The FINANCIAL -- 11 out of 80 answered The FINANCIAL’s questions sent by emails to the leading Georgian companies. The majority of companies questioned failed to meet deadline when answering very brief questions about their use of social networking websites like facebook and twitter for external communication. The experiment showed that companies are still unfamiliar with the advantages of the internet. External communications in Georgian companies are very slow and do not meet their deadlines.

At the beginning of the email they were notified that we were conducting research. The communication medium was just an email; we did not make any phone calls. The aim of the research was to find out if companies respond to emails and how quickly they do.

The queries were sent to banks, hotels, car dealer centres, beverage and drink production companies, construction companies, insurance companies, GSM communication companies, airline companies, oil companies, cinemas, supermarkets, universities, pharmaceutical companies and IT companies.

The companies were given 2 days to send back their answers to the yes/no questions. The deadline for submitting answers was clearly indicated in the email. Actually only 11 companies provided answers within the deadline. TBC Bank was the fastest among them. Redix, Rakeen, Goodwill, Bank of Georgia , UGT, Tegeta Motors, VTEL Georgia LLC, Badagoni and Delta-Comm Ltd also met the deadline.

Everyone that answered the queries said that they had a web-page and systematically updated it. For intercommunication channels, they mostly use intranets. Companies are sharing information via email and Skype. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites are often ignored. 

There are 21,700 corporate pages on facebook. Just a few of them are Georgian. The FINANCIAL’s study shows that facebook and twitter pages are mainly used by governmental institutions. For example Georgia’s Tourism Department and President’s Administration have daily updated pages on twitter.

Cinema Rustaveli and Rustaveli National Theatre both have facebook pages. The latter has 2,025 fans. It means that 2,025 active users deliver updates from the theatre.

Rakeen Development LLC, one of the leading construction and development company constantly updates its facebook page. “On Facebook we place the general info about Rakeen projects in Georgia, all additional info is a matter of online discussion,” Sophio Mamardashvili PR and Event Manager of Rakeen, told the FINANCIAL.

“We use a Cisco Unified Communication solution inside the company, we also use Asterisk, Microsoft exchange and Skype,” says Alexander Jakhua, ICT Manager of Delta-Comm Itd.

Redix, one of the leading Georgian developing companies says Outlook and Skype is more useful for distributing and transferring the huge capacity files.

Levan Kasradze, the PR Manager of Pepsi, says that the company has a global official page on Facebook and at present they are working to develop a local one.

“At present we do not have any page on facebook, however, mostly all the staff members are registered independently,” PR Manager of Redix, Mzia Sharashidze, told The FINANCIAL.

“We have just spoken of the importance of having a page on Facebook, in the nearest future we will probably launch one, for the information upload we would not recruit anyone, as the page will be managed by the Manager of Public Relations.”

However Alexander Jakhua, ICT Manager of Delta-Comm Itd, believes that having a corporate Facebook page is expensive and demands extra cost and extra staff.

“Our target audience is corporations and we do not need mass marketing. That’s why we have no official page on Facebook,” Ani Nadiradze, the PR manager of UGT, explained.

As for VTEL Georgia LLC, Ano Gogichadze, Marketing Communications Manager, says that Facebook is not the page they actively use for promotion, they prefer advertising on YouTube by uploading TV commercials, however sometimes Facebook is still used for event promotion.

“We do not have Facebook due to a lack of time,” Natia Sopromadze, the PR Manager of Tegeta Motors, told The FINANCIAL.

Teona Bagdavadze, Course Director of London School of Public Relations and Branding speaks of the importance of PR and makes the comparison between Old Style PR, which is still observed in countries with a developing economy, and Modern PR.

“Old style PR was more media relations oriented and did not believe in research and strategic planning as the most important tools,” says Teona Bagdavadze, Course Director of London School of Public Relations and Branding.

However Modern PR recognizes the importance of strategic planning, reputation management, stakeholder relations and issue management. Nowadays it’s proved that the media is not always considered the only tool for communication. The rise of Social Media (Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace) gave Public Relations Professionals an additional important communication tool which is more and more frequently used to deliver key messages or to change the attitude or behaviour of the certain stakeholder.”

Finally I would like to add that Modern PR does not operate in isolation, and integration is the key to all modern communication methods. The idea behind this notion of integration is that all elements of the communication mix can be integrated and used to achieve PR aims.

Related Stories

• Saving Cards - Does They Really Work?
• Ideas for Home Based Professions
• Air-tickets in Georgia Cost Less than their Tax