Managing Interdepartmental Collaboration of Social Media Relations: Investigating the PR/Com Role in the Leadership and Collaboration of Social Media Relations Practices across Organization

The planning of an organization's social media interactions with its publics is vital in building relationships in today's marketplace---and can ultimately lead to the success or failure. While CEOs, PR/Com (Public Relations/Corporate Communications) and marketing executives all agree that using social media is instrumental in providing efficient customer care, many are still struggling with best practices to collaborate and coordinate these efforts across the business enterprise. This study used collaborative planning theory and actor network theory as lenses to examine the PR/Com role in convening and translating stakeholder participation to collaborate across function. Using an online survey of PR/Com and social media executives, this report describes how PR/Com executives' use of authentic leadership and collaborative planning methods, as well as organizational culture, affect the establishment of well-coordinated plans for social media relations across organizational functions. Based upon the findings of this study, new means for examining interdepartmental coordination emerged by supporting an existing scale for authentic leadership and in the form of a new scale for measuring collaborative planning methods in an organizational setting. Implications for public relations scholarship and practice are discussed and recommendations for future research are suggested.