so this is mass communication?

Keeping with my online political public relations program of research, this study (with my amazing colleague Dr. Ruthann Weaver Lariscy at UGA) looked at a social media tool new to the 2006 midterm elections.

Kaye D. Sweetser & Ruthann Weaver Lariscy. (2008). Candidates Make Good Friends: An Analysis of Candidates’ Uses of Facebook. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 2, 175-198.

Through content analysis of Facebook wall comments in U.S. House and Senate races during the 2006 midterm election, this study describes young potential voters’ comments (quantity, valence, etc.) through the lens of the dialogic communication theory of public relations. Findings indicate that individuals who wrote on candidate walls perceive themselves on friendly terms with the candidates, overwhelmingly write messages that are shallow and supportive, and are positive in tone. Candidates rarely, if ever, respond to these messages; although the mere use of Facebook is a dialogic feature, researchers conclude campaigns are not using it for two-way symmetrical relationship building.

We have more work coming out from the huge multi-cell survey on the professional application of blogs in the journalism & PR fields. This study, just published in JMCQ, looks at the issue of credibility that professional journalists and public relations practitioners put on blogs, and relates it to use.

Kaye D. Sweetser, Lance V. Porter, Deborah Soun Chung, & Eunseong Kim (2008). Credibility and the use of blogs among professionals in the communication industry. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85(1), 169-185.

This study examines use, credibility, and impact on the communication industry of blogs as seen by professional journalists and public relations practitioners. Informed by the uses and gratifications perspective and using an online survey, the study used factor analysis to reveal simplistic blog use categorizations as being either interactive or noninteractive. Results also indicate that those who are labeled “high users” in both factors assign more credibility to the medium. Differences between journalism and public relations professionals were examined.

Other studies from this line of research include:

• Uses and Perceptions of Blogs: A Report on Professional Journalists and Journalism Educators
• Blog power: Examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations

I was very pleased to present a paper, “On the Ballot & in the Loop: The Dialogic Capacity of Candidate Blogs in the 2008 Election,” on behalf of my team of co-authors at AEJMC last week in Chicago. The paper stemmed from a project in my undergraduate public relations research course at UGA.

In this paper, we compared 80 different blogs from gubernatorial, house, senate & presidential candidate blogs during the primary leading up to this November’s election. This paper focused on the female candidates and their use of blogs.

Thanks to Grady doctoral student Kristin English, we have video!

One of the first steps in a PR program’s entry in the world of social media is often monitoring. I found this to be true in much of my research, & well it just makes sense.

So we set up Google alerts, use blog search engines & keep a watchful eye on TweetScan.

Prof. Robert French from Auburn shared an invite with me so I could check out a new service called StartPR. The online service boasts the ability to easily compile all these searches into a single place to streamline social media monitoring. You guessed it - it’s a clip service for the social Web.

I tried it out using a few terms that were niche enough that wouldn’t provide an overload, but big enough to return some hits.

I was very impressed with:

• ease of setting up the search terms
• quickness of returning items
• ability to mark items as read or keep them as unread
• visual display of items — layout, easy to see the date an item was posted & blog source, listing of the search engine through which it was found
• ability to add others in your office to the account so you can all see what is happening (big picture & response)
• ability to assign others particular items for action (tasking)
• place to paste in comments internally (called “notes”)
• built-in response management program to track whether you/your PR folks replied/commented on the post

That last item is really the coolest part — but heck, you might already have a bigger internal system integrated with other media efforts set up for that.

What I didn’t like:

• most of the returns were items that had been caught via Google alerts
• heavy reliance on Google as a source (only other source in my searches was Technorati)
• had to scroll really far down (using Firefox on a Mac) when in the notes section & didn’t immediately see all the options
• ignored non-text social media: nothing from YouTube, Flickr, audio or video etc returned
• ignored social networks: nothing from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc returned

Areas for improvement (i.e., my “wouldn’t it be cool if” list):

• include number of comments (live feed) made on each item returned
• ability to sort items by date, blog, number of comments, those you’ve replied to, etc
• more personalized fields/options in the “notes” area
• integration of metrics (other than frequency of post per day report) into the system
• expand service to cover non-text multimedia (video, audio, images)

All in all, it looks like a neat little tool … but I wouldn’t pay for it (since good old fashion alerts & searches can get you the same information + more) unless they up’ed the ante to add more sophisticated monitoring features.

Note: I was given a free trial of this service from a friend. It was my idea to write the review (no one asked me to). Finally, I have 5 invites available for a free trial of this site up for grabs if you are interested. First come, first served & be sure to give me your e-mail address.