Examining How Public Relations Practitioners Actually Are Using Social Media

The international survey of public relations practitioners (n=574) reported about in this article appears to be the world’s first extensive examination of how social media are being implemented in public relations practice. In addition to measuring how social media are being employed in the practice of public relations, this study also explores actual social media use by individual public relations practitioners. Results suggest meaningful and statistically significant gaps exist between what practitioners say is happening in terms of social media use and what they say should be happening. When subjects were asked how important various social media are in the overall public relations efforts of their organizations, respondents listed search engine marketing most important followed in importance by blogs, social networks, video sharing and forums or message boards. When asked how important the same list of social media options should be responses didn’t do much to change the perceived order of importance, but mean scores and the overall perceived importance of all of the measured items are much higher when subjects are asked what should be happening in terms of social media use than they are when the question asks what actually is happening. Differences based upon demographics found younger respondents were more likely to recommend using social media in public relations. They also were more likely to use social media and other Internet-based technologies in their daily pursuit of news and information