A Typology of Media Users in a Multinational Corporation

Due to the contemporary action of a number of variables, large organizations can be hardly considered communities of similar types of media users. Likely, they are populated by different groups, which mix in different ways within and between departments, functions and groups. The identification of the types and characteristics of media users is vital for effective internal and external communication. Among three European subsidiaries of a large American corporation three groups have been evidenced, and depicted as characterized by traditional, computer-mediated, and multi-media users. They present quite marked differences in terms of actual communication means, gender, age, and education level. It emerged that email use intensity is a good proxy to identify the types, because traditional media users are totally uncorrelated with this index, while the other two groups are positively correlated and associate with it growing from multi-media to CMC. These latter can also be identified by looking at the number of work related emails.