Home / Regular Issue / JSSH Vol. 29 (2) Jun. 2021 / JSSH-7905-2020

 

Understanding Digital Public Relations Practices among Exemplar School Principals in Malaysian Schools

Emelia Fantoza Saraih, Su Luan Wong, Soaib Asimiran and Mas Nida Md Khambari

Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47836/pjssh.29.2.28

Keywords: Digital leadership, leadership, public relations, social media

Published on: 28 June 2021

In recent years, Digital Leadership (DL) has been recognised as an important practice for school principals. DL focuses on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in support of school principals’ leadership practice. This qualitative study was undertaken with the aim of understanding DL among principals from four High Performing Schools (HPS) in Malaysia, particularly from the perspective of public relations. Semi-structured interviews were employed involving four exemplar school principals as the main respondents and 12 school staff as the secondary respondents of the study. The findings indicate that social media has become the contemporary public relations conduit among exemplar Malaysian school principals. The findings also suggest that third parties, such as students, parents, and alumni, enhance school principals’ public relations practices via their social media accounts. The aforesaid findings have meaningful implications for other school principals in similar school settings and contexts to better integrate social media in their public relations practice, especially by leveraging third-party social media accounts.

  • Banning, S. A., & Sweetser, K. D. (2007). How much do they think it affects them and whom do they believe?: Comparing the third-person effect and credibility of blogs and traditional media. Communication Quarterly, 55(4), 451-466. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370701665114

  • Brown, C., Czerniewicz, L., Mayiesela, T., & Huang, C.-W. (2016). A practice based approach to theorising digital education leadership. Commonwealth of Learning. http://dspace.col.org/bitstream/handle/11599/2542/PDF?sequence=4

  • Briones, R. L., Kuch, B., Liu, B. F., & Jin, Y. (2011). Keeping up with the digital age: How the American Red Cross uses social media to build relationships. Public Relations Review, 37(1), 37-43. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.12.006

  • Carpenter, D. M., Robertson, J. W., Johnson, M. E., & Blum, S. (2014). Social media analytics in education: What is it, how is it useful, and what does it tell us about how schools are discussed in social media? Journal of School Public Relations, 35(1), 7-43.

  • Cho, M., Schweickart, T., & Haase, A. (2014). Public engagement with nonprofit organisations on Facebook. Public Relations Review, 40(3), 565-567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.01.008

  • Cox, D., & McLeod, S. (2014). Social media strategies for school principals. NASSP Bulletin, 98(1), 5-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192636513510596

  • Çoruk, A. (2018). School principals’ opinions about public relations practices on schools. International Journal of Progressive Education, 14(2), 136-147.

  • Creswell, J. W. (2018). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (4th ed.). SAGE Publications. http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9299.00177

  • Curtis, L., Edwards, C., Fraser, K. L., Gudelsky, S., Holmquist, J., Thornton, K., & Sweetser, K. D. (2010). Adoption of social media for public relations by nonprofit organisations. Public Relations Review, 36(1), 90-92. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.10.003

  • Effing, R., & Spil, T. A. (2016). The social strategy cone: Towards a framework for evaluating social media strategies. International Journal of Information Management, 36(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.07.009

  • Eyrich, N., Padman, M. L., & Sweetser, K. D. (2008). PR practitioners’ use of social media tools and communication technology. Public Relations Review, 34(4), 412–414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2008.09.010

  • Go, E., & You, K. H. (2016). But not all social media are the same: Analyzing organisations’ social media usage patterns. Telematics and Informatics, 33(1), 176-186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2015.06.016

  • Houten, P. V. (2014). The development of public relation skills in aspiring community college presidents. Colorado State University. https://dspace.library.colostate.edu/bitstream/handle/10217/82674/VanHouten_colostate_0053A_12332.pdf?sequence=1

  • Johansson, B., & Larsson, L. (2015). The complexity of public relations work: PR managers in the public and private sector in Sweden. Nordicom Review, 36(1), 125-139.

  • Johnson, T. J., & Kaye, B. K. (2004). Wag the blog: How reliance on traditional media and the Internet influence credibility perceptions of weblogs among blog users. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 81, 622-642. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900408100310

  • Kelleher, T., & Sweetser, K. (2012). Social media adoption among university communicators. Journal of Public Relations Research, 24(2), 105-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2012.626130

  • Lopez, S. A. (2017). Experiences of Texas public school communication directors in the 21st Century: A phenomenological study. Sam Houston State University. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11875/2223

  • Moore, E. H., Bagin, D., & Gallagher, D. R. (2016). The school and community relations (11th ed.). Pearson.

  • Nah, S., & Saxton, G. (2013). Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organisations. New Media & Society, 15(2), 294-313. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812452411

  • Outvorst, F. V., Visker, C., & Waal, B. D. (2017). Digital leadership: The consequences of organizing and working in a digital society. In Proceedings Of The European Conference On Management, Leadership & Governance (pp. 43-471). ACPI.

  • Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods. Sage Publications.

  • Peruta, A., & Shields, A. B. (2016). Social media in higher education: Understanding how colleges and universities use Facebook. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 27(1), 131-143. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2016.1212451

  • Peruta, A., & Shields, A. B. (2018). Marketing your university on social media: A content analysis of Facebook post types and formats. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2018.1442896

  • Sheninger, E. (2014). Digital leadership: Changing paradigms for changing times. Corwin Press.

  • Smith, B. G. (2010). Socially distributing public relations: Twitter, Haiti, and interactivity in social media. Public Relations Review, 36(4), 329-335. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.08.005

  • Waters, R. D., Burnett, E., Lamm, A., & Lucas, J. (2009). Engaging stakeholders through social networking: How nonprofit organisations are using Facebook. Public Relations Review, 35(2), 102-106. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.01.006

  • Wiyono, B. B., Kusumaningrum, D. E., Triwiyanto, T., Sumarsono, R. B., Valdez, A. V., & Gunawan, I. (2019). The comparative analysis of using communication technology and direct techniques in building school public relation. In 2019 5th International Conference on Education and Technology (ICET) (pp. 81-86). IEEE.

ISSN 0128-7702

e-ISSN 2231-8534

Article ID

JSSH-7905-2020

Download Full Article PDF

Share this article

Recent Articles