Adoption of Social Media by Fortune 500+

Social Media in Corporate

AmericaKaye D. Sweetser, PhD, APR

Beth Avery Johnson, PhDRuthann Weaver Lariscy,

PhD

Social Media

Diffusion

MethodFunded by

PRSA Foundation Grant

Spending 4% Budget

2 hours daily

Tools Adopted by Corporate PR

Watch, Listen, Talk

Use

Perception

Tool adoption

Correlation between number of tools adopted with: relationship building (r = . 47) place stories (r = . 40) determining public opinion (r = . 36) track competition (r = . 36) entertainment (r = . 36) focus attention on an issue (r = . 35) counter negative story (r = . 32) surveillance (r = . 30) research (r = . 27) collect/present objective info (r = . 25) represent public as watchdog (r = . 21)

No correlation between daily time & number of tools

Keys to CorporateAdoption

Facilitating conditions & performance expectancy important

Using external

agencies •Has no impact on adoption

year• Averages more tools

adopted• Leads to greater

performance expectancy

En

d o

f the W

orld

as W

e K

now

It

Practitioner adoption & use

Integration experiments

Online PR

Campaign adoption

Citizen-produced content

Online Political PR

Survey

Content Analysis

Experimental Design

Method

Kaye D. Sweetser, PhD, APR

sweetser@uga.edu