Developing a multi-level organization-public dialogic communication framework to assess social media-mediated disaster communication and engagement outcomes

Dialogic communication has long been viewed as vital for effective organization-public relations. Yet, it is under-theorized whether and how organizations’ disaster communication messages may embody dialogic communication principles, and how various dialogic features are associated with different public engagement outcomes on social media. Extending the Organization-Public Dialogic Communication (OPDC) framework to the context of social media-mediated disaster communication, we propose a multi-level framework to assess the dialogic capacity of Facebook messages sent by disaster management organizations during a natural disaster. Three levels of dialogic communication characteristics (i.e., message structure-level, topic-level, and linguistic level) are examined using content analysis and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Results identified media richness, correcting, and confirming topics as three consistent predictors of public engagement of all types. Meanwhile, there exhibit greater variations regarding how other topical features and linguistic characteristics are related to public’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement during a disaster.     

Functional and emotional traits of corporate social media message strategies: Behavioral insights from S&P 500 Facebook data

Drawing from literature regarding public engagement, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), computer-mediated communication research, and emotion psychology, this study examines the effects of companies’ social media communication strategies on public engagement behaviors as indexed by post likes, shares, and comments. Specifically, it investigates how corporate Facebook posts’ functional traits (functional interactivity and vividness) and emotional traits (emotion presence, valence, and strength) impact public engagement online. Through data mining and computer-assisted sentiment analysis of 33,379 posts from 106 Standard & Poor 500 companies’ Facebook accounts, this study finds a negative effect of functional interactivity but a positive effect of vividness on engagement. It also shows that emotional traits overall yield stronger public engagement outcomes. Two-way interactions between emotional and functional features are also detected. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

What do Stakeholders Like on Facebook? Examining Public Reactions to Nonprofit Organizations’ Informational,Promotional, and Community-Building Messages

Although public relations scholarship has often discussed the possibilities of dialogue and engagement using social media, research has not truly explored this dynamic. Instead, research on social media platforms has focused on measuring the content and structure of organizational profiles. This study seeks to enhance the field's discussion about social media engagement by determining what organizational content individual stakeholders prefer on Facebook in terms of liking, commenting, and sharing. A content analysis of 1,000 updates from organizations on the Nonprofit Times 100 list indicates that, based on what they comment on and like, individuals prefer dialogic, as well as certain forms of mobilizational, messages; however, they are more likely to share one-way informational messages with their own networks. These findings are interpreted using practical and theoretical implications for the practice of public relations.     

I do not believe you: how providing a source corrects health misperceptions across social media platforms

Social media are often criticized as serving as a source of misinformation, but in this study we examine how they may also function to correct misperceptions on an emerging health issue. We use an experimental design to consider social correction that occurs via peers, testing both the type of correction (i.e., whether a source is provided or not) and the platform on which the correction ocratcurs (i.e., Facebook versus Twitter). Our results suggest that a source is necessary to correct misperceptions about the causes of the Zika virus on both Facebook and Twitter, but the mechanism by which such correction occurs differs across platforms. Implications for successful social media campaigns to address health misinformation are addressed.     

Social media engagement with organization-generated content: Role of visuals in enhancing public engagement with organizations on Facebook and Instagram

The ubiquity of social media platforms that increasingly foreground visuals over text has led to a rise in organization-generated visual content. This study addresses an underexamined question about this phenomenon: which characteristics of organization-generated visual content are associated with higher levels of public engagement in social media? Engagement is conceptualized as indicators of first level engagement such as likes and comments that represent affiliation with and support for the organization. Employing a visual social semiotic framework, a randomly selected sample of visuals posted on Instagram and Facebook by four leading airport brands in 2019 (N = 400) was coded for representational, interactive, and compositional meanings. Findings revealed that across platforms narrativity of images, and interactive features of distance and point of view enhanced engagement, while the compositional feature of framing increased engagement on Instagram. Implications of the findings for effective organization-generated visual content on social media are discussed.     

Staking reputation on stakeholders: How does stakeholders’ Facebook engagement help or ruin a company’s reputation?

The majority of studies in public relations continue to examine organization-public relationships from only the organization’s perspective, with few studies focusing on the other side of the communication loop: stakeholders. The current study takes the stakeholders’ perspective to investigate the relationship between active stakeholders’ online behavior and corporate reputation. Modeling 5-year longitudinal social media data, a content analysis was conducted for Fortune 500 companies in the context of Facebook. By examining stakeholders’ Facebook engagement at the two levels of shallow engagement and profound engagement, significant associations were discovered. Active stakeholders’ Facebook-based interactions as leaving positive or negative comments with a company are significant predictors of the company’s reputation score. The findings bring new insights to existing literature and also practical implications to public relations professionals.     

Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook

The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site – Facebook – and Polish users’ activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on ‘echo chambers’ presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign.     

How controversial businesses communicate CSR on Facebook: Insights from the Canadian cannabis industry

This study advances our current understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in a controversial industry by analyzing CSR-related Facebook posts from seven Canadian public cannabis companies. Our findings indicated that these companies’ CSR communication on Facebook was mostly instrumentalist, lacked transparency, and used effective multimedia characteristics. In addition, associations between communication strategies and public engagement on social media (e.g., # of likes, comments, and shares) revealed both opportunities and ethical concerns regarding CSR communication in controversial businesses.     

Experimenting with dialogue on Twitter: An examination of the influence of the dialogic principles on engagement,interaction, and attitude

Much of the public relations research on online relationship building has examined social media content for the use of the dialogic principles outlined by Kent and Taylor (1998). These studies, using content analysis as the primary methodology, have found that the dialogic capabilities of social media are under-utilized. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of these methods. Therefore, the goal of this study is to examine the influence of social media content utilizing these principles on engagement, interactivity, and attitude. Results of this study indicate that usefulness of information can have a significant influence on engagement and attitude.     

Social Media Management

Do foundations effectively use social media to engage stakeholders? Do usage and engagement vary by foundation type? This article has been written to stimulate discussion and research about social media use and user engagement by foundations beyond measuring social media presence. We analyzed Facebook usage and stakeholder engagement for three types of foundations: community, corporate, and independent grant‐making foundations. We found that although community foundations are more likely to have a social media presence, corporate and independent foundations are more likely to use Facebook and to effectively engage stakeholders. Findings illuminate the need to understand social media usage and engagement in addition to presence. We discuss potential benefits of social media use and provide practical communication management recommendations for nonprofit practitioners.     

Effects of 360° video on attitudes toward disaster communication: Mediating and moderating roles of spatial presence and prior disaster media involvement

Visual media technologies such as 360° video, augmented reality, and virtual reality are on the rise for immersive storytelling in a variety of public relations contexts. Yet there is a profound lack of scholarly research in public relations, crisis communication, and disaster communication to explore the effects of content displayed using these delivery formats on publics’ responses. To begin addressing the knowledge gap, this work reports results from a laboratory experiment investigating effects of media modality (traditional unidirectional video content vs. 360° omnidirectional video content) on attitudes toward the disaster communication content. Results demonstrate that 360° video featuring the aftermath of a natural disaster yields enhanced attitudes toward the helpful impact of the content. Importantly, mediation analyses show that (1) a sense of spatial presence underlies these effects, and (2) the mediating effects of spatial presence are attenuated by involvement with similar disaster media coverage (indirect experience).     

Planning to Plan: A Process to Involve Child Welfare Agencies in Disaster Preparedness Planning

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when child welfare officials in Louisiana reported they did not know the whereabouts of all their children in foster care, disaster planning in public child welfare became a new area of concern. This article reports on a process of engaging seven public child welfare agencies in planning for disasters that could affect child safety and service delivery. The Washington Metropolitan Area Disaster Planning Project used a strengths-based approach to help agencies responsible for protecting and serving children in foster care and families at risk of abuse and neglect develop plans to augment and continue service delivery and responsiveness in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster. The processes of gathering information on disaster responsiveness, interviewing community and professional informants, developing a template to guide disaster planning within the agencies, and implementing a tabletop exercise are described. As a result of this consultation effort agencies became aware that disaster planning at the state and county levels had proceeded without child welfare at the table, that the increase in need for child welfare services during a disaster was not recognized by disaster professionals, and that practicing disaster responsiveness is necessary to assure readiness.     

Go viral on the Facebook! Interactions between candidates and followers on Facebook during the Hungarian general election campaign of 2014

The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates’ followers on Facebook. Citizens’ reactivity is increasingly important in contemporary political communication. The politicians’ posts can reach the wider public through the citizens’ public reactions. While we have extended knowledge about mass media reactivity, citizens’ political reactivity on social media is highly underexplored. This study is intended to fill this gap by examining what type of political content can trigger reaction from followers on politicians’ Facebook pages. The data contain 7048 Facebook posts by 183 single-member district candidates posted during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. The unit of analysis is the individual Facebook post, and the dependent variables are the numbers of likes, comments, and shares. The independent variables are the structural (text, picture, video, etc.) and substantial (content, emotional tone, etc.) characteristics of each post, after controlling for, inter alia, a general follower-activity score on politicians’ Facebook pages. Results showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing.     

Engagement across three social media platforms: An exploratory study of a cause-related PR campaign

This study analyzed a social media campaign promoting child welfare to explore the associations among people's social media use, their engagement with different social media platforms (blog, Facebook page, Twitter account), and three intended behavioral outcomes (social media behavior, offline communication behavior, and helping behavior). An online survey of 73 participants shows that people's use of each social media platform was significantly related to their engagement with it at a bivariate level (when the other control variables were not considered). Social media use was also related to all three behavioral outcomes. Additionally, users’ engagement played a significant mediating role in the relationship between their social media use and their offline communication behavior.     

Social media,small businesses,and the control of information

Much of the discussion regarding privacy and social media has focused on consumers of social media, but social media is also popular among businesses. This article explores the privacy tensions of small business owners using social media to disseminate and gather information to better engage and serve their customers while maintaining customer trust. Drawing on Communication Privacy Management theory [Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, Petronio, S. (2007). Translational research endeavors and the practices of communication privacy management. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 35(3), 218–222], we argue that there is a dialectical tension between control and engagement. As information is disclosed via social media, it creates new opportunities for engagement, surveillance, and commodification. Based on group interviews with small business owners, we identify the kinds of information that small businesses must manage as participants on social media platforms and the privacy rules they develop.     

The Role of Facebook Intrusion,Depression, and Future Time Perspective in Sleep Problems Among Adolescents

The main aim of the study was to examine the determinants of sleep problems including Facebook intrusion, depression, and future time perspective. The participants were 426 adolescents, aged M = 14.68. The Future Time Perspective Scale, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, the Facebook Intrusion Questionnaire, and the Medical Outcomes Study Sleep Scale were used. It was found that FTP goals were a negative predictor of Facebook intrusion and depression was a positive predictor of Facebook intrusion and sleep problems. Additionally, Facebook intrusion turned out to contribute positively to sleep problems. The results contribute to knowledge on excessive social media use and its relations with mental health; they can be applied in the treatment of addictive social media use.     

Remembering disaster: Since the media do,so must public relations

Only recently has research begun concerning the longer-term aftermath of organizational crisis. This essay presents the genre of disaster rhetoric as a viable strategy to address the problems and opportunities that arise when the media write about crisis anniversaries or news stories that refer to any crisis or disaster, past or present. After a brief review of genre theory, the authors outline the seven functions of the “rhetoric of disaster” and provide multiple examples of their application to public relations activity and its news coverage. The essay concludes with questions that practitioners may use proactively in the development of copy points to address each of the rhetoric of disaster's functions.     

INFORMATION RIGIDITIES,INFLATION PERCEPTIONS,AND THE MEDIA: LESSONS FROM THE EURO CASH CHANGEOVER

The objective of theoretical models of information rigidities is to capture the fact that people are constrained in their ability to acquire and process all available information. Given that most people obtain their information about the economy from the media, press coverage of the economy may exert an influence on peoples' attitudes. This paper tests for this influence by examining consumers' inflation perceptions in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover, which serves as a natural experiment. Using a new data set, that quantifies the intensity and tone of media reports, we document that media reporting has had a statistically significant and economically meaningful impact on inflation perceptions and contributed to their sharp rise in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover and to the divergence between inflation perceptions and actual inflation rates. (JEL E53, D83)     

The role of social media on positive youth development: An analysis of 4-H Facebook page and 4-H'ers' positive development

With the hope of raising children to become responsible and active citizens with upstanding values, many youth-related organizations have focused their efforts on providing quality opportunities to encourage early participation in civic engagements. Many organizations actively engage in social media to fulfill their goals most effectively. Social media offer the potential to promote those opportunities, communicate with youth, and eventually facilitate positive youth development. Considering the importance of social media among youth, it is critical to understand how to use it as a tool to foster youth development. Therefore, utilizing the positive youth development (PYD) framework, this study examines the role of Facebook communications in developing six traits—competence, confidence, connection, character, compassion, and contribution—and their effects on youth civic engagement by analyzing a 4-H club case. Mixed methods are used to conduct a two-step study. The first step analyzes communication patterns of the national 4-H Facebook page through content analysis of posts from 2009 to early 2015. For the second step, seven in-depth interviews were conducted with recent 4-H alumni, who used the official 4-H Facebook page during their period of membership. The findings emphasized the critical role of social media in fostering positive development of youth and future civic engagement, and practical implications are discussed.     

Peer,social media,and alcohol marketing influences on college student drinking

Objective: To investigate how alcohol marketing and peers may promote college students' alcohol use through social media. Participants: College students (N = 682) aged 18 to 22 years from a large Southern university completed paper surveys in April 2014. Methods: Structural equation modeling was used to investigate relationships among variables as well as moderation by gender and race. Results: Drinking behavior was directly related to perceived norms and attitudes toward alcohol that develop, in part, from direct and indirect interactions with their online and offline peers, as well as engagement with alcohol-related content on social media. Gender and ethnicity moderated some effects. Conclusions: College student drinking is influenced by friends' alcohol-related content posted on social networking sites and by greater engagement with traditional and online alcohol marketing. College campus alcohol misuse interventions should include components to counter peer influences and alcohol marketing on social media.