Building relationship among stakeholder partners in social media: A baseline study for microfinance institutions in the Philippines

• Main Author: Antes, Raffy Mundo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Internet in public relations > Philippines; Microfinance > Philippines; Financial services industry > Philippines
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5749
• Institution: De La Salle University

There were various arguments and predictions that social media is promising and that it will force various organizations to rethink its approach on building relationship among its stakeholder partners. In the Philippines, especially from the microfinance industry, at least 62% are already in social media, where Facebook is the majority used platform; however, based on the communications audit conducted, 62% are focused on channeling information, 43% for public participation, and no microfinance NGOs (MFI NGOs) are into innovative financing scheme online. With respect to the genuineness of the relationship building strategies used, 34% of the MFI NGOs are into the genuine public relations strategies and 58% of the MFI NGOs are also capitalizing social media for marketing. In terms of stage of relationship building, MFI NGOs have already exceeded stage one, which is the starting point, and at now on stage two that is on the first level of relationship building. Hence, the engagement of MFI NGOs are still in its infancy and in terms of Aristotle's "ingredients for persuasion," the industry is still on its Ethos mode of persuasion. Given these results, this paper argues that the stage of social media use of MFI NGOs for relationship building is a reflection of their perceived and superficial characterization of their stakeholder partners reached and the social media platform available, their understanding of public relations and marketing, and the industry's low-key personality. There were some MFI NGOs that claimed that social media is not the best platform for their identified stakeholder partners, but as this paper further argues, one should not look at social media as an answer for all, given the current internet infrastructure we have in the Philippines, but as a complementary platform among other platforms.