Strategy and tactics in strategic communication: Examining their intersection with social media use

Plowman, K. D. & Wilson, C. (2018). Strategy and tactics in strategic communication: Examining their intersection with social media use. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 12, 125-144, doi: 10.1080/1553118X.2018.1428979

Summary

Plowman and Wilson discuss strategies and tactics for communications through the lens of social media. Primarily this research presents two overarching themes: social media use should be guided by strategic planning and tactics should revolve around conversations. These themes are important for organizations to ensure that they don’t focus social media use primarily to advocate for themselves, rather to remain open to building mutual understandings and relationships with their salient publics. Basically, taking a longer-term view to the benefits of these relationships rather than a short-term view towards benefits for the organization. This article primarily targets a more academic audience but does offer some practical recommendations for practitioners. This article differs from that of Benko and Anderson (2010) in that it’s focus is more on strategic planning using social media and those that are generally involved implementing social media strategies and tactics. This work is mostly related to the idea of managing complexity. This is relayed through the data gathering done to thoroughly understand how organizations employ strategies and/or tactics in the use of social media, which is a very tricky environment to navigate successfully.

Experience

This article is particularly relevant for my organization right now. We have tried using social media in the past only to see it start strong but ultimately fail. It seems that people in my organization are tied to the forms of communication they are comfortable with (e.g. e-mail). As we continue to evolve, social media will become more and more important, and using the concepts presented in this article will help us focus on better ways to utilize it, articulate the value proposition, and put sufficient resources behind it to ingrain it in our culture.

KEYWORDS: social media, strategy, tactics, public relations, context, goals, publics, asymmetrical, symmetrical, two-way