Improving Sensing And Seizing Capabilities Of A Firm By Measuring Corporate Reputation Based On Social Media Data

Firms need to continuously sense their business environment for being able to seize emerging opportunities and react against threats, such as loss of reputation. Corporate reputation is of particular importance as a valuable intangible asset. Thus, managing a firm’s corporate reputation as well as monitoring the reputation of its competitors may support sensing and seizing capabilities of a firm. As corporate reputation directly depends on public perceptions and opinions, the high amount of publicly available data of established social media platforms might be promising to determine a firm’s reputation. What is needed are intelligent information systems to analyze social media data for measuring corporate reputation effectively. This study provides a conceptual and empirical analysis on how firms might utilize data from social media platforms for measuring their corporate reputation. In particular, we analyze a dataset consisting of 8.6 million messages from the microblogging service Twitter to determine the development of the corporate reputation of ten large global firms. Our methodological approach comprises an automated sentiment analysis as well as trend analysis to measure reputation. Thus, this study demonstrates how corporate reputation can be assessed based on social media data and how firms sensing and seizing capabilities can thereby be enhanced.