Michael Etter

Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet and we are interested in which dimensions of the content of a tweet leads to retweeting. We hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. Our findings may be summarized ‘If you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public’.

Broadcasting, reacting, engaging – three strategies for CSR communication in Twitter

Purpose – Symmetric communication and relationship building are core principles of public relations, which have been highlighted for CSR communication. The purpose of this paper is to develop three different communication strategies for CSR communication in Twitter, of which each contributes differently to the ideals of symmetric communication and relationship building. The framework is then applied to analyze how companies use the micro-blogging service Twitter for CSR communication. Design/methodology/approach – Social network analysis is used to identify the 30 most central corporate accounts in a CSR Twitter network. Findings – From the social network analysis 40,000 tweets are extracted and manually coded. Anova is applied to investigate differences in the weighting of CSR topics between the different strategies. Originality/value – So far not much is known about how social media, such as Twitter, contribute to the core principles of public relations, if companies use social media to foster symmetric...

Facebook and the public framing of a corporate crisis

Purpose – It is crucial for corporate communication to know how different public sources frame a crisis and how these sources influence each other. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of Facebook by examining – if the public represented on Facebook contributes distinct frames to the discursive negotiation of a crisis at all, and whether the public represented on Facebook is able to influence the crisis framing of news media. Design/methodology/approach – The authors compared how four different public sources framed the Nestle Kit Kat crisis: news media, corporate communication, NGOs, and Facebook users. The authors therefore, coded 5,185 sentences from the four sources and conducted a frame-analysis through the detection of co-occurrence between actors and attributions. A cross-correlation with a seven-day lag in each direction was applied to detect the frame-setting effects between the public represented on Facebook and news media. Findings – While the public represented on Facebook is f...

Hypertextuality and Social Media: A Study of the Constitutive and Paradoxical Implications of Organizational Twitter Use

Texts and conversations are central to the constitution of organizations. Through the use of social media technologies, organizational members and nonorganizational members alike have the capacity to author organizational texts that co-constitute an organization as an entity with a specific identity in a situational space and time. The implications of this ability are underexplored. This study focused on how two organizations used the social media technology Twitter to interact with their constituents. The article adopts communication-centered and sociomateriality perspectives to illustrate how Twitter interactions (hashtags) become hypertexts that simultaneously coproduce an organizational actor and act as a pastiche of the organization (i.e., a vehicle of contestation for the specific identity they were designed to bring into existence). The findings provide a novel understanding of hypertextuality as the process through which an organization is temporarily co-constituted by both inter- and intraorganizational discursive-material interactions across spaces and times.

Die Ökonomie der Verantwortung – eine wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Perspektive auf CSR

Die Frage ob Unternehmen eine gesellschaftliche Verantwortung wahrzunehmen haben, und wenn ja, auf welche Art und Weise, wird seit geraumer Zeit unter dem Schlagwort „Corporate Social Responsibility“ (CSR) kontrovers diskutiert. Die Forderung nach mehr unternehmerischer Verantwortung ist auf der einen Seite den steigenden Anspruchen von Kunden, Regierungen und auserparlamentarischen Interessengruppen an die gesellschaftliche Rolle von Unternehmen geschuldet. Aber auch auf Unternehmensseite ist die Institutionalisierung von gesellschaftsgerichteten Policies und Masnahmen bereits weit vorangeschritten.

Collective remembering of organizations: Co-construction of organizational pasts in Wikipedia

Purpose – How organizations’ pasts are presented to the public is crucial, because this presentation shapes corporate reputations. Increasingly, various actors contribute to the public remembering of organizations with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a global memory place, where the pasts of organizations are communicatively co-constructed by actors of a loosely connected community. Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyze 1,459 edits of Wikipedia pages of ten organizations from various industries. Quantitative content analysis detects Wikipedia edits for their reputational relevance and reference to formal sources, such as corporate communication or newspapers. Furthermore, the authors investigate to which degree current corporate communication in form of 177 press releases has an influence on the remembering process in Wikipedia. Findings – The analysis shows how the continuous construction o...

Privacy in the Sharing Economy

Report from the EU H2020 Research Project Ps2Share: Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy

European Perspectives on Privacy in the Sharing Economy

The present report ‘Privacy in the Sharing Economy: European Perspectives’, covers the Privacy part of Ps2share: a European Horizon 2020 Research Project focusing on the sharing economy. Within this document, we present the results of a widespread European survey (N=6111), covering both users and non-users of sharing economy services. The first section of the report provides an overview of the privacy perceptions of users VS non-users of the sharing economy, highlighting important country differences. In the following chapters, we explore in more depth how providers within the platforms (such as Airbnb hosts, or Uber drivers) as well as consumers perceive their privacy, both online and when it comes to face-to-face interaction. In the last section, we explore impression management as a tool to control information disclosure, and the risks sharing economy users perceive from third-party reviews and comments.

Forms of Talk-Action-Inconsistency: Introducing Reverse Coupling

Several management approaches challenge the idea of consistency and strict coupling between managerial talk, understood as official proclamations and policies, and corresponding organizational action (see introduction to this forum). While there seems to be a shared line of critique toward the ideal of consistency, little analytic focus has been placed on different emphases and evaluations of inconsistency developed by these approaches. This essay presents a systematic comparison of these differences and contributes a more comprehensive understanding of inconsistency in terms of different emphases on talk, action, and the coupling of talk and action. Based on this comparison, we introduce the concept of reverse coupling which describes organizational actions that counteract, and thereby compensate for, ambitious managerial talk.

Beziehungspflege in Twitter – Wie Unternehmen den Micro-Blogging-Service nutzen

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), definiert als das freiwillige Wahrnehmen der soziale und okologischen Unternehmensverantwortung uber die gesetzlichen Bestimmungen hinaus, gilt als wichtiger Faktor, der das Image und die Reputation eines Unternehmens und somit auch die Beziehungen zu den verschiedenen Anspruchsgruppen positiv beeinflusst (Fombrum et al. 2000; Fombrun 2005; Gardberg/Fombrun 2006; Pfau et al. 2008; Logsdon/Wood 2002).