Paper Proposal

Research Topic:
Facebook’s goal is to connect people through information sharing. While the site originally began as a college only membership, in 2006, Facebook went corporate, inviting organizations and corporations to join its membership. Many businesses see the site as a cost-friendly way to relate to a variety of publics and are now utilizing the site as a marketing and public relations (PR) tool. Further, the site can be an important relationship building tool through the development and maintenance of online relationships with publics.

While there are several potential benefits to using the site as a PR tool, little is known about how the sites are actually used by corporations. Previous research relevant to this area has focused on two main themes: the use of Internet in PR related efforts and the impact of Facebook on individual users. Both areas of research are helpful, yet in order to truly understand the effects of these sites on PR methods, research must look specifically at how corporations use specific social networking sites (SNSs), not just compare to other Internet sources. SNSs are unique, interactive and relational Internet technologies which vary from Web sites which incorporate one-way communication tactics.

Recent research has shown that many organizations are not using the Internet to its fullest potential. Public Relations Review published an article by Waters et al. (2009) that looked at how Facebook engages its nonprofit organizations. Through a content analysis of randomly sampled nonprofits, researchers coded profiles for the presence of organizational disclosure, information dissemination, and involvement. They found that non-profits are not incorporating the vast capabilities that social networking sites have to offer them. Rather, similar to other studies (Kang & Norton, 2006; Park & Reber, 2008), nonprofits seem to be capable of disseminating basic information using the sites, but unable to comprehend the interactive power of these sites. This further poses a need to study how these sites are being used by corporations. If corporations are using these sites as potential PR tools, research on their application is a necessary step.

Waters et al. (2009) focused on how nonprofits use Facebook. Yet when Facebook originally opened its doors in 2006, it allowed membership by both for-profits and non-profits. Park & Reber (2008) argue that organizations’ Web sites are important in increasing public awareness and understanding about Fortune 500 corporations. Similarly, Facebook can also be a potential tool for corporations to use. Corporate PR campaigns can have very different goals than non-profits. How corporations use SNSs like Facebook to develop relationships with their stakeholders will further add to the knowledge of corporate social media use.

Research Questions:
RQ1: How do Fortune 500 companies incorporate relational strategies on Facebook?
RQ1a: How do Fortune 500 companies incorporate organizational disclosure into their Facebook profiles?
RQ1b: How do Fortune 500 companies incorporate information dissemination into their Facebook profiles?
RQ1c: How do Fortune 500 companies incorporate involvement into their Facebook profiles?

RQ2: What are the differences between relational strategies used by non-profit and corporate use of Facebook?

RQ3: How do the characteristics of a specific corporation affect their incorporation of relational strategies on Facebook?

Method & Proposed Sites:
Using the Waters et al. (2009) study as a backdrop, information on corporate Facebook profiles will be content analyzed for three strategies characteristic of relationship cultivation online: organizational disclosure, information dissemination and involvement.

Disclosure will entail a description of the organization, its programs and services, organizational history, mission statement, links to the organization’s Web site, logos and listings of important members of the organization.

Information dissemination will involve links to outside material such as news stories or press releases about the organization, photos, announcements and so on.

Involvement includes contact information, ways to participate in the organization, use of discussion boards, calendar of events and online stores.

Sites to be studied were taken from the list of companies on the Pathfinder Web site (www.pathfinder.com/fortune/fortune500/500list.html). Fortune 500 companies are ranked by their gross annual revenue. The listing includes both publicly and privately held companies, all of whose revenues are publicly available. Sites will be chosen by a random sample. Once each site is chosen, researchers will search for their corporate Facebook profile and analyze it. If an organization does not have a Facebook profile, it will be removed from the sample.

Annotated Bibliography:
Beer, D. (2008). Social network(ing) sites … revisiting the story so far: A response to danah
boyd & Nicole Ellison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 516-529.
- This article is a response to some of the leading scholars in the field of social networking sites (SNSs), challenging their definitions of what a SNS is, how friends are defined and the way in which we look at SNSs. Further, Beer argues that viewing friendships online are similar to what we term “actual friends.” Further, he posits that SNSs are actually commercial spaces and should be configured into business models.

Berger, C.R. (1979). Beyond initial interaction: Uncertainty, understanding, and the
development of interpersonal relationships. In H. Giles & R. N. St. Clair (eds.). Language and Social Psychology (122-144).
- Berger lays outs four different types of information seeking behavior which can be applied directly to behavior on SNSs. These include interactive, active, passive and extraction. Each can be viewed in a different aspect of SNS behavior.

boyd, d.m. (2006). Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing community into being
on social network sites. First Monday, 11 (12). Retrieved July 16, 2009 from http://
www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd.
- This article discusses how SNSs defined friendship. Further, it looks at how the connections made on the site work together to form a type of community. The paper is helpful in that it gives a better understanding of not only how relationships are formed on the site, but how these connections define both who a person is and how they are viewed by others.

boyd, d.m. (2007). Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in
teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (ed.), MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (1-26). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- boyd goes into great detail in this article about why SNSs are so important to teenagers. While my paper looks specifically at companies, it is important to understand the draw of these sites as well as how publics are connected together through a series of networks within a specific SNS.

boyd, d.m., & Ellison, N.B. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 210-230.
- This article gives a working definition of SNSs as well as explains various factors that are part of these sites (e.g. profiles, friend networks, privacy settings). boyd and Ellison’s main argument is that SNSs are centered around people, not around interests and they hold much discussion on how connections are formed using these sites.

Donath, J. (2008). Signals in social supernets. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,
13, 231-251.
- This article highlights the need to have visible links to members of a community as a way of legitimizing our online persona. Further, it highlights the types relationships that are on these sites, with strong ties bringing reliability to the profile and a large amount of weak ties expanding the network’s scale. A very important conclusion this article makes is that young adults today use profiles and status updates on SNSs to stay in touch rather face-to-face interaction, hence proving the need to study these sites more in depth.

Donath, J., & boyd, d.m. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22,
71-82.
- This article is another helpful article for understanding the background of SNSs. In order to apply them to a corporate context, we must first understand what constitutes a SNS and what factors are unique to this medium. This article lays out the idea of “public displays of connection” where people are connected with one another through entirely public means. The fact that these ties are public makes them part of a person’s online persona on these sites.

Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social
capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 1143-1168.
- This article talks about the basis of SNSs, how they are oriented and what they are used for. The basis of this article is how people present themselves online to their various network members and how this influences their social capital on these sites.

Esrock, S.L. & Leichty, G.B. (2000). Organization of corporate Web pages: Publics and
functions. Public Relations Review, 26¸ 327-344.
- This study highlights a lack of key elements in building two-way communication on corporate Web pages. It also offers a way of randomly sampling Fortune 500 companies for analysis.

Hanson, C., Thackeray, R., Bames, M., Neiger, B., & McIntyre, E. (2008). Integrating Web 2.0
in health education preparation and practice. American Journal of Health Education, 39, 157-166.
- While this article deals specifically with the integration of Web into health education, the article does highlight key terms and concepts which are essential for the understanding of SNSs. Hanson et al. makes a very clear distinction between Web 2.0 applications and Web 1.0 applications, with SNSs falling into the first category. This definition is extremely important in understanding why SNSs and other types of Web 2.0 need to be studied differently from basic Web sites.

Hargittai, E. (2008). Whose space? Differences among users and non-users of social
network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 276-297.
- This article is helpful because it highlights several SNSs and Facebook user statistics, which allows the reader to see how these sites are used by a variety of people. Further, it posits that relationship formation is important online and that Facebook, and other sites like it, help to make these relationships happen. Hargittai argues that there is a need to study users, not just generalize the findings of a study to all users of SNSs.

Kang, S., & Norton, H.E. (2006). Colleges and universities’ use of the World Wide Web: A
public relations tool for the digital age. Public Relations Review, 32, 426-428.
- Kang & Norton address the usability, accessibility and communicative capabilities of college and university Web sites. The most important finding for this paper is that the ability of university Web sites to be an information provider for potential publics is somewhat mixed. In other words, these universities might not be using their sites to their fullest dialogic potential.

Kent, M., & Taylor, M. (1998). Building dialogic relationships through the World Wide Web.
Public Relations Review, 24, 321-334.
- Kent and Taylor were one of the first to introduce the idea of online relational development to the world of PR. Their article details the need to build a dialogic relationship between an organization and its publics through the Internet. It further details what constitutes a dialogic relationship and how these are formed online.

Lenhart, A. (2009). Adults and social network websites. Washington DC: Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
- This brief article highlights current adult social media usage across the United States. It provides a basis for who is using the sites as well as the number of people that they impact on a daily basis.

Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., & Christakis, N. (2008). The taste for privacy: An analysis of college
student privacy settings in an online social network. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 79-100.
- Lewis and colleagues highlight Facebook as being a system of networks which are visible for all users. This is essential to the idea of SNSs as a public relations mechanism because organizations are now able to disseminate information to a widespread audience through these networks.

Liu, H. (2008). Social network profiles as taste performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 13, 252-275.
- Liu likens SNS profiles to virtual performances which describe and present the user to other members of these sites. Further, he finds that SNS profiles may actually be more useful for describing a person than an actual declaration of interest. This is important because much of the information corporations may get about their publics may come from their SNS profile.

Park, H., & Reber, B.H. (2008). Relationship building and the use of Web sites: How Fortune
500 corporations use their Web sites to build relationships. Public Relations Review, 34, 409-411.
- This study is an analysis of Fortune 500 companies Web sites. The results show that many of these for-profits are not using their Web sites to their fullest potential. Some key concerns included that companies are unclear about how to promote dialogic communication on their Web sites. Further, they are not dedicated to prompting return visits or even encouraging their users to return to the site. This is important background information to have as my study looks at how Fortune 500 businesses utilize their Facebook corporate pages to facilitate this type of dialogic communication.

Ruble, R. (2007). “I Facebooked You!”: An examination of information seeking strategies
on Facebook.com. Paper presented at the National Communication Association
annual conference, Chicago.
- This paper looks at how other seek information about one another in a computer-mediated communication context. Specifically looking at Facebook, Ruble uses Berger’s information seeking strategies to outline how information is gained about other users on the site. This is an important application considering that my paper will be on information seeking strategies and information dissemination techniques of for-profits on Facebook.

Stewart, J. (2008). Twitter time: How companies are using and responding through the
social networking tool. Tactics, 17.
- This is a practical application article that talks about how real companies use the social networking tool Twitter in their day to day activities. The purpose of the article is to acknowledge that SNSs can be used as an instant response mechanism for businesses as well as an interactive tool to continue conversations.

Utz, S. (2009). The (potential) benefits of campaigning via social network sites. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 221-243.
- This article shows how SNSs can be used in political campaigns. While not directly applicable, there are some key pieces of information which make this article useful. First, the article states that how your friends view something can influence your decision. So a friend who has Target as a friend on their Facebook account may influence you to seek information about that company as well. Second, the article also makes an argument for SNSs being integrated into many users’ daily routines.

Waters, R.D., Burnett, E., Lamm, A., & Lucas, J. (2009). Engaging stakeholders through
social networking: How nonprofit organizations are using Facebook. Public Relations Review, 35, 102-106.
- First, this study is helpful because I am duplicating it in order to study how fo-profit organizations are using Facebook. It provides several important coding factors as well as information about how nonprofits are using SNSs, specifically Facebook. Further, it shows that these sites are not being used to their fullest potential and that several of the organizations are not incorporating the interactive nature of SNSs into their Web designs.