Scholarly record

NEW MEDIA AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION. A MULTIPLE ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN BANK ONLINE ENVIRONMENT

Victor-Alexandru A. Briciu, A. Briciu, S. M. Gaitan

Abstract

This paper aims to briefly present the ways of communication and promotion of Romanian banks through the online environment. The underlying motivation of this work is the particular importance of virtual communication. This is a defining feature of contemporary societies, being preferred by organizations, especially thanks to the technological means of communication. They use all existing media, from traditional to unconventional events. Today, organizations increasingly rely on online communication (social networks, blogs, official site, newsletter, digital marketing). Thus, new media has brought changes in the field of marketing, in particular about how to address consumers, the relationships that can be created between brands and consumers, and the role of different means of promoting consumer and brand communication. In the same time, social media became increasingly important in marketing communication due to its rapid expansion. Specialists in the field have identified the opportunities offered by social media and used them in promotion. Social media includes social networks, the most used services being Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Social networks are mostly used by companies to help them increase loyalty, news distribution, organizing competitions (helping to increase the visibility of brands and the number of customers), increasing sales, but also the visibility of the company and its notoriety in the online environment. The purpose of the paper is to identify the main ways in which Romanian banks communicate and promote themselves online through new media on two distinctive directions: through the Facebook social network and through their official website. To achieve the objectives, a descriptive research was conducted, using the content analysis as the research method and the frequency analysis as a technique. A theoretical sampling and a partially guided sampling method based on accessibility (availability) was carried out. The corpus of research was constituted by all the banks in Romania, according to the list from the official website of the National Bank of Romania (from April 2018), and the sample is represented by those banks in the list that meet the criterion of having an official website. Thus, the volume of the sample included in the analysis is 18 cases. The first research tool (coding scheme) contains five categories of information based on the content and structure of the official websites of the selected banks, based on the models proposed by Pollach, Pinterits and Treiblmaier (2006) with the following dimensions for site analysis and evaluation: navigation, interaction, accessibility, organizational information and the model created by Miranda, Cortes and Barriuso (2006) based on the following dimensions for site analysis: content, navigation, accessibility, speed. The second research tool for the Facebook page contains four major categories of information provided directly on the page: visual content, written content (status) consisting of page postings, company base information and content of Facebook activities. In conclusion, this study provides an overview of new media communication in the Romanian banking environment. Banks choose to communicate and promote themselves using Facebook tools and the official website to create an online presence. Banks make an impression always in a favorable light and prefer online promotion because they are cheaper, simpler and reach a larger number of people than traditional TV or print media. Because Internet users access Facebook to interact and reach about news, a bank can use both the Facebook page and the official website to promote products as well as attract and retain customers.

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