IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this article

Social Media for Socially Responsible Firms: Analysis of Fortune 500’s Twitter Profiles and their CSR/CSIR Ratings

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Kiljae Lee

    ()

  • Won-Yong Oh

    ()

  • Namhyeok Kim

    ()

Registered author(s):

    Abstract

    The instrumental benefits of firm’s CSR activities are contingent upon the stakeholders’ awareness and favorable attribution. While social media creates an important momentum for firms to cultivate favorable awareness by establishing a powerful framework of stakeholder relationships, the opportunities are not distributed evenly for all firms. In this paper, we investigate the impact of CSR credentials on the effectiveness of social media as a stakeholder-relationship management platform. The analysis of Fortune 500 companies in the Twitter sphere reveals that a higher CSR rating is a strong indicator of an earlier adoption, a faster establishment of online presence (followers), a higher responsiveness to the firm’s identity (replies and mentions), and a stronger virality of the messages (retweets). Incidentally, the higher CSIR rating is also found to be associated with the stronger virality. Our findings also suggest that socially responsible firms can harvest proactive stakeholders’ participation (user-driven communication) without investing more resources (firm-driven communication). As the first study that conceptualizes the social media as a proponent of CSR, this paper contends that “being socially responsible” makes more practical sense for firms with the rise of social media. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

    Download Info

    If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-013-1961-2
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

    Article provided by Springer in its journal Journal of Business Ethics.

    Volume (Year): 118 (2013)
    Issue (Month): 4 (December)
    Pages: 791-806

    as
    in new window

    Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:118:y:2013:i:4:p:791-806
    DOI: 10.1007/s10551-013-1961-2
    Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.springer.com

    Order Information: Web: http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/applied+ethics/journal/10551/PS2

    Keywords: CSR; CSIR; Social media; Twitter;

    References listed on IDEAS
    Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

    as
    in new window


    1. Vanessa M Strike & Jijun Gao & Pratima Bansal, 2006. "Being good while being bad: social responsibility and the international diversification of US firms," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 37(6), pages 850-862, November.
    2. Kaplan, Andreas M. & Haenlein, Michael, 2011. "Two hearts in three-quarter time: How to waltz the social media/viral marketing dance," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 253-263, May.
    3. Kaplan, Andreas M. & Haenlein, Michael, 2010. "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 59-68, January.
    4. Thomas P. Lyon & John W. Maxwell, 2011. "Greenwash: Corporate Environmental Disclosure under Threat of Audit," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(1), pages 3-41, 03.
    5. White, Halbert, 1982. "Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Misspecified Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(1), pages 1-25, January.
    6. Itziar Castelló & Josep Lozano, 2011. "Searching for New Forms of Legitimacy Through Corporate Responsibility Rhetoric," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 100(1), pages 11-29, April.
    7. Heckman, James, 2013. "Sample selection bias as a specification error," Applied Econometrics, Publishing House "SINERGIA PRESS", vol. 31(3), pages 129-137.
    8. Aaron K. Chatterji & David I. Levine & Michael W. Toffel, 2009. "How Well Do Social Ratings Actually Measure Corporate Social Responsibility?," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(1), pages 125-169, 03.
    9. Roberts, Robin W., 1992. "Determinants of corporate social responsibility disclosure: An application of stakeholder theory," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 17(6), pages 595-612, August.
    10. Kietzmann, Jan H. & Hermkens, Kristopher & McCarthy, Ian P. & Silvestre, Bruno S., 2011. "Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 241-251, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.

    as
    in new window


    Cited by:

    1. Boyang Zhang & Vos Marita & Jari Veijalainen & Shuaiqiang Wang & Denis Kotkov, 2016. "The Issue Arena of a Corporate Social Responsibility Crisis ¨C The Volkswagen Case in Twitter," Studies in Media and Communication, Redfame publishing, vol. 4(2), pages 32-43, December.
    2. Peter Seele & Irina Lock, 2015. "Instrumental and/or Deliberative? A Typology of CSR Communication Tools," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 131(2), pages 401-414, October.
    3. Xanat Vargas Meza & Han Woo Park, 2016. "Organic Products in Mexico and South Korea on Twitter," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 135(3), pages 587-603, May.
    4. Boyd, D. Eric & McGarry, Benjamin Michael & Clarke, Theresa B., 2016. "Exploring the empowering and paradoxical relationship between social media and CSR activism," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 69(8), pages 2739-2746.
    5. repec:kap:jbuset:v:142:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s10551-015-2743-9 is not listed on IDEAS

    This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

    Access and download statistics

    When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:118:y:2013:i:4:p:791-806. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sonal Shukla)

    or (Rebekah McClure)

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

    If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.