Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Public Relations from The Lens of Internal Practitioners: Evidence from Jordan

Abstract

This study explored the benefits and disadvantages of using online PR from the perspectives of university PR practitioners, employing in-depth face-to-face interviews with 22 PR managers from public and private Jordanian universities based on a purposive sampling technique. This research's main objective was to determine what these practitioners felt were the benefits and drawbacks of online PR. The data were analysed using NVivo 12 software to develop themes. The findings showed that the PR practitioners conceptualised online PR as a part of the modern technology revolution, effective and sustainable in this era. They said that online PR offered several benefits like potential cost savings, the ability to spread information, resolve student-related problems, and raise their organisation's visibility. However, they were concerned that online PR could lead to disadvantages like added costs because of the need to hire online experts. Among the recommendations drawn from the results are that strategies and their concomitant tactics must be developed to reach specific publics, qualified employees with the necessary skills must be hired and their skills updated with frequent training, employees must be incentivised to achieve their best performance, organisations should monitor social media to address and solve problems of their key publics, and metrics must be created to measure the impacts of online PR quantitatively.