Digital corporate communication and corporate reputation

Digital communication enables dispersed stakeholders to easily connect and publicly exchange feelings, opinions, and experiences about a company, to the point of changing the collective judgements of an organizations. While there is growing anecdotical evidence of the impact of digital media on corporate reputation, scholars are still debating how digital media actually impact reputation. In this chapter, we review this debate on the formation of corporate reputation and digital corporate communication to highlight current issues related to the digitalization of stakeholders’ social evaluations. We identify two issues that challenge assumptions about corporate reputation formation: the first concerns the diffusion of false signals in the form of “fake news”, and the second concerns the diffusion of false signalers driven by Artificial intelligence specialized in the creation and diffusion of online content. We outline future directions to evolve our theories incorporating the changes in the social evaluations process brought by digital communication.