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Public Relations Review 37 (2011) 321– 324

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Public Relations Review

hort communication

weet, tweet, tweet: A content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ witter updates

ichard D. Waters a,∗, Jia Y. Jamal b

Department of Communication, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, North Carolina State University, United States Department of Communication, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, North Carolina State University, United States

r t i c l e i n f o

rticle history: eceived 26 June 2010 eceived in revised form 2 February 2011 ccepted 2 March 2011

eywords: onprofit organizations ocial media witter rganizational communication

a b s t r a c t

Many of the relationship cultivation strategies and the dialogic principles assume sym- metrical communication is taking place. However, significant amounts of information are shared in a one-way manner. Although they have fallen out of favor with many academics, the four models of public relations can provide significant insights into how organizations communicate. Using the models as the guiding framework, this brief study examines how nonprofit organizations from the Philanthropy 200 communicate on Twitter. The findings reveal that the organizations are more likely to use one-way models despite the potential for dialogue and community building on the social networking site.

© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

. Introduction

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that has quickly become the social media service that is most often used in strategic ommunication campaigns (Stelzner, 2009). Similar to blogging, Twitter is a real-time network that allows users from across he globe to share information through private and public messages capped at 140 characters. The site-imposed character imit allows users’ updates, or tweets, to be sent to cellular phones and other mobile devises as a text message.

The ability to communicate in real-time short messages has garnered significant attention from individuals and organi- ations. In May 2010, the site had more than 19 million users though outside analytics estimate that only 25% of the users ctively use the service. Although no official numbers exist to confirm nonprofit organization participation on the service, he Twitter account, @nonprofitorgs, was created to serve as an unofficial tally by only following nonprofit organizations. sing this account as a guide, there are slightly more than 25,300 nonprofits on Twitter in June 2010. However, little is nown about how nonprofit organizations are using the service. The purpose of this study is to explore how nonprofits are ommunicating on the micro-blogging service.

. Literature review

As the relationship management paradigm continues to grow in public relations scholarship, researchers continue to xplore a variety of online and offline strategies used by organizations to develop relationships with stakeholders. These trategies, however, rarely examine the specific content of communicated messages. While Kent and Taylor’s (1998) dialogic

∗ Corresponding author at: North Carolina State University, Communication, 201 Winston Hall, Box 8104, Raleigh, NC 27615, United States. el.: +1 352 359 6837; fax: +1 919 515 9456.

E-mail address: [email protected] (R.D. Waters).

363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. oi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2011.03.002

322 R.D. Waters, J.Y. Jamal / Public Relations Review 37 (2011) 321– 324

principles and Hon and Grunig’s (1999) relationship cultivation strategies discuss openness, neither really get at the nature of what is being said in these conversations. They also fail to consider one-sided communication, which continues to play a significant role in organizational communication and public relations writing (e.g., newsletters, brochures, websites). While legitimate conversation is certainly needed for the organization–public relations, it may be helpful to consider public relations’ traditional models of public relations proposed by Grunig and Hunt (1984) to truly understand how organizational communication contributes to relationship growth.

Although the models have fallen out of favor with public relations scholars in recent years (e.g., Laskin, 2009; Sha, 2007), they continue to be featured prominently in the discipline’s leading textbooks. Using direction, purpose, and nature of communication, strategic communication is subdivided into press agentry, public information, two-way asymmetry, and two-way symmetry. Press agentry is a one-sided model that rarely uses research to disseminate emotional messages that may be used manipulatively; public information takes a similar one-way approach, but relies on the conveyance of truthful messages. Reflecting the two-way side of the continuum, two-way asymmetry reflects market research in that a faux dialogue is created with stakeholders for the sole reason of obtaining information that can be used for organizational benefit later while two-way symmetry consists of legitimate conversations taking place between an organization and stakeholder with the end goal being mutual understanding.

Until the mid-1990s, the four models of public relations were widely researched in a variety of professional settings (e.g., agencies, corporations, government agencies), public relations specializations (e.g., fund raising, public diplomacy), and countries around the globe. Research on the models helped fuel the development of the field’s Excellence Theory and is referenced as a precursor for many of the organization–public relationship studies filling the discipline’s journals today (Cameron, Cropp, & Reber, 2001; Grunig & Grunig, 2008). Scholars have taken particular models and expanded their scope as studies on source credibility, information subsidies, and corporate social responsibility touch on the underlying principles of the four models. Sha (2007) proposed the four models be broken into seven strategic and tactical dimensions of public relations; however, beneath the explanation of these dimensions rested four distinct message styles. As theory development grew in public relations and the descriptive nature of the models fell out of favor with scholars, little research was ever done to explore how the models were incorporated into web communication.

Given the discipline’s continued findings that all organizations – corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies – fail to capitalize on the interactive nature of the web, perhaps describing their communication patterns using the four models might reveal insights that are not being conveyed through the dialogic principles or relationship cultivation strategies. This study attempts to explore how nonprofit organizations use Twitter by answering the following research question:

RQ: To what extent are nonprofit organizations following the models of public relations on Twitter?

3. Method

To understand how nonprofit organizations use Twitter, a content analysis of their tweets were conducted. To create a sample, the researcher first reviewed the Philanthropy 200 published by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Of the top 200 fund raising nonprofits in the United States, it was found that 81 organizations actively used Twitter. One-third of these organizations (n = 27) were randomly selected, and their tweets for March 2010, were coded using a schema developed to measure the four models of public relations. Additional data, such as number of people following the account and number of tweets, was recorded to help provide additional information on nonprofit organizations’ Twitter usage.

After a 90-min training session, two-coders coded five organizations’ tweets for the month of February 2010. Using Cronbach’s alpha, the intercoders met intercoder reliability for press agentry ( ̨ = 0.88), public information ( ̨ = 0.91), two- way asymmetry ( ̨ = 0.92), and two-way symmetry ( ̨ = 0.85). The coders were also reliable in recording data concerning the account ( ̨ = 0.94).

4. Results

The 27 randomly sampled nonprofit organizations represented the broad spectrum of nonprofit organizations: pub- lic/society benefit (n = 12, 44.4%), health (n = 7, 25.9%), human services (n = 4, 14.8%), religion (n = 2, 7.4%), arts and culture (n = 1, 3.7%), and education (n = 1, 3.7%). At the time of coding, these nonprofits had an average of 4514.6 people following their accounts (sd = 4869.3), which ranged from a minimum of 91 followers to a high of 19,522 followers. The nonprofits followed 2462.7 other Twitter users (sd = 4369.4), which ranged from only following one other account to a high of following 19,162. The sampled nonprofits had an average of 421.9 publicly shared updates (sd = 721.7), which ranged from a minimum of 32 to a maximum of 4007.

During the month of March 2010, the nonprofit Twitter accounts had an average of 28.63 tweets (sd = 9.92) during the month of March, 2010. Of the total (n = 773) tweets coded, 36 (4.7%) updates were deemed off topic and discussed items clearly unassociated with the nonprofit organizations, such as the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament. The vast majority

of tweets (n = 608, 78.7%) provided a hyperlink that took users non-Twitter Websites. Nearly one-fifth (n = 135, 17.5%) of the tweets were retweets that shared other users’ updates, and a similar proportion (n = 170, 21.9%) included a hash tag to indicate the tweet was a part of an organized searchable topic.

To answer the study’s research question, frequencies were run on the four models of public relations. In regards to the one-way models, nonprofit organizations were more likely to use public information than press agentry. For tweets

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hat used press agentry, nonprofits rarely used emoticons to express emotions (n = 11, 1.4%); however, they were likely to se words that expressed excitement (n = 193, 24.9%), such as amazing, incredible, or “Wow,’ and expressions of emotion n = 424, 54.9%). The most commonly expressed emotions were happiness (n = 217, 51.2%), fear (n = 103, 24.3%), hope (n = 51, 2%), humor (n = 44, 10.3%), and sadness (n = 9, 2.1%). Public information was the most widely used model of all four models. onprofit organizations provided a variety of unidirectional updates and announcements, including sharing upcoming dates nd deadlines (n = 184, 23.8%) and providing information and reports from outside organizations (n = 185, 23.9%). However, onprofit organizations largely shared their own information over Twitter (n = 423, 54.7%). This information was shared hrough a variety of different tactics, including links to the nonprofits’ website (n = 103, 24.3%), blog (n = 86, 20.3%), newsletter n = 56, 13.2%), news releases (n = 42, 9.9%), research findings (n = 39, 9.2%), shared pictures (n = 39, 9.2%), videos (n = 28, 6.6%), rochures (n = 17, 4.0%), position papers (n = 10, 2.3%), and annual reports (n = 3, 0.7%).

In regards to two-way communication, nonprofit organizations were more likely to engage in asymmetrical commu- ication than symmetrical dialogue on Twitter. While the organizations did use Twitter to ask for specific feedback from thers (n = 133, 17.2%), they most often asked users to participate in a survey or poll (n = 191, 24.7%). The next most common emonstration of two-way asymmetrical communication was asking Twitter users to become involved with the organi- ation (n = 186, 24.1%). Nonprofit organizations wanted to learn more about their followers by meeting them offline at an rganized TweetUp (n = 72, 38.7%), following the organization on other social media accounts (n = 40, 21.5%), participating in nline forums (n = 38, 20.4%), and signing online petitions (n = 36, 19.4%). To engage in legitimate conversations on Twitter, onprofit organizations had to address others specifically. This is most often done using at replies indicated by the “@” sym- ol followed by users account name. Nonprofits used this method of public conversation more than any other symmetrical trategy (n = 197, 25.5%). Nonprofit organizations more often tried to resolve conflict (n = 64, 8.3%) on Twitter than engaging n on-going conversations (n = 62, 8.0%). However, when organizations did engage in conversation, it was with an average f 1.38 Twitter users (sd = 0.77), ranging from 1 to 5 users.

. Discussion

This study found that nonprofit organizations are primarily using Twitter to convey one-way messages. Based on he overall means for the four models of communication, public information (m = 34.13, sd = 17.81) and press agen- ry (m = 27.07, sd = 26.82) were used more often than two-way asymmetry (m = 22.0, sd = 4.17) and two-way symmetry m = 13.93, sd = 10.02). Rather than capitalizing on the interactive nature and dialogic capabilities of the social media ser- ice, nonprofit organizations are primarily using Twitter as a means of sharing information instead of relationship building. verall, their Twitter updates sent messages that directed their followers to a variety of information subsidies on their web-

ites. The provision of information certainly could help the nonprofits’ followers feel that they could trust the organization; owever, the one-sided approach of the tweets certainly results in a lopsided relationship.

The prevalence of one-way messages in the sample present runs counter to consultants’ advice that stresses the ommunity-building strength of social media. Kanter and Fine (2010) suggest that nonprofits have the ability to strengthen heir organizational support and brand by tapping into social technologies; however, despite the suggestions, it appears that onprofits are not using social media to its full potential (Eyrich, Padman, & Sweetser (2008). The latter study found that onprofits are on par with government agencies and public affairs communicators but trail corporate communicators and gencies in their rates of adoption and communication practices.

Given the increasing focus of relationship management in public relations, the results are somewhat discouraging that so ittle conversations are being attempted in this medium. Pure symmetry was the least used model by the organizations. While he provision of information demonstrates a willingness to share information, a follower of these nonprofit organizations’ witter accounts might sense an unwillingness to answer questions or respond to others’ comments. Despite the use of ne-way information, users may be more satisfied that organizations’ are soliciting feedback and attempting to get them nvolved in both online and offline activities.

This study does have limitations that need to be acknowledged. The first concerns the coding of the tweets. Given the oding schema, it is possible that a tweet could be coded as multiple models of communication. The code sheet did not ask he coders to choose a dominant model for each tweet. Requiring this selection would have made it more precise in saying hich models were used the most and least. Additionally, it should be noted that the conversation strategy using “at replies”

ncludes both legitimate conversations as well as retweets. While some of these tweets contained the retweeted information nly, others contained the shared information and a brief comment from the nonprofit. In retrospect, it would have been elpful to code these separately as to be able to more accurately reflect the nature of the conversations.

This study does, however, introduce a variety new research ideas for public relations and organizational communica- ion scholars. As Twitter continues to be the social media application used most often in marketing and public relations

ampaigns, understanding how a diverse range of organizations use the service is valuable for educational and professional urposes. Given that the one-way models dominated, it would be helpful to use surveys or qualitative measures to determine ractitioners’ views towards Twitter. It would be helpful to know whether they felt it could be used to engage in dialogue nd foster relationship growth or whether they felt that the application was most helpful in sharing information and driving raffic back to the organizational websites.

324 R.D. Waters, J.Y. Jamal / Public Relations Review 37 (2011) 321– 324

References

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Eyrich, N., Padman, M. L., & Sweetser, K. D. (2008). PR practitioners’ use of social media tools and communication technology. Public Relations Review, 34, 412–414.

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Kanter, B., & Fine, A. (2010). The networked nonprofit: Connecting with social media to drive change. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons. Kent, M. L., & Taylor, M. (1998). Building dialogic relationships through the World Wide Web. Public Relations Review, 24(3), 321–324. Laskin, A. V. (2009). The evolution of models of public relations: An outsider’s perspective. Journal of Communication Management, 13(1), 37–54. Sha, B. (2007). Dimensions of public relations: Moving beyond traditional public relations models. In S. Duhé (Ed.), New media and public relations (pp.

3–26). New York: Peter Lang. Stelzner, M.A. (2009). Social media marketing industry report. Retrieved online February 26, 2010 from http://www.socialmediasummit09.com/.