ABSTRACT
Corporate communications in social media continue to evolve. As Roger Sametz (2010), President and CEO of Sametz Blackstone Associates, recognized, “The notion that you can manage your brand by simply crafting messages onto print and digital materials and then handing them down from headquarters is becoming more outdated every day. Today, monologues need to be replaced by dialogues; formal market research needs to be paired with attentive listening.” When social media first emerged in the early 2000s, for-profit and non-profit organizations and their marketing divisions often approached these spaces with a one-way, broadcast communication mindset, a monologic mindset: Organization creates message, organization sends out message, consumers or members see message, consumers are persuaded to purchase products, or members are persuaded to donate. Communications on platforms like Facebook and then eventually Twitter and Instagram were viewed mainly from the perspective of the old broadcast media model—as akin to radio, television, magazine and newspaper ads, and billboards (Grunig 2009; Sametz, 2010). The benefits of social media were perceived mainly as reach (drive up those likes!), speed (the message could get out faster), and improved corporate research (social media provided data mining opportunities to track views, clicks, purchases, and link trails by target demographics). For for-profit organizations in particular, consumers on social media were viewed just as that—consumers, largely passive recipients of company messaging and company products.
