Exploring negative peer communication of companies on social media and its impact on organization-public relationships

This study examined whether and how the publics’ negative peer communication (NPC) about companies on social media could influence the quality of organization-public relationships (OPRs) through the theoretical lens of socialization and social learning theory. Through an online survey and a structural equation modeling analysis, results showed that NPC about companies on social media negatively influenced the quality of OPRs. Publics who were more dependent on social media and who had stronger ties with their peers tended to engage more in NPC about companies. Publics who perceived a favorable reputation of the company were less likely to engage in NPC.     

Unpack the relational and behavioral outcomes of internal CSR: Highlighting dialogic communication and managerial facilitation

This study examines how corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication and management contributes to internal public relationship building and employees’ megaphoning behaviors. Specifically, it investigates how organization-public dialogic communication (OPDC) about CSR and organizational leaders’ facilitation behaviors for employees’ CSR engagement influence employees’ perceptions of two distinct types of organization-public relationships: communal and exchange relationships. Structural equation modeling results of 660 online survey responses suggest that OPDC has a positive association with communal relationships and negative association with exchange relationships. Facilitation behavior positively contributes to exchange relationships. Both communal and exchange relationships are positively associated with employees’ positive megaphoning. Yet, negative megaphoning is negatively linked with communal relationships and positively linked with exchange relationships. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on internal CSR communication and management. More importantly, it uncovers the nuanced effects of CSR on employee-organization communal and exchange relationship building.     

Prioritizing relationships: The investment model and relationship maintenance strategies in organizational crises

Crisis communication and crisis management are dominated by research in image repair and restoration, but much has to be done to address the lack of research that engages relational perspectives in these fields. Adopting the investment model (Rusbult, 1980) as a theoretical framework and using structural equation modeling, the study develops a crisis relational maintenance model to explain how organizations can (re)build relationships with publics. Survey results show that publics’ commitment and publics’ trust are two significant mediators that influence publics’ relational behaviors post-crisis. The investment model provides a suitable framework to explain publics’ commitment to an organization, with explained variance more than 90 percent, and an organization’s relationship maintenance strategies during and post-crisis significantly affect publics’ trust. Whether an organization’s relationships with the publics can be maintained or repaired depends on whether an organization engages in these relationship maintenance strategies that prioritize publics’ need, which can be reciprocated from publics as publics reorient themselves along with the long-term goals and well-being of the relationships. Results of this study call for further attention on relationship maintenance approaches in crisis communication and management research.     

Managing relationships on Facebook: A long-term analysis of leading companies in Germany

The purpose of this study is to investigate how companies manage relationships with publics on social media. Based on the concepts of functional and contingency interactivity, the study examines the long-term implementation of three interactive strategies derived from research on organization-public relationships: dialogic communication, transparent communication, and informal communication. The study sheds further light on relational outputs and outcomes. The results of content analyses of leading German companies’ Facebook pages in 2012, 2015, and 2018 indicate the growing importance of dialogic communication and informal communication. There is a constant relation between dialogic communication and the extent of user interaction, with the analysis suggesting that dialogic communication is used to manage critical user comments. Hence, the long-term study contributes to a deeper understanding of professionalization in corporate social media communication. It provides evidence for PR scholars and professionals that there are effective features on Facebook for managing sustainable relationships.     

Employees as information influencers of organization’s CSR practices: The impacts of employee words on public perceptions of CSR

This study investigates the impact of employees’ words about their organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on external publics’ attitudes and behaviors toward the organization. Specifically, it examines how the valence (positive vs. negative) of employees’ words regarding a CSR campaign interacts with the type of channel (face-to-face vs. social media) of employees’ communication behaviors, and how these factors affect external publics’ perceived authenticity of the organization’s CSR, corporate attitudes, and purchasing intentions, respectively. An online experiment among 221 general consumers in the United States was conducted. The results demonstrated that negative messages regarding CSR distributed by employees in face-to-face communication decreased publics’ favorable attitudes and behavioral intentions to a greater extent than that distributed via social media (i.e., Facebook). However, the effect of communication channel became insignificant when positive messages regarding CSR were shared by employees. The results further showed that perceived authenticity mediated the effects of channel and message valence on publics’ attitudes and behavioral intentions. Theoretical and practical implications for CSR practices and employee communication are discussed.     

Computer mediation vs. dialogic communication: How media affordances affect organization-public relationship building

The ontological conflict between computer mediation and dialogic communication—a normative ideal for ethical organization-public relationship building rooted in interpersonal literature—has attracted much scholarly attention, and in particular has generated the notion that mediated dialogue is a self-contradictory concept. In this study, we question this argument and provide empirical evidence by conducting a survey that links media channels’ affordances to their capability to carry organizations’ dialogic orientations. Results show that bandwidth and social presence affordances facilitate dialogic communication while anonymity slightly inhibits it, whether the communicative context is proactive or reactive. Social presence exerts the greatest impact on how publics perceive organizations’ dialogic orientations, and anonymity’s negative role was overstated by previous studies. Assessing media channels’ dialogic affordances, we found video conferencing and instant messaging to be the most dialogic channels for mediated organization-public communication.     

Discourse of renewal: Developing multiple-item measurement and analyzing effects on relationships

Emphasis on protecting an organization’s image and reputation has dominated crisis communication research. A crisis is assumed to only bring negative impacts because it tarnishes an organization’s reputation. Priority is placed upon whether an organization can come up with response strategies that mitigate this harm, rather than on rebuilding relationships. Challenging these untested assumptions, discourse of renewal is complementary to the image- and reputation-centered perspectives and theorizes crises as opportunities to reflect, grow, and therefore renew to a better state. To further discourse of renewal, the current study first establishes a valid and reliable measure of discourse of renewal, and investigates how discourse of renewal influences publics’ relationship with an organization. Results of the study indicate that engagement, prospective foci, communication efficiency, and emphasis on organizational culture and core values are four dimensions of discourse of renewal, and that discourse of renewal positively influences publics’ relationship with an organization.     

I Want to Be Your Friend: The Effects of Organizations’ Interpersonal Approaches on Social Networking Sites

Publics tend to use social networking sites mainly for interpersonal communication purposes. Corporate communication focusing on promotional activities, thus, might create negative sentiments toward the organization within those platforms. This experimental study examined the effect of organizations’ interpersonal approaches to communication (e.g., nonpromotional messages, high interactivity) in social networking sites using real and fictitious companies. Our results suggest that publics consider corporate activities in social networking sites more negatively when they perceive those platforms as a personal space. However, publics evaluate an organization more positively when it is highly interactive with its publics on these platforms. Finally, publics who perceive the platform as a personal space have a more positive attitude toward the organization when the organization is both highly interactive and employs nonpromotional messages.     

Communicated commitment and conversational voice: Abbreviated measures of communicative strategies for maintaining organization-public relationships

Guided by relationship theory, this study develops and tests abbreviated operational definitions of communicated commitment and conversational voice as communicative strategies in maintaining organization-public relationships (OPRs). Researchers first identified 25 relational maintenance items from 12 prior published studies. Then surveying three independent subsamples of an organization’s key public (N = 1,169), the distilled list revealed two univariate concepts measured with a total of 11 items. The shorter scales make the measurement and evaluation of communication online and real-world activities more accessible and manageable for practitioners and academics focused on organization-public relationships.     

Corporate public relations dynamics: Internal vs. external stakeholders and the role of the practitioner

Most public relations research advocates for stronger organization-public relationships and the implementation of dialogic theory to advance the practice and elevate the status of the public relations practitioner. However, this study reveals that internal relationship dynamics can prevent corporate public relations practitioners from carrying out this function of the public relations role. Twelve weeks of observation and eleven interviews were conducted at a Fortune 1000 technology company to gain insights on how corporate PR practitioners build relationships with external publics, to gauge practitioners’ orientation to dialogue, and to identify challenges to external relationship building. Results show that internal relationship management is a prerequisite to corporate public relations practitioners’ success in developing mutually beneficial relationships with key publics. These findings have implications for both the theory and practice of public relations especially when considering the discussion of the technician versus strategic manager role of public relations and the advancement of the field to a professional status.     

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.     

Issue contention and consumers’ reactions to corporate social responsibility: Challenging the dyadic assumptions

Two experiments (one fictitious on environmental CSR and one real-life on a company’s social advocacy on gun violence) were conducted to examine how issue contention affects consumers’ reactions to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Results of the two experiments suggest that while issue contention does not lower consumers’ agency, it makes consumers less likely to engage the organization based on their values and beliefs (i.e., symbolic avoidance) regardless of the organization’s viewpoints. The results also suggest that this effect does not directly extend to actual purchase intention, which indicates that actual purchase intention is confounded by both symbolic interactions and tangible factors such as price and corporate expertise. Results of the two experiments provide important implications for public relations research, challenging the dyadic assumptions of organization-public interactions and relationships and calling for further attention on inter-publics and inter-organizations dynamics.     

Explicating trust and its relation to dialogue at a time of divided societies

Values, beliefs, opinions and attitudes on issues (such as religion, LGBTQ, immigration, etc.), and the proliferation of social media platforms have made society not only more diverse but also more divided. Competing and conflicting views and attitudes result in more schisms and disengagement. In addition, conflicts and disagreements on various issues also have resulted in a lack of trust and a reluctance of organizations and publics to engage in meaningful communication. As a result, developing trusting relationships by facilitating dialogues is significant. Trust has been an important construct in past research on organization-public relationships. However, the concept of trust has rarely been discussed in-depth in public relations literature. This special section of Public Relations Review, entitled Enhancing Dialogue and Trust in Diverse Societies, examines whether the current definitions of trust and its dimensions in the public relations literature are adequate in an organization-public dialogic communication setting.     

An exploratory study on content and style as driving factors facilitating dialogic communication between corporations and publics on social media in China

Global corporations publicize on social networking sites (SNSs) to foster dialogic communication with publics as a form of building relationships. Yet the link between the content and style of the corporation communication from different cultural backgrounds and publics’ responses in the form of likes and retweets is under-researched. This empirical study explored how global corporations from China and Germany employ factors such as useful content topics and culturally-influenced communication styles to cultivate dialogic communication with publics on Sina Weibo, the largest SNS in China. Although both German and Chinese corporations similarly posted a range of content on products/services, corporate appeal and relationship building with no distinct significant differences in their communication styles, publics’ response varied noticeably in that they were more receptive to content on products/services disseminated by German corporations yet had greater responses to content on corporate appeal posted by Chinese corporations. In addition, publics were more inclined to react favorably to messages presented in an individualistic style of communication by German companies and messages in a collectivistic style by Chinese companies. The implications of how to effectively use SNS to engage in dialogue with publics are highlighted.     

Tornado warning: Understanding the National Weather Service’s communication strategies

This study explores the National Weather Service’s communication through a multi-sited rapid ethnography that extends the fully functioning society theory. National Weather Service field offices do not employ public information officers. Instead, forecasters predict the weather, craft messages, and build relationships with their publics. Scholars have called for public relations research that examines messages, including how crisis communication can help publics cope. Additionally, scholars have noted that all organizations need public relations, even if they do not employ formal public relations personnel. In our study, forecasters emphasized the need to build their publics’ tornado threat awareness and provided strategies to make weather science accessible. Forecasters discussed a variety of message strategies including avoiding fear appeals, humanizing the organization, and visualizing risks. Forecasters also built relationships with active publics through soliciting weather spotters and empowering them to prepare others for severe weather. Overall, findings expand knowledge about how organizations can employ strategic public relations to benefit society, thereby extending fully functioning society theory.     

How publics react to situational and renewing organizational responses across crises: Examining SCCT and DOR in social-mediated crises

The prevalence of social media among networked publics calls for more research regarding how organizations can conduct effective crisis communication on social networking sites. Based on the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) and the discourse of renewal (DOR) theory, this study examined how social media publics’ sentiments were affected by situational and renewing organizational responses in various clusters of crises. Twitter data of six crises representing three crisis clusters varying in the responsibility attribution (i.e., ambiguous, accidental, and preventable) were collected. We conducted a content analysis on organizations’ official tweets during crises (N = 59) and sentiment analysis on publics’ replies on Twitter (N = 4,340). The results showed that publics’ positive sentiments toward organizations were affected by organizational crisis responses that included instructing information, sympathy, systemic organizational learning, and effective organizational rhetoric. We recommend that crisis managers express sympathy toward publics as well as organizational learning that prevents a crisis from happening again.     

Impacted publics’ perceptions of crisis communication decision making

This study focused on qualitative analysis utilizing the grounded theory approach to explore how impacted publics connected to an organization’s business interests perceive the complexities of crisis communication decision making. Referencing the Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashes in October 2018 and March 2019, respectively, the researcher conducted interviews with participants either affiliated with Boeing publics or affiliated with an organization within the same industry that could conceivably be connected in a similar hypothetical context. Coding resulted in the emergence of Publics’ Expectations, which are those expectations that an impacted public has in an organizational crisis situation where it is affected by the crisis communication of a central organization, as the core category. This was further subcategorized into Cognitive Empathy (impacted public empathizes or understands elements that introduce central organization reluctance to communicate), Crisis Communication (impacted public expectations of central organization communication), and Decision Making (impacted public expectations of complicated decision making), with corresponding components for each subcategory. Although the findings support many of the prevailing notions in Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) and other crisis communication theories, this study found that impacted publics might have higher levels of empathy for organizational realities than previously understood that reframes culpability as responsibility for the plight of your publics, not necessarily immediate outright responsibility for the crisis. This offers insights for a practical approach to crisis communication that is inclusive of publics, yet still fair to the organization that has to also represent its own interests.     

Factors affecting social presence and word-of-mouth in corporate social responsibility communication: Tone of voice,message framing,and online medium type

To understand how tone of voice, message framing, and type of online media affect public perceptions and reactions to an organization in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, this study conducted a 2 (tone of voice: human voice vs. organizational voice) x 2 (message framing: gain-focused vs. loss-focused) x 2 (online media: Facebook vs. organizational blog) online experiment (N?=?394). Conversational human voice and gain-focused framing significantly influence the social presence of the organization and publics’ positive word-of-mouth intention. Publics’ intention to generate positive word-of-mouth was highest when the organization used conversational human voice with gain-focused message and conveyed the message on its Facebook page.     

Relationships between organizations and publics: Development of a multi-dimensional organization-public relationship scale

Public relations has long struggled to develop an identity in both scholarship and practice. An increasing number of scholars are adopting the perspective that public relations should be viewed as the management of a relationship between organizations and publics. The current investigation was an attempt to design a multiple-item, multiple-dimension organization-public relationship scale. Results of this investigation show that organizations and key publics have three types of relationships: professional, personal, and community. The organization-public relationship measure developed in this investigation should provide an instrument that can be used to measure þe influence that perceptions of the organization-public relationship have on consumer attitudes, predispositions, and behavior, as well as an opportunity to track changes in organizationpublic relationship perceptions over time. Results of the investigation, conclusions, and suggested applications for future research are presented.Dr. Bruning and Dr. Ledingham are members of the Department of Communication at Capital University, Columbus, OH.