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An Exploration of the Organization-Public Relationship Through Online Media: The Case of the Tampa Bay Rays

ABSTRACT
Organizations are working to establish and maintain relationships with their target publics using a wide variety of communication tools. How they work at developing this organization-public relationship (OPR) is open to the organization, but previous research suggests there are measurement scales that can indicate what factors an organization may be doing right and those they may need to improve on.
This study examines relationship building efforts of the Tampa Bay Rays organization and the representation it has demonstrated through online content. Utilizing a content analysis, sample articles were collected and coded to examine if relationship components could be found through the organization's affiliated website and the target public's local newspaper. The structure and development of this study was created based on the relationship indicators that were established by Hon and Grunig (1999) and Huang (2001).
Based on the analysis of the results, it was discovered that OPR indicators were being used by the Tampa Bay Rays. Examples of commitment, satisfaction, and control mutuality were the most frequent indicators throughout the online content. Trust and face and favor were the two remaining indicators that showed the lowest frequency of representation through the online content.
From the study, the results revealed: (1) that differences in framing exist; (2) a representation of frequent OPR material and topics does occur; (3) there are thematic patterns on the part of the source; and finally, (4) the organization perspective of what may show up from online content may differ from the outside perspective.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:USF/oai:scholarcommons.usf.edu:etd-5558
Date01 January 2012
CreatorsLynch, Steven
PublisherScholar Commons
Source SetsUniversity of South Flordia
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceGraduate School Theses and Dissertations

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