Creating and destroying b2c stakeholder relationships on Facebook

Creating and destroying b2c stakeholder relationships on Facebooka multiple case study on Finnish companies
Euprera Congress 2011Leeds, UK, September 7th - 10th
Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, PhD candidateCommunications Research Centre CRCUniversity of Helsinki
Paper co-authored with MA Susanna Neiglick
8.9.2011
1
Faculty of Social Sciences / CommunicationsResearch 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

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.
Consensus-building strategy : building bridges between the organization and the environment, e.g. to cover a mutual agreement
Dialogue strategy : seeking consultation with the stakeholders, interactivity and sending informational messages on both sides.
(van Ruler 2004)
The communication GRID

Reputationcategories
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 mostmistrustingparticipants
Faith-holders : the mostcommittedstakeholders
“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

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 (publicbroadcastingservice)
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 (dairyproducts)
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 discussions
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
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

Reputational interplay
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

Creating and destroying b2c stakeholder relationships on Facebook

by Salla Laaksonen on Sep 10, 2011

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