Social Media Reputation: Social Media as a Data Source for Corporate Reputation Measurement

In two ways corporate reputation research has strongly tied corporate actions to stakeholder’s perception of a company and therewith downplayed the autonomy of stakeholder´s evaluation of a firm. First, the most prominent theories used in corporate reputation research tie stakeholder perception directly to corporate performance and actions. Secondly, prominent reputation measurements couple stakeholders´ believes to reputation drivers through the use of predefined scales and items. We argue that with the rise of social media a company´s reputation has increasingly become autonomous from corporate actions,
which demands a greater decoupling of stakeholders´ perceptions from corporate signals or actions in corporate reputation research. We develop the concept of social media reputation as the overall evaluation of a company presented in social media and present a new approach of measuring reputation based on social media data that accounts for the autonomy of stakeholder´s perception of a firm. We compare and contrast this novel social media reputation measure (SMRM) with traditional reputation measurements and
find that SMRM is a valuable measurement to capture the autonomy of the stakeholders´ evaluation of a firm online.