A RESEARCH UPON VIRTUAL PRESS ROOMS USAGE: FORTUNE 500 TURKEY SAMPLE

Abstract

Corporations have started to utilize the web for their media practices while public relations practices have been moved onto the web with the development of new communications technologies. It is the same for the journalists as they have turned towards the web environments to gather news. This study has examined Fortune 500 Turkey's corporations' use of corporate web sites to communicate with journalists and their use of dialogic components on the web sites press rooms. The study is a kind of repetition of Pettigrew and Reber's study, thus the aim, which is also the same, is to try to reveal how dialogic communications is handled by corporations for their public relations practices in Turkey. Moreover, a comparison between corporations in America and in Turkey is made in order to reveal similarities and differences in public relations practises of these corporations. The study also seeks to reveal whether corporations have started to integrate social media tools onto their corporate web sites. Thus, top 50 web sites from Fortune 500 Turkey companies were analysed accordingly with a content analysis. Results revealed that corporations have not been able to utilize dialogic components of web sites effectively in order to communicate dialogically with journalists. Corporations in America are better than the ones in Turkey in terms of web site components that will strengthen dialogic communication with journalists and in terms of use of internet's features. However, it promises hope to see that corporations in Turkey have started to integrate the most popular social media tools of today onto their web sites.