Tom Kelleher

Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes

This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategiesappropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new mea-sures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs overtraditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organiza-tion’s ‘‘conversational human voice’’ to be greater than participants who were assigned toread traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversationalhuman voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantlywith relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00019.x

Social Media Adoption Among University Communicators

Long interviews were conducted with university communicators at 2 distant universities with distinct social systems. Participants were drawn to adopt social media mainly by relative advantage, compatibility, and trialability attributes of the innovation. Inductive themes that emerged from the interviews included an emphasis on publics, information sharing, cost, and convenience. A believer–nonbeliever distinction among adopters is introduced. Believers are driven by the same characteristics of social media that public relations researchers have found to be essential to the practice of public relations itself: 2-way communication, interactivity, dialogue, and engagement.

Applying the Technology Acceptance Model to Assess Outcomes in a Globally Linked Strategic Communication Project

Public relations students at two U.S. universities separated by several time zones were assigned to use online message boards to communicate with each other as well as cultural consultants in Korea to write an issue statement and promotional plan for an international strategic communications project. The technology acceptance model was found to fit well with student attitudes and behaviors related to online bulletin board systems used in the class project. Student perceptions of the ease of using online technology were the strongest predictors of their intentions to use this technology in their careers beyond the classroom.

Papayas and Pedagogy: Geographically Dispersed Teams and Internet Self-Efficacy.

Abstract PR students’ Internet self-efficacy (e-mail, BBS, real-time chat, and Web research) was measured before, immediately after, and 7 weeks after they worked in either geographically dispersed (Kansas and Hawaii) or local (Kansas only) teams to develop a PR issue statement. Internet efficacy increased over time regardless of condition.