CORPORATE COMMUNICATION IN THE NEW MEDIA ENVIRONMENT
By LEMA BARAKA (BAPRM 3/42592)

Corporations are increasingly faced with challenges caused by the development of new media. The internet is changing business models, value chains and distribution systems. Additionally, the internet increases the value of communication in the so called “economy of attention”, regarding the difficulty for corporations to reach their target group’s windows of attention. Today’s predominant problem is no longer the production of goods and services, but their communication [Schmid, 2000]. The logic behind these approaches is: If the target groups of companies don’t know both, the products and the companies behind the products, they might not want to buy those products. If they don’t know the (corporate) brand which is today predominant for buyers choices they won’t rely on the company (You don’t buy books online, you buy at amazon.com). Therefore communication becomes a more important factor for the success of a company. In the past years many companies created their own web site to serve as a communication platform with their target groups. Corporate web sites are used for online communication with various target groups of a company. They are usually structured according to certain business and communication models giving a site its structure. As various communication models are well known for offline communication, we wanted to find out, whether these were also used for online communication. In addition to that we investigated whether corporate web sites offer interactive services and whether content is distributed using a classical target group or a community driven approach (see also Will/Geissler [2000] for the implications of the internet on corporate communication). In a first step we will introduce a communication model, which was developed at the Center for Corporate Communication, which is based on distinguished author’s approaches. Step two will explain the research questions for this paper and show the conducted survey. In step three results will be discussed, and conclusions will be drawn. I. The model This article is not about the various implications of the internet for business in a narrow sense of meaning. It examines the influence of the internet on business and communication with a wider sense of meaning: We take an holistic communication model from the old economy “for granted” and research, whether this is applied or even adapted to the internet. Thus, we do not examine, which instruments are being used by corporations for their corporate communication, and what their organization looks like, but we analyze, whether such complex models are used for corporation’s web-based communication. The chosen communication model differs from classical communication science models in being focused solely on corporate communication. The chosen model from Will [1999, 2000], is based on similar approaches from distinguished authors such as Argenti [1998] and van Riel [1995, 1997]. Argenti, for example, names several functions of coporate communication, as there are media relations, financial communication, employee communication, corporate image and identity, corporate advertising, government affairs, etc. The messages, created by these communication functions, are communicated to specific constituencies. These functions are integrated in the larger context of a corporate communication strategy model. The corporate communication strategy model describes the communication process – where an organization creates specific messages for certain constituencies and measures the respond of each constituency, which is compared to the intended reaction.