[Air-L] PRism Special Issue CFP: 'Fandom, Brands and Public Relations'

[Amber Hutchins]

PRism Special Issue CFP: 'Fandom, Brands and Public Relations',

Amber Hutchins and Natalie Tindall, prfandom at gmail.com

Traditional public relations methods of communicating with target publics
have changed. The idea of engaged publics or audiences has arisen in
multiple fields, including audience studies, media studies, sport culture,
participatory culture, marketing, cultural studies, and public relations.
The conceptions of the public in previous models are no longer valid across
all campaigns.

With the advent of social media, content producers and audiences can be one
and the same. Fans have more ownership on a global scale, without the
limitations of physical proximity, yet our current conceptions of public do
not delineate between active and super-active publics, let alone discuss
engagement with information beyond processing and seeking it or dealing
with publics virtually who are highly motivated to communicate with
organizations and brands. Also, in public relations, there is a huge shift
to community managers. Yet, there is not a lot of knowledge about the
publics who are interacting within the community; this is a place where
this special issue can provide significant insight.

Fandom and participatory culture have been identified, discussed, and
lamented over in these areas and in various global contexts, and these
conversations are synonymous and parallel with the ideas outlined in the
segmentation strategies and the robust research on the situational theory
of publics.

However, little conversation between those areas has occurred. For example,
online community management of fans and critics is a relatively new method
practitioners use to engage stakeholders and public. Although there has
been some work on offline community management (or brand communities),
primarily in fields outside of public relations, there is not much
available for online communities. The work that has been done has been
focused on marketing or cultural studies. If you look at our leading public
relations and strategic communication journals, research on fans is rare,
and the attempt to connect fandom research to segmentation and other public
relations theory is nonexistent.

The goal of this project is to bring scholarly attention to the
disciplines' interaction, engagement, and interaction with fans who are
publics. The purpose of this special issue is to integrate stakeholder and
publics theories with those of participatory cultures and media studies/fan
perspectives; to add new, fresh insight into the public relations
discipline's concepts of publics and segmentation; and to apply new
research and understandings of publics.

* Submission deadline: 1st February 2014

* Anticipated publication date: During the 2014 calendar year

Submissions for review should be sent to Amber Hutchins and Natalie T.J.
Tindall, prfandom at gmail.com

See the full call on the PRism website at
http://www.prismjournal.org/cfpfandom.html


Dr. Amber Hutchins
Public Relations Program Director
Digital & Social Media Graduate Certificate Coordinator
Department of Communication
Kennesaw State University
ahutch13 at kennesaw.edu
770.794.7749