Public relations and social media: Deliberate or creative strategic planning

The subject of the presented exploratory study is the strategic planning of the daily professional activities of managers in social media (SM). Is this planning deliberate, or emergent? Are the strategies prescribed, or creative? To what communication logics must professionals adapt their practices? Following the sociology of uses studied in the approach to SM appropriation in the field of corporate communication, these questions are tackled through a qualitative, descriptive approach. The dual objective is to describe the actual professional practices of SM managers and compare them to the theories found in the literature. To do this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 managers active in SM in North American organizations. During these, practices emerged for which the standards were not always prescribed.