CSR communication strategies for organizational legitimacy
in Social Media
Marcin Szewczyk & Elanor Colleoni
Danish Technical University
Copenhagen Business School
• 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
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Topics
Companies
Audience
Results- Is there congruence between companies and audience?
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 70
0.05
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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