Social Media Adoption among Public Relations Practitioners in Qatar
Mohamed Kirat, PhD

Abstract
This study looks at how PR practitioners in the state of Qatar are adopting social media and how they are using it to perform various PR activities. This paper builds on Wright and Henson and Alikilic and Atabek studies. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to public relations practitioners working for government and private organizations in the country. Two hundred and thirty three PR professionals from 48 institutions participated in the study. The questionnaire addressed the following issues: Patterns of social media usage by PR practitioners for public relations activities; social media and its impact on the practice of public relations; social media impact on organization‟s publics, and entity in charge of monitoring and managing social media in the organization. Findings of the study showthat public relations practitioners in Qatar are highly aware of the importance of social media in enhancing public relations activities. On the social and emerging media impact on the organization‟s activities findings indicate that there is a significant impact on the communication activities of the organization.As for the social media use for public relations activities, findings of the study show that corporate website comes first with 75.1% followed respectively by electronic mail72.2%, Intranet35.7%, social networks 24.6%, video and photo sharing 20.6%; blogs 19.8%, forum and news groups 18.4%, instant messaging 17.6% and podcast, wikis and social bookmarking 11.7, 11.7 and 11.6 respectively. Public relations practitioners in Qatar believe social media has a considerable impact on organization‟s publics, and 90% of them think that public relations department should monitor and manage social media in the organization.

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