2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America

However, many inside the public relations profession lament the lackadaisical posture
that PR practitioners take in response to Web 2.0 opportunities. One prominent PR blogger
labeled public Relations practitioners as hopelessly out of touch with today's revolution in PR
technology (in Sinkinson, 2007). Researchers have, in the past, labeled public relations
practitioners "laggards" when it comes to acceptance and use of technology (Porter et al., 2001).
Moreover, a recent study examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public
relations found that even though practitioners clearly see the importance of blogs, less than 10%
of respondents reported writing/maintaining a blog, and of those only 23% were blogging as a
part of their job (Porter et al. 2006).
Descriptive “state of technology” reports from the public relations sector dot the
academic journal landscape (see Pavlik & Dozier, 1996; Pavlik, 2007 Porter & Sallot, 2003;
Porter et al., 2001; Sallot & Porter, 2004; Wright, 2001). A 1992 study indicated that clearly
technology adoption and use were important issues on the professional agenda of public relations
(Anderson & Reagan). However, researchers expressed concern that practitioners have not kept
pace with other management disciplines in their uses of such technologies as word processing,
electronic mail, data bases, budgeting software and statistical software packages. Pre-dot-com
researcher Merton Fiur (1986) argued that practitioners must shorten their technology learning
curves in order to keep from being isolated from the mainstream of management decision
making.
An IMT Strategies Report (2000) surveyed 100 public relations professionals to define
the impact the Internet was having on the profession. Results indicated that although new
technologies provided the ability to communicate with more targeted audiences and more media,
public relations professionals had yet to use these new technologies to their full potential, or even
understand the impact the internet could have on the field. In a 2006 survey of corporate
executives (Goodman, 2006), only a small number of business leaders were convinced that
corporate blogging was growing as a communication medium (5%), a brand-building technique
(3%), or a sales/lead generation tool (1%). Moreover, early half of senior executives polled did
not have corporate policies pertaining to blogging, although 77% believe that their organization
should have such policies.
There is a concurrent need to examine the applicability of technology acceptance models
in the public relations sector and a need for increased knowledge and research on Web 2.0
technologies among public relations professionals. It is these two identified gaps in knowledge
that this research aimed to address.
While Web 2.0 describes a technology cluster (Rogers, 2003) of online communication
and networking tools (blogging, podcasting, web video, content syndication (RSS), wikis, virtual
worlds, and social networking), blogging is selected for this study as a baseline indicator of
acceptance and use for all Web 2.0 technologies for three reasons: (1) blogging is the "elder
statesman" of the Web 2.0 technologies and thus could have the highest awareness and interest
among public relations practitioners; (2) blogging best fits Grunig's two-way, symmetrical model
of communication for public relations professional and thus would arguably have the highest
practical value to working practitioners and ; (3) blogging perhaps represents the lowest common
denominator in terms of technological skills and training required for its deployment and use
among practitioners.
While technology acceptance and utilization research is common in mature fields such as
MIS, decision science and information systems, economics, agriculture, management, and
marketing, its application to public relations and corporate communications has never been
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