Grasping corporate identity from social media: Analysis of HR consulting companies

Abstract

Corporate identity is often defined as “what an organization is”. This concept relates to organizational identity. However, while organizational identity has an internal employee focus, corporate identity has an external focus. As such, it is often used as a synonym to organizational image that organizations project externally. Social media have created a multitude of ways for organizations, as well as for their employees, independently, to develop and disseminate corporate identity. However, although there have already been attempts to explore the role of employees’ personal social media profiles in projecting organizational identity externally, little is still known about how organizations use their social media profiles for these purposes. This empirical research, which is part of a broader doctoral research focusing on organizational identity and social media, aims to address this gap. Building on previous corporate identity and social media research, and adopting an existing framework explaining the relationship between social media and corporate identity, it analyses social media profiles of 12 international HR consulting companies. In particular, it explores the platforms they use, type of content they publish, their approaches for stakeholder engagement and interaction for building stronger organizational image/corporate identity. Diverse off-the-shelf applications were used for collecting social media data for the period between January and December 2017. We expect that the results of our analysis will help to understand how organizations (specifically HR consulting companies) use social media to project and strengthen their corporate identity, and what organizations from other sectors can learn from them.