CSR Communication via New, Social & Mobile media

1. CSR communication strategies
for organizational legitimacy
in Social Media
Marcin Szewczyk & Elanor Colleoni
Danish Technical University
Copenhagen Business School

2. Model- Communication Strategies for
Corporate Legitimacy

3. Defining 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.

4. Research Question-
RQ1
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?

5. Research Question-
RQ2
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?

6. Data-
• 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

7. Method– Identifying the
communication strategies in Twitter
Corporate
@DIRECT
Communication @RETWEET
messages
Flow
Strategies Reciprocity
No direct
Self-Centered No No
communication
Mediated Experts Experts Experts
Dialogical Audience Audience Experts Audience Experts

8. Method- Identifying the topics of
discussion
• 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).

9. Method- Identifying the attention
and the sentiment towards the topics
• 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).

10. Results- We didn’t find evidence of
the mediated strategy….
Degree of Reciprocity
Features Degree of Conversation
with
Communication
Experts Audience Strategy
Corporation Experts Audience @DIREC @DIREC
@RT @RT
T T
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 61.80% 45.15% 1,08% 0,22% 43,87% 12,47% Dialogical
Coffee Roasters
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

11. Results- We found six topics of discussion
between companies and audience
Topics
Theme Keywords
Information seeking Power, wind and solar associated
Energy & green & us
with free, look, share
Information seeking Energy and solar with thank, share,
Thank & Share
great, day
Green, solar, energy but both
Sustainable Debate Energy & Solar & Renew without associations with news or
business
Sustainable Debate
Health & Care Us, health, energy, solar, care
Business, make, market, work,
Market Free & business & make blog
Twitter, support, show, Iran,
Democracy Democracy & support
democracy

12. Results- The vocabulary of the companies
does not vary among strategies, but….
Dialogical Strategy: Most frequent words for Companies and Audience
Companies Audience

13. Results- The vocabulary of the companies
does not vary among strategies, but….
Information Strategy: Most frequent words for Companies and Audience
Companies Audience

14. Results- Is there congruence between
companies and audience?
Informational Strategy- Attention and Affective orientation’s
Congruence by topic, Audience and Companies
0,4
0,35
0,3
0,25
Sentiment
0,2
Companies
thank & share
solar & renew
Audience
0,15
health & care
0,1 energy & green & us democracy
business & make
0,05
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Topics

15. Results- Is there congruence between
companies and audience?
Dialogical Strategy- Attention and Affective orientation’s
Congruence by topic, Audience and Companies
0.45
0.4
0.35
0.3
solar & renew
Sentiment
0.25
2
0.2
Companies
0.15 Audience
health & care
0.1 democracy
1
business & make
0.05
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Topics