Search results

The purpose of this paper is to compare the communication styles on the web sites of a random sample of the top American corporations and non‐profit organizations. By revisiting the traditional approach to understanding strategic communication, the four models of public relations provide insights into the direction and nature of organizational communication.

A random sample of Fortune 500 (n=180) and Philanthropy 400 (n=170) was conducted. Although public relations research has never measured internet communication using the four models, the researchers created original scales to measure their web performance.

The research reveals that both corporations and non‐profits have strong preferences for using one‐way communication on their web sites. However, both groups moderately incorporated two‐way communication practices as corporations were more likely to use two‐way research practices and non‐profits were more likely to engage in conversations online.

This research examines organizational communication by returning to a previous method of analysis that has been cast aside by current scholars. However, assessing communication from the models of public relations perspective provides insights that current research strategies have not provided because they assume two‐way communication is the preferred form of communication.

This study seeks the views of environmental and communication managers in three mining companies on the use of the world wide web for environmental communication.

Interviews were utilised to gather data for this research.

Prior literature on web‐based environmental communication has a primary emphasis on the content of environmental disclosure on web sites. It is highlighted in this paper that one must move beyond merely analysing web sites for environmental information in order to gain an in‐depth understanding of the practice of web‐based environmental communication.

Very few studies to date have sought the opinions of corporate executives on the web‐based environmental communication practice of their companies and this study addresses this gap in the literature.

This study obtains “first hand knowledge” of web‐based environmental communication in Australia's minerals industry through its interviews.

The study provides an in‐depth understanding of current web‐based environmental communication practices in an environmentally sensitive industry and suggests that both technical and socio‐political factors impact current practices. This has implications for the choice of theoretical perspectives for analysing web‐based environmental communication practices.

The focus of this paper is to study the influence of social media on scholarly communication. The aim is to provide an overview of researchers' use of Web 2.0 techniques, and discuss a possible change of information behaviors in the context of scholarly communication.

A web survey was distributed to a targeted sample of university staff (professors, teachers, researchers, and doctoral students). SPSS was utilized as a main tool to synthesize and analyze data, and present the results.

Web 2.0 tools are well‐known to researchers. Most researchers are familiar with blogs, wikis, social networks, multimedia sharing, and online document. Social media provide a convenient environment for scholarly communication. Depending on different aims within the scholarly communication process, researchers choose appropriate modes of communication in their research work.

A combination of content analysis with survey and/or interviews may highlight other aspects of Web 2.0, which is not possible using a single method of content analysis.

There are few studies on the changes of scholarly communication in the context of Web 2.0. This study provides new insights for exploring the effects of Web 2.0 tools on scholarly communication and the development of new information behavior to match the scholarly environment of social media. This understanding can aid the researchers to keep abreast of new characteristics of scholarly communication and help the librarians to develop the correlative services in the scholarly environment of social media.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which brand positioning elements are manifested in the business‐to‐business (B2B) online environment.

The UK print industry is used to investigate the web site elements used to communicate positioning elements through the content analysis of corporate web pages of 30 UK print suppliers.

A framework is developed to show how web site communications are manifested in the online B2B environment.

Because the research vehicle is a sample of websites from only one industry the findings may not be transferable to all industries nor to the whole industry. However, the model is a useful framework for helping managers to plan their online communications.

The paper concludes by giving recommendations about how the framework can be used by practitioners in order to improve the linkage between communications messages and the means for transferring these messages.

This is a novel approach to examining branding elements in the online environment. Comparatively little literature exists which examines branding in the online B2B environment.

Existing literature has agreed that during elections party web sites are primarily an information tool. This study seeks to identify to what extent political parties have developed a distinctive role for the Internet as a communications channel.

Research data were based on content analysis of the web sites and e‐newsletters of parties contesting the 2005 UK General Election, and interviews with party e‐campaigners.

Party size determined whether they had an integrated online communication strategy or not. The Internet did provide a discrete role, that of recruiting new members, encouraging donations and mobilising volunteers. Whereas previous research has focused on the web as an election campaign tool, this study found that it was e‐mail, especially pass‐protected e‐newsletters to party members.

The traditional view was that parties used their web sites primarily to promote information. This study suggests that they only do so partially. Parties do not use their web sites as part of an integrated communication strategy supporting the messages carried by other channels. In 2005 UK parties began to develop a positive reason for having an online presence, namely as a resource generating tool, particularly in mobilising volunteers. Previous literature had considered whether parties had entered into dialogue; this study further defined this into asymmetrical and symmetrical two‐way communication. The results suggest that it is smaller parties who are more likely to use two‐way symmetrical communication.

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) debate has developed tremendously over decades. However, while CSR communication has developed significantly, web‐accessibility of CSR communications is under researched. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms make their CSR communications accessible to their stakeholders on the internet.

The authors used number of “clicks” to download CSR communication of a firm to measure its accessibility. Independent mean test showed that CSR communications by high impact sectors are more accessible on the internet than low impact sectors, but web‐accessibility is not affected by country.

Although CSR research has grown tremendously over the decades, the discourse has been largely restricted to disclosures in the annual reports and, lately, to the standalone sustainability reports. In addition, they have mainly examined the management's motives for disclosures, using legitimacy theory as the most influential theoretical underpinning. Only very few studies have examined CSR communication on the internet and even these studies have only researched the content of the disclosure, examining the quality and quality of disclosures.

The originality of this paper lies in its consideration of the effect of firms' CSR communications on the recipients. While CSR communication has developed significantly, web‐accessibility of CSR communications remains under researched.

Drawing on a unique case of a Web 3.0 recruitment campaign, the purpose of this paper is to explore how a Web 3.0 social media recruitment communication strategy influence, add value to and challenge conventional recruitment communication management.

The study draws on a reflexive dialogical research approach, which means that it is methodologically designed as a critical dialogue between on the one hand an empirical case and on the other hand theories on social media and strategic communication.

The study points toward a fundamental new approach to recruitment communication. The application of a Web 3.0 strategy entails what we term an open source recruitment strategy and a redirection of employee focus from work life to private life. These insights point toward ontologically challenging the basic assumptions of employees, work life and the employing organization.

The paper presents a single-case study, which prepares the ground for larger, longitudinal studies. Such studies may apply a more long-term focus on the implications of applying Web 3.0 recruitment strategies and how they may be integrated into – or how they challenge – overall corporate communication strategies.

A turn toward Web 3.0 in recruitment communication affects the degree of interactional complexity and the level of managerial control. Furthermore, the authors argue that the utilization of a Web 3.0 strategy in recruitment communication put forth precarious dilemmas and challenges of controllability, controversy, ownership and power relations, demanding organizations to cautiously entering the social media 3.0 employment market.

This study indicates how the value and potentials of social media as facilitating participatory processes and community conversations can be strategically used in and fundamentally alter recruitment communication, and hence offers new insights into a paradigmatically new way of understanding what strategic social media recruitment is, can and do.

Discusses the results of content analysis of the Web sites of Fortune 100 companies, carried out to identify the mix of promotional activities on their Web sites. Specifically, we performed a content analysis of Web sites utilizing categories representing a range of marketing communications, including: communicating product, pricing and dealer/retail location information, related and unrelated advertisements, sales promotion, direct marketing, basic company information and public relations. We also identified differences between and among industries based on standard industrial classification (SIC) codes. We found considerable variability in how members of the Fortune 100 used their Web sites. The Web sites ranged from very simple ones that focused on basic company information, such as company history, to quite complex Web sites that incorporated a mix of promotional elements, such as press releases, advertisements, games, free gifts and pricing information.

For companies that intend to respond to the modern conscious consumers' needs, a great competitive advantage is played on the ability to incorporate sustainability messages in marketing communications. The aim of this paper is to address this important priority in the web context, building a semantic algorithm that allows content managers to evaluate the quality of sustainability web contents for search engines, considering the current semantic web development.

Following the Design Science (DS) methodological approach, the study develops the algorithm as an artefact capable of solving a practical problem and improving the operation of content managerial process.

The algorithm considers multiple factors of evaluation, grouped in three parameters: completeness, clarity and consistency. An applicability test of the algorithm was conducted on a sample of web pages of the Google blog on sustainability to highlight the correspondence between the established evaluation factors and those actually used by Google.

Studying content marketing for sustainability communication constitutes a new field of research that offers exciting opportunities. Writing sustainability contents in an effective way is a fundamental step to trigger stakeholder engagement mechanisms online. It could be a positive social engineering technique in the hands of marketers to make web users able to pursue sustainable development in their choices.

This is the first study that creates a theoretical connection between digital content marketing and sustainability communication focussing, especially, on the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO). The algorithm of “Sustainability-contents SEO” is the first operational software tool, with a regulatory nature, that is able to analyse the web contents, detecting the terms of the sustainability language and measuring the compliance to SEO requirements.

This paper aims to develop a service‐oriented distributed multi‐robot system based on manufacturing message specification (MMS) and new‐generation distributed object technology – web services for realizing remotely monitoring and controlling multiple heterogeneous robots in the internet environment.

The study presents robot communication model and distributed multi‐robot monitoring and control software structure based on MMS and web services. In particular, monitoring and control software design of MMS concepts in web services environment using Unified Modeling Language model is discussed in detail. In addition, to verify the validity of the proposed design method, a multi‐robot prototype system for robot flexible assemble cell has been achieved. Its Server software is implemented in C++ with Visual Studio.NET being the development environment and Client software is programmed in Java with Borland JBuilder 9 being the development tool.

Finds that the communication structure following MMS can make the multi‐robot monitoring and control system have perfect robustness, interoperability and reconfigurability. Besides, web services technology can conveniently realize MMS services, also can successfully resolve the remote multi‐robot monitoring and control problem among cross‐network, cross‐platform and heterogeneous systems.

Provides an easy and low‐cost method for realizing heterogeneous multi‐robot remote driving. The web‐based distribution of the presented system is critical in enabling capabilities such as e‐manufacturing, e‐diagnostics and e‐maintenance.

The proposed system can be seamlessly integrated into other automated manufacturing systems or management systems in plug‐and‐play fashion. The combination of MMS and web services is in favor of real manufacturing equipments being embedded in the network, so the presented systematic methodology can be a useful reference for constructing web‐based reconfigurable manufacturing systems.

Provides robot communication model based on MMS and web services and presents service‐oriented distributed remote multi‐robot monitoring and control software architecture.