New Communication Technologies in Spanish University Communication Departments

New communication technologies provide several benefits to public relations practitioners. On one hand, they facilitate a better flow of information and a broader coverage. On the other hand, they encourage public relations practitioners from technician roles to manager roles, at the same time they increment their power within their organization. Those are the reasons why new communication technologies are becoming a trend in the public relations field. The aim of this research is to study the implementation of different new tactics in the universities of Spain, both public and private. For that, a questionnaire was sent to the heads of the university communication departments asking them about their use of new communication technologies with different publics. Results show that Spanish universities make an extensive use of some traditional tools, such as web pages, email, social network and intranet. Many of them also broadcast different events through the Web and offer virtual press sites for the media. Nevertheless, they do not use many new tools, like podcasts, forums, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, Bluetooth, augmented reality, SMS or videoconferences. On the other hand, public universities employ slightly more technologies than private ones, although the disparities are very small. In conclusion, Spanish university communication departments have similar characteristics in their use of new communication technologies: they employ traditional and established tactics, but they do not extensively benefit from all the technologies available.