Trends in media relations: An exploratory study in Italy

This paper reports on an exploratory study of how Italian companies are using the Internet for public relations. The research looked at a sample of 192 companies belonging to different sectors: manufacturing companies, commercial and service companies, banking-insurance companies, and finance. Interestingly, even though many of the top companies maintain online media rooms, no companies run corporate blogs. The Italian companies, no matter the industry they belong to, do not take full advantage of the Internet to support corporate communication: Italy lags far behind the desirable levels of integration and use achieved by, for instance, American companies.