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