Today’s public relations professionals build most of their relationships online. The emergence of social media and public relations’ management of its tools, has provided a whole new sphere for relationship management. Building trustworthy and transparent exchange relationships is now more important than ever. Social media is used every day to communicate with customers, respond to questions, or to publicise clients. Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, blogging sites such as Blogger, and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter have become a crucial part of the PR toolkit.
Strange as it is, however, though there is little to no evidence that embracing social media should offer anything but benefits, the majority of FTSE 100 companies have still not fully engaged in the use of social media activities. Small companies, on the other hand, are readily engaging with their stakeholders online.
Radley Yelder, a London based communications company, found that sixty of the FTSE100 companies did not display their link to social media sites on their homepage, despite engaging in at least one of the major sites. Moreover, they identified that only twenty-nine of the companies had a corporate page on Facebook. Of these, only sixteen of the active Facebook users actually updated their profiles with fresh content weekly; and just nineteen attempted to actively engage with their page audiences. Why the larger companies are not as willing to engage with their stakeholders online could have several explanations.
Perhaps, budgets and timings do not allow the PR personnel to actively engage with their stakeholders online...
Or could it be that the larger companies are not really committed to engage in open and transparent dialogue?
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