Public Relations Journal Vol. 5, No. 3 ISSN 1942-4604 © 2011 Public Relations Society of America

A Study of PR Practitioners’ Use of Social Media in Crisis Planning
Shelley Wigley, Ph.D., and Weiwu Zhang, Ph.D. Social media are increasingly changing the way public relations practitioners communicate and do their jobs. Scholars have begun to explore public relations practitioners’ general social media usage. This study is one of the few attempts to investigate how public relations practitioners use social media in crisis planning and crisis communication as well as in ordinary situations. A survey exploring social media and crisis planning was conducted with 251 members of the Public Relations Society of America. Nearly half of respondents (48%) said they have incorporated social media into their crisis plans. Of these respondents, most indicated they have incorporated Twitter as a tool in their crisis planning, primarily for distribution purposes. Additionally, the study found that public relations professionals whose organizations rely more heavily on social media tools in their crisis planning correlated positively with practitioners’ greater confidence in their organization’s ability to handle a crisis. As for practitioners’ use of social media in their every day practice, results revealed that a large percentage use social media on a personal level; however, results also indicated that a large percentage of respondents’ organizations (82%) use social media. Survey respondents indicated that the stakeholders they communicate with most via social media are potential customers and clients (71%), followed by news media (61%).

LITERATURE REVIEW
Social media are changing the way everyone, including journalists and public relations practitioners, communicates. Despite the prevalence of social media and those who use these channels, the definition of what