Emergent methods: Using netnography in public relations research

This article suggests the use of netnography in public relations studies of online communities. It shares lessons from an unplanned and unexpected experience with members of an online community. It demonstrates how, in an environment of trust, respondents to online surveys can become engaged with the research, discuss it on their own online forum, and provide rich data that goes beyond their answers to quantitative online questionnaires. It draws from the author's experience while conducting an empirical study on the role of public relations in facilitating community networks. More specifically, the online survey examined the work of community network organizers who used the online platform Meetup.com to organize offline face-to-face community group activities (Toledano & Maplesden, 2016). That research aimed at tracing the involvement of public relations in online networks. The unexpected post-survey engagement with the participants involved netnography that provided significant additional evidence and insight. The article calls for the use of netnography in PR research to expand PR scholars' understanding of relevant communities through analysis of their internal genuine online conversations and the way they process organizational messages. The call takes evidence from the actual research on Meetup organizers (Toledano & Maplesden, 2016) to provide an example that demonstrates the potential benefit of using the emergent method of netnography.