Social Media, Traditional Media and Marketing Communication of Public Relations: A Study of Banking Industry

Public relations are undertaking more important role in the marketing communication and advertising. The present paper reports a survey conducted in three Iranian banks’ public relations departments to understand how they use different media in their marketing communications and other related functions. A classification of public relations functions including fourteen functions in three categories has taken as research framework and by using a questionnaire, eight media have been asked to rank for each function, includes Television, Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Classified Ads, Internet Websites, Social media and
finally Mobile and SMS ads. Findings show that traditional media still play a dominant role in media consumption of public relations, while new Web2.0 media consist of Mobile communications and Social networks, have never ranked better than fifth from eight. Some reasons have been argues in conclusion.