A comunicação das organizações diante do impacto das mídias sociais na práxis da assessoria de imprensa

Abstract

This work had as objective analyzing how Social Media (SM) have transformed the practice of Press Relations (PR) within the Communication of Organizations. And identifying these impacts on functions of PR in this new scenario introduced by the emergence of social media; analyzing new tools adopted by this segment in contrast to the traditional ones; and understanding the required profile of the new press secretary. For this study, it was adopt the concept of the press officer functions in organizational communication made by Duarte (2009) and analyzed 17 of these functions forward to this new context. Each function was studied as it was developed before and after the advent of social media. These actions were chosen because they represent the dynamics of MR, from the strategic part to the operational. The survey also identified which social media are currently most used by advisors to contact and dissemination the actions of the organizations they belong to. In the interviews for each function has been added a third question, to measure the degree of influence of SM in this transformation. Finally, the results of the study were presented to two communication managers to validate the data. The research is qualitative and quantitative nature. For qualitative research, we used the academic paradigm of Content Analysis, which lends to exploration purposes of discovering and verification to confirming whether or not hypothesis or pre-established assumptions. For the application we chose the Likert scale, when respondents specify their level of agreement with a statement, which ranges from one to five levels of answers. To reach the percentage that defines the degree of influence of SM in the practice of PR was used calculations involving simple average criteria. The assessment of the research results revealed that social media had a very significant impact on the practice of the Press Office. The overall result of the quantitative analysis showed that the impact measured was 69.58%. We note that of the total of 17 functions studied, nine had a more evident transformation. Another eight were partially changed with the use of SM. Those functions who had a greatest impact was: the relationship with journalists, crisis management, use of telephone to contact with reporters, the speed and form of feedback to the press; data collection for the production of texts; evaluation of results; production of mailing list; way of clipping and finally, conducting events. Research reveals that the actions that require more speed in solving demands are the most affected. The remaining eight functions analyzed that had a lower impact with the of SM, but no less significant, were: contact with journalists by e-mail; follow-up of interviews; presential interview; promotion of meetings; guided visits; media training; PR skills and raising tariffs.