Michaël Opgenhaffen

Why practitioners do (not) apply crisis communication theory in practice

ABSTRACT Twenty-five in-depth interviews with Belgian crisis communication practitioners were conducted to examine the gap between theory and practice. Crisis communication has become an important research area within public relations. Several studies have resulted in theories and guidelines regarding the effective use of communication during organizational crises. Unfortunately, these findings are not always put into practice. This study examines to what extent public relations practitioners apply theory in practice during crises and why. The findings offer an opportunity to formulate potential ways in which we can bridge the scholar-practitioner divide in public relations, through guidelines for both scholars and practitioners.

Managing Social Media Use: Whither Social Media Guidelines in News Organizations?

Fears exist that social media use by news media and journalists may affect basic journalistic tenets such as objectivity, gatekeeping, and transparency. As a result, more and more news media organizations are issuing guidelines to manage employee use of social media. In this article we discuss the complex relationship of a selection of market-leading news media organizations with prescribed use of social media. Applying content analysis to 12 existing social media guidelines, we elaborate on the various types of rules linked with the basic principles of journalism. A key intention of this research is to provide insights for media management and journalism scholars to better understand the use of social media by journalists and the implementation of guidelines by media organizations. More practically, this article can aid media organizations who are shaping their own set of rules regarding use of social media by their staff.

Social media gatekeeping: An analysis of the gatekeeping influence of newspapers’ public Facebook pages:

Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. In this study, we investigate how much of an impact these social media editors really have, focusing on the impact of newspapers’ public pages on Facebook. Since the actions of individual users are not visible on many platforms due to privacy consideration, we propose a method that leverages time series of aggregated scores for total user engagement, which are available for various platforms. We use this method to study and compare the influence of Facebook pages for six newspapers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Flanders, for all news items published over 2u2009weeks in 2017.

Presenting News on Social Media: Media logic in the communication style of newspapers on Facebook

With the rising popularity of social media as news sources, a new common format element for presenting news has emerged: in addition to the classic headline, lead and picture, news organizations add a status message when they share their news articles on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Based on media logic theory, we argue that the communication style of these messages is likely to be more interpersonal and subjective. To investigate this we used computational text analysis to compare status messages to headlines and leads, covering nine newspapers from the Netherlands and Flanders over a period of 2.5 years. We conclude that newspapers use status messages to add a subjective expression to news on social media, and call for research into how this takes shape and affects the audience.

Between hope and fear: developing social media guidelines

Purpose n n n n nThe purpose of this paper is to examine employers’ policy with regard to employees’ social media use. Specifically, the authors examine the extent to which employers allow the use of social media in the workplace, what opportunities can be related to employees’ social media use and how social media guidelines are implemented within organizations. n n n n nDesign/methodology/approach n n n n nIn-depth interviews were conducted with HR and communication managers of 16 European companies from different sectors and of varying size. n n n n nFindings n n n n nSome organizations believe that social media should be accessible to employees while others ban them from the workplace. Most respondents believe that organizations can benefit from employees sharing work-related content with their own network. However, they encourage the sharing and retweeting of official corporate messages rather than employees developing their own messages. This fear regarding employees’ messages on social media is reflected in the broad adoption of social media guidelines. n n n n nResearch limitations/implications n n n n nFuture research should chart the nature of existing social media guidelines (restrictive vs incentive). Accordingly, the perceived sense and nonsense of social media guidelines in companies should be investigated, not only among the managers but also among employees. n n n n nPractical implications n n n n nOrganizations should remain in dialogue with employees with regard to social media. Managers seem overly concerned with potential risks and forget the opportunities that can arise when employees operate as ambassadors. n n n n nOriginality/value n n n n nThe use of in-depth interviews allowed the authors to assess the rationale behind social media guidelines within organizations in depth and formulate suggestions to organizations and communication managers.