2010 - Public Relations Society of America

participants taught in universities on the East coast, two educators were from the Midwest, and
the remaining two were from universities in the Western region of the US. The educators ranged
in how long they have been mentoring students, from one year to 25 years. Number of mentees
over the course of the educators’ lifetimes ranged from 10 protégés to over 1,000.
An interview guide was crafted to help guide the discussion and to answer the research
questions. Each interview began with a discussion about mentoring relationships in general, with
a transition into how mentoring is unique in the field of public relations through the use of social
media. Although these topics were the main foci of the interviews, there existed some flexibility
in which I allowed participants to discuss any additional issues or topics that seemed relevant.
Data Analysis
Audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed to fully capture the speech style of
the participants. After completing the transcripts, I analyzed them using Pardun and Krugman’s
(1994) procedure and the grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Open-coding
procedures were first used to examine the transcripts line-by-line to locate emerging themes and
potential categories. Axial coding was then used to find how the data identified in the first step
fit into discrete categorical themes, along with whether it described any of the concepts found in
the literature review. According to Lindlof and Taylor (2002), axial coding is a part of the
integration process of the grounded theory approach that narrows down the number of categories
by finding similarities across data in order to make the data clearer and more understandable.
However, though single statements were combined to create various concepts, stand-alone
statements that were unique or exceptional were also coded, in an effort to avoid too much
coherency in the data (van Zoonen, 1994).
Results
RQ1: How Do PR Educators Use Social Media in their Mentoring Relationships?
Knowing the purpose. With a large variety of different social media channels, the
educators believed that it was important to know the purpose of each medium in order to make
their mentoring relationships more effective. As one professor from an Eastern US university
stated:
That’s what you have to remember about social media. It’s not about the technology, it’s
about what it does. The pedagogy behind it. What are you using it for, what are you going
to do, how will it enhance teaching and learning – that’s really the important thing. The
venue itself? You can learn about what is in fashion, but you need to learn how to use it
for what it’s worth.
Another professor mentioned the importance of “knowing which channel you’re going to use –
who are your audiences you’re trying to reach, what is your message, and what are you
ultimately trying to gain.”
Maintaining a conversation. Educators also used social media in order to maintain a
conversation with their students. As one professor from an Eastern US university put it: “More
people are reaching through social media to continue the conversation. That’s what it is. They
are able to asynchronously continue the conversation,” while another professor from the
Midwest US stated that “mentoring is more of a conversation” which can be enhanced through
the use of social media.
Doing what’s comfortable. One professor from the Eastern region of the US discussed
the importance of choosing the best social media channel that is the most comfortable for both
the mentor and the mentee:
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