ABSTRACT
Public relations practitioners and scholars seek insights into the communicative processes and experiences of such different organizational stakeholders as customers, investors, donors, volunteers, activists, local communities, and government agencies. Each group of stakeholders is based on different socio-cultural norms and meanings that should be gauged and understood via formative research to enable effective communication and trustworthy relationships between organizations, their stakeholders, and society. Current public relations practice, however, rather than increasing the use of formative research for better understanding the stakeholders’ cultural environments, concentrates on evaluative research designed to provide evidence for practitioner impact on the organization bottom line. By embracing evaluative social media analytics, public relations practitioners further support efforts to put organizational interests first. Both the online and offline prioritizing of organization interests clash with the growing movement in public relations scholarship for the field to shift away from the functionalist self-interest of organizations and toward fulfilling public relations proclaimed commitment to contribute to society. In supporting that movement, this chapter shares experiences from two studies and an interview with an expert to demonstrate the potential of netnography to contribute to contemporary pro-social public relations.
