Fans, Friends, Advocates, Ambassadors, and Haters: Social Media Communities and the Communicative Constitution of Organizational Identity

Fans, Friends, Advocates, Ambassadors, and Haters: Social Media Communities and the Communicative Constitution of Organizational Identity

Blog Article

Organizational identity is always somewhat socially co-authored.The social-media context provides an opportunity Cable Retainer to interrogate the extent of this co-authoring in an interaction-heavy and difficult to control environment.This article presents a typology of online communities that co-author organizational identity through confirming and disconfirming identity messages.Through extensive qualitative research, including interviews, marketing meetings observations, and social media interaction observations, social media communicative practices are examined through a communication constitutive of organizing (CCO) framework, specifically the conversation-text dialectic of the Montreal School.

By focusing the research on boundary-spanning social media marketers and their interpretations of social media interactions, this article demonstrates ways that organizational identities are co-authored from external interaction (conversation) to internal practice (text).This study contributes to the ongoing theoretical extension of the CCO Stainless Steel Spur with 1" Band and 9 Point Rowel framework beyond the container metaphor, while also contributing to the practice of social media marketing within and around organizations.