CSR communication strategies for organizational legitimacy

in Social Media

Marcin Szewczyk & Elanor Colleoni

Danish Technical University

Copenhagen Business School

Model- Communication Strategies for Corporate Legitimacy

• The creation of a “congruence between the social values associated with or implied by [organizational] activities and the norms of acceptable behavior in the larger social system” (Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975: p.122) lies at the core of the legitimacy of business in society.

• Obtaining legitimacy by “aligning corporate behavior with stakeholder expectations” (Dawkins, 2004: p.108) is necessary to guarantee the corporation’s continued existence.

Defining Corporate Legitimacy

Theoretical Question: Is there an alignment between companies CSR agenda and stakeholders social expectations?

Empirical Question: Do the companies and their audiences discuss about similar arguments and with similar vocabularies?

Research Question-RQ1

Theoretical Question: Do the different communication strategies lead to different convergence outputs?

Empirical Question: If we identify the topics of discussion, do the companies and their audiences share the same attention and opinion towards the topics?

Research Question-RQ2

• Why in social media?• We use Twitter from 2009• We identify the CSR accounts of seven companies based

on the 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2009 list redacted by Corporate Responsibility Magazine (2009) :

Starbucks, Ford, SmarterPlanet, Microsoft, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Campbell, Xcel Energy

(Thanks to our colleague Michael Etter )• We download the networks of these companies (i.e. the

online audiences) and their conversations… about 10K users and 300M tweets

Data-

Corporate Communication

Flow

@DIRECT messages

@RETWEET

Strategies Reciprocity

Self-Centered NoNo direct

communicationNo

Mediated Experts Experts Experts

Dialogical Audience Audience Experts Audience Experts

Method– Identifying the communication strategies in Twitter

• We first selected the CSR-related tweets from the general conversations using a Bayesian Classifier

• We use Latent Semantic Analysis in order to extract the “conceptual spaces” that represent the “topics” (i.e. CSR themes).

Method- Identifying the topics of discussion

• We define the attention as the relative amount of conversation generated by a topic

• We use sentiment analysis to identify the affective orientation towards a topic (i.e. opinion).

Sentiment analysis is a data mining techniques that allows subjective perceptions to acquire an objective existence as observable and measurable forms (Colleoni et al., 2011).

Method- Identifying the attention and the sentiment towards the topics

FeaturesDegree of Reciprocity

withDegree of Conversation

Communication Strategy

Corporation Experts AudienceExperts Audience

@DIRECT

@RT@DIREC

T@RT

Ford 95.11% 94.63% 0,00% 1,12% 7,87% 8,99% Self-centered

Starbucks 94.46% 89.25% 0,67% 0,33% 44,15% 5,02% Dialogical

Smarter Planet 82.05% 70.24% 0,00% 3,17% 17,46% 36,51% Dialogical

Green Mountain

Coffee Roasters61.80% 45.15% 1,08% 0,22% 43,87% 12,47% Dialogical

Xcel Energy 41.66% 33.61% 8,15% 0,00% 11,11% 16,30% Self-centered

Campbell 23.07% 14.50% 2,38% 0,00% 2,38% 9,52% Self-centered

Microsoft 0% 1.90% 1.08% 3.60% 1,80% 31,65% Self-centered

Results- We didn’t find evidence of the mediated strategy….

ThemeTopics

Keywords

Information seekingEnergy & green & us

Power, wind and solar associated with free, look, share

Information seekingThank & Share

Energy and solar with thank, share, great, day

Sustainable Debate Energy & Solar & RenewGreen, solar, energy but both

without associations with news or business

Sustainable DebateHealth & Care Us, health, energy, solar, care

Market Free & business & makeBusiness, make, market, work,

blog

Democracy Democracy & supportTwitter, support, show, Iran,

democracy

Results- We found six topics of discussion between companies and audience

Companies Audience

Results- The vocabulary of the companies does not vary among strategies, but….

Dialogical Strategy: Most frequent words for Companies and Audience

Results- The vocabulary of the companies does not vary among strategies, but….

Companies Audience

Information Strategy: Most frequent words for Companies and Audience

Results- Is there congruence between companies and audience?

Informational Strategy- Attention and Affective orientation’s Congruence by topic, Audience and Companies

energy & green & us

thank & sharesolar & renew

health & care

business & makedemocracy

0

0,05

0,1

0,15

0,2

0,25

0,3

0,35

0,4

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Se

nti

me

nt

Topics

Companies

Audience

Results- Is there congruence between companies and audience?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 70

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

0.35

0.4

Series3

solar & renew

health & care

business & make

democracy

Companies

Audience

Topics

Sen

tim

ent

Dialogical Strategy- Attention and Affective orientation’s Congruence by topic, Audience and Companies