2010 - Public Relations Society of America

tools. By comparing and contrasting the behaviors of all generations, future studies could help
answer this compelling question.
This particular study looked intently on channel usage related to indentifying social
media use and the way that this relates to brand loyalty and continued interest in continuing
relationships. What it doesn’t look at is message content that is disseminated through those
channels. Additional research should be conducted in order to analyze messages that are sent
through these social media channels and how those messages relate to Millennials wanting to
continue their relationship with the organization.
Finally, while this study allowed the researcher to investigate Millennials’ interaction
with social media tools of specific companies, research is also needed to investigate what makes
Millennials engage with one particular social media tool over another. The current study found
that Millennials heavily engage with social networking sites (e.g., MySpace and Facebook).
What makes Millennials engage with social networking sites more than other social media tools
such as blogs, micro-blogs, or podcasts? To extend the current study, a future qualitative study
could divulge a better understanding through open-ended questions as to why Millennials prefer
social networking sites and e-mail to microblogging and podcasts. Likewise, researchers might
also examine the various social media tools that Millennial engage with the most and how those
tools change over time.
Conclusion
Beneficial relationships with the public are important for the survival of an organization.
Public relations practitioners must build and maintain strong relationships between the
organization and its public to lead to a desired behavior of the public for the organization and
vice-versa. Rather than focusing on all dimensions of the organization-public relationship
(anthropomorphic, personal commitment, professional benefit/expectation, community
improvement, and comparison of alternatives), this study specifically concentrated on the
personal commitment relationship to the company/brand. Hence, the current study contributes to
a theoretical body of knowledge in the public relations field by providing acute in-depth
understanding into the personal commitment relationship dimension, specifically with a younger
demographic, the Millennial Generation.
In addition, this study is important to the field of public relations because of its
contribution to the body of literature focusing on social media tools and contribution to the
knowledge of public relations practitioners. The literature review for this study sufficiently
exemplifies the growth of social media within the field. The current study enhances that body of
literature by supporting other’s testimonies (Gillin, 2007; Hallahan, 2008; Li and Bernoff, 2008;
Scott, 2007) of the importance of a social media presence for organizations to build relationships
with key publics. Currently, the literature supports organizations being familiar with and using
many social media tools, but current findings indicate that organizations that utilize one tool well
is more essential than using several social media tools. As this study showed, Millennial
satisfaction does not increase with the variety of tools, yet for most companies/brands a social
media presence did matter with Millennials’ favorable perceptions of that particular
company/brand.
Public relations practitioners are yearning for in-depth knowledge of social media tools
and how they can best play into their relationship building with key markets. In October, the
cover of PRWeek, a monthly magazine targeted to practitioners, read Social Media Survey 2009.
The seven-page article by Maul (2009) outlined important issues in social media such as what
was being used most frequently industry-wide (social networking) to ethical issues of using
20