Strategic communication in participatory culture: From one- and two-way communication to participatory communication through social media

In contemporary literature in strategic communication, public relations, and corporate communication, co-creation of meaning is often claimed to be a core objective (e.g., Coombs & Heath, 2006). The aim of this chapter is to review the literature on social media and strategic communication and develop arguments for why we believe the new communication structure is challenging old concepts and perspectives. The chapter discusses social media as technologies woven into a social and cultural communication structure, dened through participatory communication. It also addresses some of the challenges, opportunities, threats and changed practices that an organization’s approach to participatory communication, through use of social media, can cause. The chapter is, as mentioned, a literature review and it also contains a conceptual analysis, using dierent examples. The theoretical approach is to a certain extent founded in the cocreational tradition, but it follows a social constructionist perspective where communication is viewed as constitutive of reality. This approach may be interpreted as a current example of a paradigm struggle, forecast by Botan and Taylor (2004, p. 659):

We expect the period starting in the early 2000s and extending into the next decade to be characterized by a paradigm struggle away from symmetrical research. The future state of the field of public relations lies with whichever cocreationist model emerges as the most useful, the most theoretically valuable, and perhaps, the one that situates public relations theory as a foundational member of the field of communication.