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)

1. 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

2. 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)

3. 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

4. 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

5. Reputationcategories company reputation product reputation corporate culture reputation (Weigelt & Camerer 1988), issue reputation stakeholder reputation (Mahon & Wartick 2003)

6. 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)

7. 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).

8. 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

9. The cases

10. 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!

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

17. 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?

18. Thank you! http://reputationproject.wordpress.com @jahapaula