2010 - Public Relations Society of America
2010 - Public Relations Society of America
2010 - Public Relations Society of America
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using social networking tools is encouraging to those public relations practitioners who are<br />
considering or are beginning to reach out to this key audience through this social media tool.<br />
Most interesting, inconsistent with what others have found, is the interaction Millennials<br />
reported with both blogs and podcasts. Jones and Fox (2009) report that 43% <strong>of</strong> this generation<br />
engage with blogs. In this study, only 21.1% <strong>of</strong> Millennial students reported interacting with<br />
blogs. Because this percentage is rather low, the finding raises several questions. One significant<br />
question is whether blogs are becoming less popular within this Millennial Generation. This<br />
finding suggests that blogs are not as popular as others have reported. Another question is what<br />
characteristics make blogs more or less engaging? Possibly because <strong>of</strong> the recent growth <strong>of</strong> blogs<br />
as reported by Technorati (2009), information is becoming not only overwhelming but also<br />
difficult to trust. Although some research has found that Millennials are suited for blogging<br />
because <strong>of</strong> its unique capability <strong>of</strong> allowing for content contribution, being leery <strong>of</strong> where their<br />
information is being posted and who is accessing that information is becoming more <strong>of</strong> an issue<br />
(McConnell & Hubba, 2007).<br />
Another noteworthy finding that emerged in the study is the 11.2% <strong>of</strong> Millennial students<br />
who reported interacting with podcasts. Recent studies suggest that the audio podcast is one <strong>of</strong><br />
the rising social media tools that is expected to have exponential growth in upcoming years.<br />
Indeed research says that 25% <strong>of</strong> Millennials are already using podcast, which contradicts the<br />
finding <strong>of</strong> this study. (EMarketer, 2008; Jones & Fox, 2009). Similar to blogs, questions arise<br />
about this significant decline <strong>of</strong> Millennials who report interacting with podcast. Findings<br />
suggest that podcasts as a social tool are not the best way to target this generation. Besides the<br />
0.5% <strong>of</strong> participants who reported not interacting with any social media tool, podcasts were<br />
reported as the least interacted with social media tool.<br />
One note <strong>of</strong> interest pertaining to the first research question regards those participants<br />
who selected interacting with no social media tool. Only five <strong>of</strong> 1093 students who participated<br />
in the study reported that they did not engage with any social media tool. This finding supports<br />
the idea that Millennial students are indeed interacting with a variety <strong>of</strong> social media tools.<br />
<strong>Public</strong> relations practitioners should find this result encouraging while thinking strategically for<br />
ways to reach this target audience through these different social media tools. Although all social<br />
media tools did not register with above-average percentages <strong>of</strong> interaction, most Millennials<br />
reported interacting with a variety <strong>of</strong> tools.<br />
Hypothesis #1. The first hypothesis states, “Millennial students who indicate they<br />
interact with company/brand e-mail will generate the most committed relationship over all other<br />
company/brand social media tools.” First, an independent samples t-test was run for each social<br />
media tool with a usage response over 50% <strong>of</strong> the sample who had been engaging with social<br />
media tools (yes/no) and wanting their relationship to continue with each company/brand (1 =<br />
strongly wanting the relationship to continue, 7 = strongly not wanting the relationship to<br />
continue). Results in Table 2 (Appendix B) indicated that hypothesis one is partially supported.<br />
Secondly, in order to determine if having contact via social networking tools had varying effects<br />
on wanting the relationship with each company to continue, a series <strong>of</strong> factorial analyses <strong>of</strong><br />
variance (factorial ANOVA) were run. As indicated in Table 3 (Appendix C), all other top 10<br />
social media companies/brands (Xbox, Starbucks, MTV, Sony and Dell) resulted in no<br />
significant interaction effect for any <strong>of</strong> the comparisons between the social media tools and<br />
strongly wanting the relationship with the company to continue.<br />
Millennials are using social media tools, some more than others as supported by research<br />
question and hypothesis one, to receive messages from companies and organizations. As<br />
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