Diffusion of social media among public relations practitioners

This work reports the findings from ten in-depth interviews with public relations professionals in various fields of public relations including academia, consulting, healthcare, social media, non-profit, and agency. Based on the diffusion of innovations theory, the overall purpose of this work is to understand why public relations practitioners are slow adopters of social media. Findings demonstrated that practitioners are laggards of social media primarily due to their lack of understanding of how to utilize social media effectively. Practitioners felt that brand recognition was the main benefit of practicing public relations through social media. The most frequently cited drawback found among practitioners was responding to negativity on social media.