with a conversational voice. Conversational human voice and communicated relational commitment (relational maintenance strategies) correlated positively with trust, satisfaction, commitment, and control mutuality (relational outcomes). Building on prior research, this survey supports a model of distributed public relations—one in which key outcomes of public relations are fostered by a wide range of people communicating interactively while representing an organization.

Measurement of Organization–PublicRelationships: Validation of Measurement Using a Manufacturer–Retailer Relationship

In this study I attempt to replicate and extend Huang's (2001) research by adding relational dimensions that could capture specific features that may characterize the organization–public relationship in South Korea. Findings indicate that trust, control mutuality, satisfaction, and commitment are closely related to each other, whereas personal network is positively associated with other dimensions in the retailer group. In contrast, the managers representing Samsung Electronics' position perceived more negatively the personal network dimension than did the retailer group. This study reveals that trust, satisfaction, and commitment are global relational measures, whereas personal network as conceptualized here may reflect unique aspects of Eastern culture. Furthermore, these 4 relational measures can be used to evaluate public relations outcomes.

The role of relationships in public relations: Examining the influence of key public member relational attitudes on behavioral intent

Increasingly, scholars and practitioners define the practice of public relations as relationship management. Scholars recently have demonstrated that relationship attitudes can be used to predict key public member satisfaction and intended behavioral outcomes in the telecommunications, banking, and education industries. The investigation reported herein examines the role that relationships play in influencing respondent behavioral intentions in the insurance industry by surveying 62 clients of a medium‐sized full‐service agency. The results indicated that respondent personal, professional, and community relationship attitudes differentiated those who intend to remain loyal to the agency from those who were not or were undecided. The findings suggest that (a) the practice of public relations should continue to evolve toward the relationship management paradigm, (b) practitioners may wish to re‐conceptualize the measurement of public relations outcomes away from measuring effectiveness based on communication flows and toward measuring the influence that public relations activities have on key public member perceptions, attitudes, evaluations, and behaviors, (c) practitioners can demonstrate accountability and justify programmatic initiatives by focusing on the organization‐public relationship, and (d) the role of public relations within the corporate structure should be expanded to managers of the relationships that affect the organization's economic, social, political, and/or cultural well‐being.

The domain of public relations

Deteriorating mass media audiences and a trend toward measuring public relations outcomes in audience behaviors suggests that practitioners look beyond traditional message delivery systems for best results. The effectiveness of media-delivered information is too easily destroyed by contradictory messages transmitted through the behaviors of organizations and their personnel, by the environments they create for employees, consumers and others, and in the quality of their products or services. Learning, conflict and exchange theory suggest that the domain of public relations expand to encompass these and other factors that enter into the complex transactions in which organizations and stakeholders engage. E.W. (Bill) Brody is a professor and coordinator of the public relations sequence in the Department of Journalism at Memphis State University.

Public relations in the public eye: Two case studies of the failure of public information campaigns

Abstract The authors examine two instances in which public relations efforts undertaken in behalf of foreign governments became the subject of public attention or controversy, finding in each case that the news image of the client government worsened. Comparing their results with other research that has identified more positive public relations outcomes, they conclude that public awareness of the manipulative efforts distinguished these cases and contributed to the observed effects.