A reputation measurement model for online stakeholders: concepts, evidence and implications

In today’s global markets, corporations are daily competing for visibility, investments, brand positioning. Reputation plays a key role in these aspects, as a favourable corporate reputation attracts investors, customers, suppliers, employers and consumers. Reputation is an exclusive and rare intangible asset and by cultivating it companies can attain competitive advantage over competitors (Peteraf &Barney, 2003), and ultimately affect financial performance (Roberts & Dowling, 2002). While reputation per se is not a controllable asset, some elements that compose it can be. Among these, communication is considered a crucial element for the development of a good reputation. Beyond informing stakeholders on institutional, strategic and market contents (Fombrun &Shanley, 1990), organizations are more and more using communication as a way to convey corporate identity and values as well as to engage and manage stakeholder relations. Van Riel and Van Halderen (2006) argue that the main functions of communication are enhancing so-called corporate expressiveness, boosting organizational transparency and sincerity, and contributing to the maintenance of coherence across corporate activities. Yet, because of the deep collective and social nature of reputation, through the use of communication, organizations can influence the collective and social definition of corporate reputation by employing specific relational cultivation strategies and stakeholder engagement processes (Romenti, 2010) . Reputation can be conceived as a meta-construct formed at a collective level through social relations, rather than a set of perceptions possessed by individuals. In other words, communications among individuals in the form of conversations construct a collective understanding of a corporate reputation. Around the world, the increasing spread of social media for private and professional uses challenges the management of corporate reputation because corporate messages are not only generated by organizations but also by online influencers that, through the use of social media, can converse with current and potential stakeholders about corporate behaviours, products and services . The volatility of today’s markets and the presence of cyclical crises have enhanced the amount of online conversations and rumors among stakeholders, and that can rapidly lead to the formation and sharing of erroneous opinions and attitudes towards organizations which can easily spread outside digital environment. Thus online conversations can have significant impact of corporate reputations, and on companies’ performance. Most previous research on corporate reputation has focused on how offline reputation can be effectively measured. What is less known, however, is a solid framework for online reputation measurement that provides relevant indicators, sampling criteria and scales’ assessment of online reputation. The scope of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework based on offline reputation measurement models, theories of stakeholder relations and social network analysis (SNA) with the aim of offering a practical framework for online corporate reputation measurement. Starting from a discussion on what can be learned from the offline environment for what concerns the measurement of reputation and which the crucial implications for online environment are, we discuss existing models of online reputation measurement, their strengths and weaknesses and propose stakeholders’ identification and segmentation as a pivotal element for measuring online reputation. Following this, we offer a practical approach to measure online reputation with some examples of large corporations.