140 Characters Of Risk: Some Ceos Fear Twitter: Twitter Case Analysis

In the article “140 Characters of Risk: Some CEOs Fear Twitter,” published in 2012 in The Wall Street Journal, it was stated that: “ Many corporate leaders say they are too busy running a company to spend time posting 140-character messages to Twitter, or re-tweeting posts from followers.” (Kwoh and Korn, 2012) Studies conducted in 2012 (CEO.com/Domo, 2012) showed that only one in 20 business leaders were using Twitter. Likewise, the importance of social media in this digital era can seem unclear for companies and business leaders as they do not have any control on these platforms. And this situation persisted though the tentatives of public relations practitioners and the growing popularity of social media.

Indeed, PR practitioners were early
Facebook Messenger has an impressive 47 penetration, and Instagram (also owned by Facebook) comes 2nd for engagement.

Corporations were described by Cyert and March (1963) as coalitions and sub-coalitions of individuals sharing similar interests. Social media have been particularly powerful in connecting likeminded individuals, providing an infrastructure for communities of interest (Wilson & Peterson, 2002; Van den Broek et al., 2012). Donaldson & Preston (1995, p. 70) stated that stakeholder theory ‘views the corporation as an organizational entity through which numerous and diverse participants accomplish multiple, and not always entirely congruent, purposes’. Carroll argued that companies are increasingly expected to assume responsibility for a broad range of social and environmental concerns (Carroll, 1979; Carroll & Buchholtz, 2006). Social media is more than marketing and branding for businesses. Organisations do not only use the networks to monitor conversations about their industry, competitors, and products, they are increasingly reaching out to their customers via the social media to inform their clients, potential ones and the public at large of their product and service offerings. In fact, social media is revolutionising the way organisations
It is of utmost importance for corporations to establish constructive relationships with their stakeholders to achieve good governance and manage complex social or environmental tasks (De Beer & Rensburg, 2011). Three generations of stakeholder engagement were identified by Krick et al. (2005): in the first generation, companies were primarily responding to the pressure of interest groups to prevent bad publicity whereas second generation was described as a more proactive approach—companies strove to increase their understanding of the business environment through stakeholder engagement. Finally, companies in the third generation are expected to incorporate stakeholder engagement into their governance structures in order maintain strategic competitiveness by aligning social, environmental, and economic performance (c.f. Andriof & Waddock, 2002; Burchell & Cook,