Sensing Social Media for Corporate Reputation Management: a Business Agility Perspective

The concept of business agility reflects an organization’s need to develop sensing capabilities for being able to respond to changes in the business environment rapidly. Therefore, intelligent information systems are needed to support decision makers with accurate and timely information. Since corporate reputation is among the most valuable assets, organizations need efficient measuring techniques for being able to manage it. Recently, due to the advent of social media new reputational challenges have emerged for firms, since such technologies significantly increase the risk for being associated with negative issues. Therefore, organizations should utilize there IT-systems for actively sensing social media content as a basis for a quick response to reputational threats. Accordingly, we provide an empirical example on how firms might improve corporate reputation management through sensing social media. Specifically, we analyze a dataset of 271,207 messages about a large American Bank collected from the public microblogging platform Twitter. For our empirical investigation, we applied automated sentiment analysis and manual content analysis. Our results demonstrate how social media might impact corporate reputation and what organizations can do to prepare themselves. Beyond corporate reputation management, analyzing social media content may be valuable for many other purposes to improve an organization’s sensing capabilities.