While social media represents a broad range of benefits to organisations and institutions, such as enhanced brand engagement, it also presents challenges and risks to reputation and security, such as confidentiality breaches. Employee use of popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, both at work and about work has resulted in organisations developing social media policies and guidelines as part of contemporary governance practice. This paper investigates this recent approach to corporate governance by examining 20 social media policies and guidelines from a sample of corporate, government and third sector organisations that are active social media users. It develops a basic framework for social media governance based on the 13 common themes that emerge from the sample, including confidentiality, disclosure and the public-private divide of social media usage. It draws on social contract theory and considers its importance to the field of social media governance. Key implications for managers who are tasked with developing and implementing social media policies and guidelines are discussed.
Despite some sporadic attention since the 1950s, the concept of the public interest has failed to attract the consideration of public relations scholars in the same way it has other disciplines. This article examines this seeming anomaly while also presenting an overview of how scholars from politics, media, law, anthropology and planning have engaged with and often embraced the public interest, including through key public interest theories or intersections with the work of other theorists, such as Habermas. The article also explains why the public interest historically polarised scholars and suggests how this may account for its marginalisation within public relations. It draws on themes developed in a new book – Public Relations and the Public Interest – in challenging public relations to more fully engage in this space. The article concludes that public relations may benefit from a deeper understanding of the complexity of the public interest and the ways in which it is viewed and adopted in other fields in order to more robustly connect with democratic processes and social change agendas.
The paper examines the changing nature of publicity in the courts, tracing three distinct but interconnected phases of publicity using Jeremy Bentham's theory of open justice and publicity as a framework. The first phase is press coverage, with the news media chronicling the justice system for the general population, most recently including televised court proceedings. The second is the appointment of Courts Information Officers, occurring as early as the 1930s and growing in impact since the 1990s, established to facilitate the relationship between courts and the news media. The third and final phase is the Internet, including social media, resulting in changes to news media models and driving contemporary practices of court-generated media. The paper concludes that, while media and communication practices have changed radically since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the concept of publicity has shifted, Bentham's approach to open justice remains salient for twenty-first-century courts' communication.
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