This article is part of The Measurement Advisor’s comprehensive coverage of the 2015 International Public Relations Research Conference. See our additional articles:
- You Could Be Next: 7 IPRRC Research Results to Improve Your Crisis Communications
- Can We Talk? 5 Lessons for CEOs from the Newest Public Relations Research
- Internal Communications and Managing Millennials: Research from IPRRC on What Works
- IPRRC 2015: Is CSR Still a Thing?
- Scandal? PRSA Silver Anvil Award Winners Ignore Barcelona and Measurement Standards
- IPRRC 2015: A Treasure Trove of Ideas, Research, and Information
- IPRRC 2015: What Do You Think About These Proposed Standards for Content Marketing, Influence, and Transparency?
Facebook is sooo 2009…
Probably the biggest new development at this year’s IPRRC was that social media is considered mainstream. Even more shocking were the prevalence of papers that used Twitter and social media as a proxy for opinion research. My, how things have changed!
What hasn’t changed that much is the use of social media by PR professionals. The latest results from Donald Wright and Michelle Hinson’s perennial study on social media use (“A Longitudinal Analysis: Tracking a Decade of Social Media and Emerging Media Use in PR”) found that social media usage by PR professionals is virtually universal, with both Twitter and Facebook used by a broad majority. Facebook scored slightly higher than Twitter on importance to overall communications efforts.
Happily, the measurement of social media has also continued to grow. For the first time, a majority (52%) said that they were measuring new media use, the highest percentage in the seven years since the study began. Most measurement involves content analysis, although a growing number of organizations are measuring impact and outcomes.
The big buzz was the impact of Instagram, researched by several teams. Jeanine Guidry, Marcus Messner, Yan Jin, Shana Meganck, and Jeromene Niyiora of Virginia Commonwealth University compared the use of Instagram vs. Twitter during the Ebola crisis by Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and Doctors without Borders (MSF) (“Ebola on Instagram and Twitter”). Their award-winning research analyzed 779 tweets and 107 Instagram posts to determine how people react and engage with health information. The study clearly has far reaching implications for how public health organizations can best get out their information:
- Instagram elicited far more engagement than Twitter. And now, according to Pew Research Center, it has more active users than Twitter. so consider Instagram a primary news source.
- MSF was far more effective than the other organizations in generating user engagement due to extensive use of high-quality photographs. MSF’s Instagram posts yielded a mean of 1,424 likes compared to just 6.79 likes for CDC and 391 for WHO. 94.4% of most Instagram posts referred to MSF’s credibility and trustworthiness, compared to 58.6% of the CDC’s and 28.6% of WHO’s.
- CDC and WHO were retweeted more frequently, presumably because they were simply posting factual, text-based information.
- CDC was more likely to reply to posts, while MSF was most likely to include a byline.
- Risk was perceived more on Instagram than on Twitter.
- 9% of Instagram posts mentioned trustworthiness and credibility of the posting organization.
- If an item mentioned irreversible adverse outcomes and reassurance, then that post tended to be “liked” more frequently and retweeted more often. Particularly if they depicted an identifiable victim.
The team’s recommendations:
- Use multiple media platforms, not just one.
- Make Instagram a high priority.
- Incorporate photos, not just text or tables.
- To foster engagement, communicate positive, emotional messages, not just negative problem-based, fear providing messages.
Does media drive social or vice versa? That was the question that S. Mo Jang of the University of Michigan and Sang-Hwa Oh of the University of South Carolina, tackled in their study of the Ice Bucket Challenge (“Ice Bucket Challenge”). They examined the content, nature of tweets, and news articles. They determined that for the first 50 days, news followed tweets, but for the last 50 days, tweets followed news. Suggesting that once an agenda is picked up by mainstream media the mainstream media become the drivers of the agenda, rather than vice versa.
In study after study, we found lots of good advice about how and what to tweet. Rosie Jahng and Celine Hong studied thousands of tweets to determine whether a more human voice or a corporate voice was more effective in mitigating a crisis (“How Should You Tweet?”). Not surprisingly, human voices won out by an enormous margin. Their message: You can apologize all you want, but if your voice isn’t authentic then no one will believe you. And, ultimately, if they don’t find you authentic, their interpretation of your brand performance and reputation will decline along with their likelihood of buying your products/services. Interestingly, Jahng and Hong also found that your loyal customers expect you to defend the brand, while those unfamiliar with your brand expect you to be to be more apologetic.
Should you delete a tweet? This topic is frequently debated in social media circles, and was taken on by Tianduo Zhang of the University of Florida (“The Impacts of Social Media Deletion”). In the early days, deleting a post or a tweet was strictly verboten, but now that Twitter and Facebook have become home to so many brands, this issue has reemerged. Zhang’s study unveiled that very little has changed. When presented with the fact that a brand deleted a tweet, respondents perceived the organization as less transparent, less ethical, and less credible. Deleting a tweet is perceived as hiding a wrongdoing, or at best correcting a mistake (despite the fact that most respondents admitted to deleting posts themselves).
What specific types of engagement do different forms of content evoke? This question was investigated with a beautifully designed experiment by the triumvirate of social media experts that includes Marcia DiStaso of Penn State, Tina McCorkindale of Appalachian State, and Hilary Fussell Sisco of Quinnipiac University.
Their study exposed 815 participants to mock Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram posts for a company they “liked,” i.e., followed in some capacity. The post was on a variety of subjects, including CSR, financial performance, and innovation, as well as unrelated topics. Facebook drew the most cognitive engagement, while Twitter generated the most online and offline behavior. Instagram fell somewhere in the middle in terms of generating cognitive and emotional responses, but little behavior. For Facebook, the highest level of response was generated by CSR-related posts. The subject of innovation drew the most emotional response.
Who said anything about “social?” IPRRC researchers also delved into YouTube to examine how Fortune 500 companies used it to communicate with their publics (“Fortune 500 Companies Content Strategies”). Fay Chen, Cheng Hong, Chun Zhou, and Qinghua Yang all of the University of Miami sampled 7,450 videos published by Fortune 500 companies between 2009 and 2013. They content-analyzed the videos to determine what exactly the companies were doing with their YouTube channels.
It almost feels wrong to even include their use of YouTube under the category of social. The vast majority were essentially just putting up corporate advertising, a smaller percentage were using it for product advertising. Neither generated a lot of engagement. Although the more corporate-focused videos did generate a higher level of what they termed “shallow engagement” than did product-focused videos. And, while corporate videos were intended to build relationships, they were very bad at it.
Negativity taints future attitudes. Chen et al.’s findings were reinforced by a study by Evan Doyle and YoungAh Lee of Ball State. They proved what we all fear the most: That once someone hears negative toned conversation about an organization, that negativity will color all future impressions and attitudes towards the organization (“Attitudes Towards Corporations in Social Media”). And, while organizations may wish that positive conversation would make people feel more positively towards their news in the future, there was no evidence to support that hypothesis.
PR firms don’t eat their own dog food. This was one of the more depressing, if not surprising, findings of Jee Young Chung of Southern Utah University (“Analysis of 118 Leading PR Firms”). Of all the “social media” efforts on the part of 118 PR firms she studied, most of the content focused on their own internal stuff – company events, employee interviews, and promoting their own work. There was virtually no engagement, no two-way conversation, or relationship building. And most of the social channels used by PR firms offered little more than links back to their web site. ∞
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