THE ROLE AND APPLICATION OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AS A PUBLIC RELATIONS TECHNIQUE: EXAMPLES OF INTERNET CAMPAIGNS

Sa？etak The paper deals with the concept of corporate social responsibility as a public relations technique implemented with the two goals (Tench, 2009, p.111): a) the responsibility of an organization to act for the benefit of the society within which it operates, b) to impact positively on an organization’s image and reputation on the societies point of view, and/or more specifically, engaged stakeholders – in order to gain profit. The goal of this paper is to present/visualize the role of corporate social responsibility and ways how to be applied in contemporary public relations. Two case studies show examples of such campaigns: a) Croatian campaign by O？ujsko beer, Po？e？i s razlogom, aiming to raise awareness among the tar - get audience on the ways of early detection of testicular cancer and its treatment, and the other one is French campaign by an online portal Addict Aide that became popular worldwide, called Like my Addiction, aiming to raise awareness on alcoholism among young generations. A content analysis conducted on published social media posts determined different approaches of using social media platforms, although their key messages were similar. By presenting advantages and disadvantages of the Internet, in comparison to the offline (virtual) media, this paper illustrates the opportunities enabled by contemporary public relations, as well as whether the communication results of both campaigns were substantial for the society