Can citizens transform companies? Monitoring of the online reputation of companies by consumers

The objective of this research is to see how in a new social context, the network society, a consequence of the 3rd Industrial Revolution or ICT revolution, a new relational model between business and the citizens is established. In this new digital context, companies see how it shapes around them, but not only for their performance, also for a long been known and widely studied intangible called Corporate Reputation. It has acquired a new dimension in the Internet environment, as an aggregation of impressions of different stakeholders of the companies. The new network society has tools for monitoring the actions of companies and it has the ability to communicate the results of this monitoring through tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and the called new journalism (citizen journalism or civic journalism). Establishing analogies with John Keane's Monitory Democracy, we examine whether this new relational model between the citizens and businesses affects the creation of Corporate Reputation of companies and if the changes in this intangible affect the economic results of companies. In this cyberspace, where economic and civic actors interact with each other using (more or less) the same tools, it is where we place the question this article tries to answer as to whether the citizens in the digital environment are able, through their actions and interactions, to monitor and influence firms’ reputation and, therefore, their functioning and their practices. Finally, three examples are included of reputational conditions for companies, as well as a brief analysis of the consequences.