Working the Twittersphere: Microblogging as Professional Identity Construction

Dawn R. Gilpin

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Public Relations and Crisis Communication Digital Marketing and Social Media Media and Digital Communication

Abstract

Public relations professionals are called upon to forge and maintain relationships with vast networks of stakeholders, colleagues, and contacts. These relational networks are fluid, adjusting to constantly changing needs. The growth of online communication environments has been seen by many scholars and practitioners as an opportunity to extend the reach of public relations efforts to a larger number of current and potential organizational stakeholders. To manage these networks of relationships, many practitioners have become active users of social media. One outlet that is rapidly growing in popularity is Twitter: a Web 2.0 service that allows users to perform “micro-blogging,” or communicate in messages of no more than 140 characters (known as “tweets”). This chapter approaches Twitter as a window into the complex processes of professional identity construction employed by public relations practitioners today. Analyzing some of the most prominent Twitter feeds among the online professional public relations community in the United States, the study described here used social and semantic network analysis to examine use of the microblogging site among public relations practitioners. Findings indicate that Twitter serves multiple purposes for practitioners, such as information sharing, networking, and establishing professional expertise. Finally, Twitter itself emerges as a boundary-blurring tool that links multiple online spheres and spans the divide between offline and virtual professional domains. Twitter illustrates the ways in which social media are encouraging patterns of selforganization among public relations practitioners seeking new ways to adapt to a turbulent professional environment.

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References

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