The Impact of Interactive Corporate Social Responsibility Communication on Corporate Reputation

Abstract

Companies increasingly communicate about corporate social responsibility (CSR) through interactive online media. We examine whether using such media is beneficial to a company's reputation. We conducted an online experiment to examine the impacts of interactivity in CSR communication on corporate reputation and word-of-mouth intentions. Our findings suggest that an increase in perceived interactivity leads to higher message credibility and stronger feelings of identification with the company, which also boost corporate reputation and word-of-mouth. This result implies that using interactive channels to communicate about CSR can improve corporate reputation. Our results also show that the detrimental impacts of negative user evaluations on corporate reputation are much higher than the favorable impacts of positive evaluations. This finding suggests that, despite the effectiveness of interactive communication channels, firms need to carefully monitor these channels.Keywords: Corporate reputation, corporate social responsibility, electronic word-of-mouth, interactivity, message credibility, social media. IntroductionCompanies are increasingly communicating about their efforts in the realm of corporate social responsibility (CSR), that is, efforts to "integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights and consumer issues into their business operations and core strategy" (European Commission 2011 p. 6). A major goal of such communication is to achieve or protect organizational legitimacy (Arvidsson, 2010). Furthermore, companies are embracing interactive online media to communicate about CSR. For example, Kim et al. (2010) showed that 71% of the Fortune Global 500 firms devoted a separate section of their website to environmental responsibility and 75% of these environmental sections gave users the opportunity to respond to the information provided. It is unclear, however, whether using such interactive media adds This paper investigates whether allowing stakeholders to post comments on CSR messages (and to read comments posted by others) affects the credibility of messages and stakeholders' feeling of identification with the company. Furthermore, we examine the effects of improved message credibility and identification on the reputation of the company and positive word-ofmouth intentions. We also analyze the effects of user evaluations, testing the conventional wisdom that messages having mostly positive comments have a higher credibility than messages having no user comments, while the reverse holds for messages having mostly negative comments. Our findings suggest that an increase in perceived (but not actual) interactivity leads to higher message credibility and stronger feelings of identification with the company, which also boost corporate reputation and word-of-mouth. This result implies that using more interactive channels to communicate CSR could improve corporate reputation. Our results also show that the detrimental impacts of negative comments on corporate reputation are much higher than the...

The mediating effect of transparency in the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation

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