SOCIAL MEDIA AND REPUTATION FORMATION1 Michael Etter City, University of London
[email protected] Davide Ravasi City, University of London
[email protected] Elanor Colleoni Reputation Institute
[email protected] 1 We thank Associate Editor Peer Fiss and the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback and guidance. We furthermore thank Emilio Marti, Patrick Haack, Thomas Roulet, Jeremy Moon, Dan Kärreman, Jukka Rintamäki, Dennis Schoeneborn, Friederike Schultz, Lars Thøger Christensen, and Eero Vaara, for very helpful comments and discussions on previous versions of this paper. We also benefited from presenting previous versions at the 2014 annual meeting of the Academy of Management and at a 2015 OTREG meeting. We also thank the European Commission for research funding (EC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions European Fellowship scheme). 1 SOCIAL MEDIA AND REPUTATION FORMATION ABSTRACT The rise of social media is changing how evaluative judgments about organizations are produced and disseminated in the public domain. In this article, we discuss how these changes question traditional assumptions that research on media reputation rests upon, and we offer an alternative framework that begins to account for how the more active role of audiences, the changing ways in which they express their evaluations, and the increasing heterogeneity and dynamism that characterizes media reputation influence the formation of organizational reputations. KEYWORDS: Social media, reputation formation, news media, media reputation, organizational reputation 2 In April of 2017, three security guards dragged a random passenger against his will through the corridor of an overbooked United aircraft and threw him violently off the airplane. Two passengers filmed the short incident with their mobile phones and instantly uploaded the videos to the social media platform YouTube, from which the vivid videos spread through social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.