creating and destroying b2c stakeholder relationships on facebook
DESCRIPTION
A presentation on an academic research paper by Salla-Maaria Laaksonen & Susanna Neiglick, presented at the EUPRERA congress 2011 – Public Relations in a Time of Turbulence Leeds, England (sept 2011)TRANSCRIPT
12.04.2023 1www.helsinki.fi/crc
Creating and destroying b2c stakeholder relationships on Facebook
a multiple case study on Finnish companies
Euprera Congress 2011Leeds, UK, September 7th - 10th
Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, PhD candidateCommunications Research Centre CRC
University of Helsinki
Paper co-authored with MA Susanna Neiglick
Faculty of Social Sciences / Communications Research Centre CRC
Background and research design
Purpose: to study current practices of Finnish b2c organizations’ Facebook use in building stakeholder relationships Communicative means utilized by organization / stakeholders:
strategies, functions and issues A framework for analyzing stakeholder relationships and
corporate reputation in social media? Theoretical background:
Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004)
PR strategies proposed in van Ruler (2004) Reputation categories (Weigelt & Camerer 1988; Mahon &
Wartick 2003)
Reputation and PR on social media Reputation is a discursive and cumulative
construction based on narratives, beliefs and evaluations
The increased use of social media makes reputation formation a collective and communal process
Social media makes multifocal communication more visible than before Platform for monitoring and communicating but
especially for dialogue and engagement
(van Ruler 2004)
Information strategy : providing information in order to help people form ideas, opinions and discussion.
Persuasion strategy : aiming to create a favorable basis for future relationships with the stakeholders and to change their opinions and behavior.
Dialogue strategy : seeking consultation with the stakeholders, interactivity and sending informational messages on both sides.
Consensus-building strategy : building bridges between the organization and the environment, e.g. to cover a mutual agreement
The communication GRID
Reputation categories
company reputation product reputation corporate culture reputation
(Weigelt & Camerer 1988),
issue reputation stakeholder reputation
(Mahon & Wartick 2003)
Emotionality
The level of public involvement in organizational affairs is changing: publics no longer only want to participate, they also show and express emotion (Luoma-Aho 2009) Hateholders : the most mistrusting participants Faith-holders : the most committed stakeholders
“we have moved into a time of emotional publics, where feelings toward organizations range from love to hate, and the different stakeholders have several ways of showing their emotion and recruiting others to join in and comment on their feelings” (Luoma-Aho 2009, 1)
Word-of-mouth: emotional content is being spread and is shared more likely both in offline and online social networks (see e.g. Berger & Milkman 2010, Hansen & al. 2011, Sweeney & al. 2005)
Method and data collection
Explorative case study using the Facebook pages of four Finnish organizations
The dataset under analysis was coded using ATLAS.ti and spans March 2011. It contains 142 wall posts of which organization-initiated were 69.
In addition to qualitative study and category frequencies the interplay with different categories was studied using the Co-occurence Table Explorer tool provided by ATLAS.ti (their co-occurrence in all documents and a normalized coefficient of probability).
Facebook is a social networking service with over 500 million active users, 50% of which are daily visitors (via Facebook)
Finland: 2 039 000 users (via Socialbakers), accounting for 45% of internet using population
The cases
Blue1 Valio VR Yleisradio
The second biggest airline company in Finland, flying to 29 different destinations within Europe.
Company owned by Finnish dairy farmers that secures milk production in Finland and is producing aliment products.
(Valtion rautatiet), Finnish state owned railway transport company in Finland. VR is a monopolistic freight and passenger carrier in Finland.
Suomen Yleisradio (YLE) Finnish public broadcasting service company.
Likes: 17 784 Likes: 42 230 Likes: 11 270 Likes: 4 798
http://www.facebook.com/valionsivu
http://www.facebook.com/blue1.fi
http://www.facebook.com/VRyhteisellamatkalla
http://www.facebook.com/suomenyleisradio
VR (national railways)
Least overall activity, also the least active initiator Most passive likers, hateholders Negative tone is present in the conversation …but VR knows how to show minimal interest!
Blue1 (airline)
Mainly used for marketing & customer service
Dialogic approach (through the issue)
The importance of the issue at hand: travelling is a rather positively viewed topic in general
Yleisradio (public broadcasting service)
Yleisradio: easy and heavy linking due to the nature of the product Links to their online service initiate
discussions on product reputation Most laid-back mode of
answering and a lot of dialogue they clearly have code of adding
the respondent name at the end Informational, non-marketing
strategy utilized in connection to Fukushima accident
Valio (dairy products)
Lots of product-related discussions the brand of “milk”
Stakeholders and affiliates are present (tv shows, organizations) Using stakeholder reputation to
create positive image & conversations
Nuclear plant discussion commanded by Greenpeace
Hateholders & faithholders can be found – relating to company or to an issue
Initiating discussionsInitiator Blue1 Valio VR Yleisradio Totals %
Organization 20 11 7 31 69 49%
Others
Customer 9 6 14 2 31 21%
Citizen 9 13 3 3 28 20%
Other Organization 1 1 2 9 13 9%
Employee 0 0 0 2 2 1%
Others Total 19 20 19 16 74 51%
All total 39 31 25 47 143 100%
Organizations initiated roughly half of the discussions in the four Pages studied During March 2011, Yleisradio was the most active poster or initiator of discussion
(31 versus 16), whereas in VR case most of the intiatives came from the users (mainly customers, 18 versus 7).
Organizational functions and public relations strategies
Functions %
Customer Service
46%
Dialogue 10%
Marketing 26%
Communications
17%
Totals 100%
Facebook pages are mostly used as customer service platforms (46% of total), and after that as marketing platforms (26%).
Persuasion is the most common strategy used in our sample in general (36% of all messages), but all strategies were well present
Communication GRID %
Consensus-building 20%
Dialogue 19%
Information 25%
Persuasion 36%
Totals 100%
Reputational interplayReputation types
Blue1 Valio VR Yleisradio Totals %
Product reputation
24 35 19 33 111 60%
Stakeholder reputation
1 7 0 0 8 4%
Company reputation
2 17 2 9 30 16%
Corporate culture reputation
2 1 0 2 5 3%
Issue reputation
3 29 0 0 32 17%
Totals 32 89 21 44 186 100%
The most discussed category of reputation is product/service reputation (60% of all reputation related content).
Formality and informality
Comments made by page fans were more informal than comments or wall posts made by page admins Majority of the fan comments are short opinion statements:
“Yes, a good product” “I watched the show and liked it” Response strategies of the organizations
Valio’s textual approach in replying to comments was most formal, starting with a clear letter-type opening greeting and ending with a signature
Yleisradio representatives are less formal and undersign their messages with first names only and dropping opening greetings, whereas VR representatives normally begin with a formal greeting but the letter-type ending is less formal, just “-mikko”.
Blue1 representatives do not indicate at all who speaks.
General conclusions Facebook pages are used more as a tool for customer service and
marketing than as a tool for corporate communications or for actual b2c conversations
Stakeholders are clearly willing to use the opportunities of interaction offered
A key factor in creating conversations is the content and the topic Often the likers or criticizers were left chatting by themselves: the
organization didn’t follow up with the discussion it initiated Most likes go the company initiated posts and marketing-related
content Hateholders and faith-holders are present – but especially faith-
holders are not addressed in any special ways by the organization What strategy is the most efficient?
Thank you!
http://reputationproject.wordpress.com
@jahapaula