Laura Illia, Elanor Colleoni and Katia Meggiorin
The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore under which conditions Tweets of infomediaries (i.e. ordinary users having few or no followers on Twitter) might nevertheless…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore under which conditions Tweets of infomediaries (i.e. ordinary users having few or no followers on Twitter) might nevertheless promote a negative sentiment toward a corporation to the point of having a negative impact on the corporation's outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical study is based on a unique database that combines a sample of one year of Twitter conversations about an Italian bank and its daily business performances (i.e. number of closures and openings). The relationship between these two is analyzed using autoregressive time series models (VAR).
Findings
Findings indicate that a tweet affects a bank’s outcomes only when embedded in a larger conversation about the bank, rather than simply repetitively shared. These findings contribute to two debates within bank marketing literature. First is the debate about the role of infomediaries in banks' outcomes, as it urges to reconsider the way banks' online reputation is conceptualized and measured. Second is the debate on opportunities and threats of social media for the banking industry, as it indicates that negative sentiment expressed by the general public influences not only stock markets but also directly banks' outcomes.
Originality/value
This study allows managers and corporations to understand what to do when conversations of unknown individuals become threatening for the company. To influence such situations, the company should identify not only the actors that are influencers but also the communications that have been popular in the past for their brand or the brand of their competitors and monitor the conversational volume and broadness.
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Laura Illia, Michael Etter, Katia Meggiorin and Elanor Colleoni
Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an…
Abstract
Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.
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Stefania Romenti, Elanor Colleoni, Grazia Murtarelli and Camilla Moroni
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into business operations at various levels, it offers not only new opportunities but also complex ethical challenges…
Abstract
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into business operations at various levels, it offers not only new opportunities but also complex ethical challenges. These challenges often manifest as reputational risks when stakeholders perceive ethical missteps in the use of AI that can escalate into corporate crises.
Using a unique database of AI failures and related litigation, this chapter examines the emerging types of reputational issues and the corresponding crisis communications responses of companies engaging with AI, with the overarching goal of exploring the factors driving the various response strategies. This analysis contributes to the emerging field of AI ethics by explicitly linking it to crisis communication, highlighting the critical role of ethical considerations in managing reputational risk.
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Mirko Olivieri, Elanor Colleoni and Giuseppe Bonaccorso
Because of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, online platforms where travelers' comments and reviews are published have grown considerably. More specifically, in the tourism sector…
Abstract
Because of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, online platforms where travelers' comments and reviews are published have grown considerably. More specifically, in the tourism sector, these social evaluations have been shown to have a strong influence as online platforms, such as online travel agencies (OTA), represent a main touchpoint for the formation process of the online corporate reputation. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate how the pandemic has influenced the online reputation formation of tourism companies and which are the new reputation pillars emerging from the COVID-19. To achieve this research aim, we analyzed the customers' reviews as reported publicly on TrustPilot.com, an online platform that allows customers to review businesses after a purchase or contact with their customer service, before and after COVID-19 so as to identify significant changes in the corporate reputational drivers of LastMinute.com. With this study we have identified the four topic clusters and their sentiment in the two periods of consideration, and we have found that the corporate reputation of tourism companies is formed today starting from different consumer needs. Finally, managerial implications for communication professionals operating in tourism firms are presented.
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Organization legitimacy is a general reflection of the relationship between an organization and its environment. By adopting an institutional approach and defining moral…
Abstract
Purpose
Organization legitimacy is a general reflection of the relationship between an organization and its environment. By adopting an institutional approach and defining moral legitimacy as “a positive normative evaluation of the organization and its activities”, the goal of this paper is to investigate which corporate communication strategy adopted in online social media is more effective to create convergence between corporations' corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda and stakeholders' social expectations, and thereby, to increase corporate legitimacy.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the entire Twitter social graph, a network analysis was carried out to study the structural properties of the CSR community, such as the level of reciprocity, and advanced data mining techniques, i.e. topic and sentiment analysis, were carried out to investigate the communication dynamics.
Findings
Evidence was found that neither the engaging nor the information strategies lead to alignment. The assumption of the more the dialog, the more the communality seems to fail to portray the complexity of the communicational dynamics, such as the persistence of different, or simply a dialog without alignment. Empirical findings show that, even when engaging in a dialogue, communication in social media is still conceived as a marketing practice to convey messages about companies.
Originality/value
This paper originally investigates organizational legitimacy in the context of social media by applying advanced data‐mining techniques that allow the analysis of large amounts of information available online.
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Urša Golob, Klement Podnar, Wim J. Elving, Anne Ellerup Nielsen, Christa Thomsen and Friederike Schultz
This paper aims to introduce the special issue on CSR communication attached to the First International CSR Communication Conference held in Amsterdam in October 2011. The aim of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to introduce the special issue on CSR communication attached to the First International CSR Communication Conference held in Amsterdam in October 2011. The aim of the introduction is also to review CSR communication papers published in scholarly journals in order to make a summary of the state of CSR communication knowledge.
Design/methodology/approach
The existing literature on CSR communication was approached via systematic review. with a combination of conventional and summative qualitative content analysis. The final dataset contained 90 papers from two main business and management databases, i.e. EBSCOhost and ProQuest.
Findings
Papers were coded into three main categories. The results show that the majority of the papers are concerned with disclosure themes. Considerably less salient are papers that fall under process‐oriented themes and the outcomes/consequences of CSR communications. The most important outlets for CSR communication‐related topics are Journal of Business Ethics and Corporate Communications: An International Journal.
Originality/value
This paper represents the first attempt to perform a systematic and comprehensive overview of CSR communication papers in scholarly journals. Its value is in making this rather vast and heterogeneous literature more visible and accessible to all CSR communication scholars.
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Malak Hamade, Khaled Hussainey and Khaldoon Albitar
This systematic review aims to comprehensively explore the existing literature on the use of corporate communication within the realm of social media.
Abstract
Purpose
This systematic review aims to comprehensively explore the existing literature on the use of corporate communication within the realm of social media.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 136 peer-reviewed journal articles are explored and analysed using both performance and bibliometric analysis.
Findings
This review identifies five main findings: (1) trends in corporate social media research that highlight the growth trajectory of research on social media use for corporate disclosure, (2) geographical coverage of studies indicating the concentration of research in certain regions, such as the USA, followed by China and the UK, with notable gaps in others, such as developing countries, (3) theoretical frameworks employed demonstrate that various theoretical frameworks are utilized, although a significant portion of the studies do not specify any theoretical underpinning, (4) social media platforms studied, confirming Twitter to be the most studied channel followed by Facebook and (5) thematic analysis of articles on disclosure type that categorized the articles using bibliometric analysis into five themes of disclosure: general disclosure, corporate social responsibility-related information, financial information, CEO announcements and strategic news communication. A subsequent cross-theme analysis classifies disclosure determinants and consequences of corporate social media usage.
Originality/value
Through a comprehensive and systematic analysis of existing research, this review offers novel insights into the current state of corporate communication on social media. It consolidates current knowledge, highlights under-explored areas in the existing literature and proposes new directions and potential avenues for future research.