Developing policy guidelines for social media in public relations practice at selected NGOs in Gauteng

Abstract

This study focuses on a constructivist grounded theory that investigated the use of social media in public relations in non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This thesis focuses on the development of the managerial policy guideline for public relations in non-governmental organisations. Social media has changed the nature of information more especially regarding its use and interpretation. Social media tools such as facebook have become almost omnipresent in daily life. Public relations practitioners have diverse, and intensive information needs to communicate and share information. A literature study was conducted on this topic of social media to create the foundation for the study and to understand what other previous researchers have documented around the topic of social media in South African context. Regarding the empirical study, data was collected from an array of South African public relations practitioners working in non-governmental organisations by employing the grounded theory approach. The study used semi-structured interviews as the primary data collection strategy. This was used to get a better understanding of what the public relations practitioners were using the social media communication tool for and what the advantages of the technology were from an NGO perspective. In total, nine interviews were undertaken, with participants from different NGOs. The findings provide the holistic view of public relations practitioners' use and experience of social media in NGOs. The main findings suggest that social media played a crucial role to promote the existence of the NGOs in the society. Categories of experience were constructed through a constructivist grounded theory analysis process. The results show that although South African NGOs communication technological environment has not matured as yet, there are already benefits that can be realised from using social media as a communication tool. This study makes a contribution to the public relations knowledge, methodology and practice. This study provides insight into public relations experience of social media and with information in social media that will be of interest to other practitioners across a wide range of communication professions