Publication
The effect of social media in the business world: the Dieselgate and United Airlines cases
| Summary: | This present dissertation aims to explore the role of social media in the business world. This theme arises from the notion that social media are becoming increasingly relevant in people’s daily life and hence, surfaces as a pertinent subject to explore it as we apply it to the business world. This, in the sense that if fundamentally, every person is using these social networks, then corporations should be paying closer attention to them as well. To fulfil this study, the literature will be based on a corporation’s purpose, where it is reviewed the progress of a profit creation agenda, of satisfying only the shareholders needs to, a growing concern for other parties, every stakeholder, directly or indirectly linked with the corporation. Afterwards, corporate social responsibility, as a logical subject for this concerns or responsibilities related with stakeholders and, society as a whole given that, it will be important to explore what are indeed these responsibilities as members of society. Then we will determine how does this translate into corporate image and reputation. Furthermore, social media will be duly defined and onwards we will establish a more concrete platform which was found to be the most relevant for this project, Twitter. Two case studies were selected for this thesis: The Dieselgate case, referring to Volkswagen’s emission scandal and, the United Airlines flight 3411, where a passenger was forcefully removed from an aircraft. The data collection was extracted from Twitter from the day that these corporate cases were made public and the seven days that followed. The following hashtags were duly selected: #Dieselgate; #Volkswagen; #UnitedAirlines; #Passenger. Leximancer (software tool designed for analysing natural-language text data which identifies the high-level concepts delivering the key ideas and actionable insights with powerful interactive visualisations) was used to provide visual sentiment matrixes which allowed to determine what were Twitter users discussing and feeling for both cases. Findings showed us that, the reactions were fundamentally negative for both case studies, which did not come as a surprise. As the aftermath of both cases, both companies suffered losses in regards to market value loss and shares price. However, for both companies, sales actually increased after the scandals, which contradicts the sentiment data retrieved. |
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| Main Authors: | Nunes, Mariana da Conceição Domingos dos Santos |
| Subject: | Social media Corporate social responsibility Business Corporate scandals Rede social Responsabilidade social corporativa Negócio Escândalos corporativos |
| Year: | 2020 |
| Country: | Portugal |
| Document type: | master thesis |
| Access type: | open access |
| Associated institution: | ISCTE |
| Language: | English |
| Origin: | Repositório ISCTE |
| Summary: | This present dissertation aims to explore the role of social media in the business world. This theme arises from the notion that social media are becoming increasingly relevant in people’s daily life and hence, surfaces as a pertinent subject to explore it as we apply it to the business world. This, in the sense that if fundamentally, every person is using these social networks, then corporations should be paying closer attention to them as well. To fulfil this study, the literature will be based on a corporation’s purpose, where it is reviewed the progress of a profit creation agenda, of satisfying only the shareholders needs to, a growing concern for other parties, every stakeholder, directly or indirectly linked with the corporation. Afterwards, corporate social responsibility, as a logical subject for this concerns or responsibilities related with stakeholders and, society as a whole given that, it will be important to explore what are indeed these responsibilities as members of society. Then we will determine how does this translate into corporate image and reputation. Furthermore, social media will be duly defined and onwards we will establish a more concrete platform which was found to be the most relevant for this project, Twitter. Two case studies were selected for this thesis: The Dieselgate case, referring to Volkswagen’s emission scandal and, the United Airlines flight 3411, where a passenger was forcefully removed from an aircraft. The data collection was extracted from Twitter from the day that these corporate cases were made public and the seven days that followed. The following hashtags were duly selected: #Dieselgate; #Volkswagen; #UnitedAirlines; #Passenger. Leximancer (software tool designed for analysing natural-language text data which identifies the high-level concepts delivering the key ideas and actionable insights with powerful interactive visualisations) was used to provide visual sentiment matrixes which allowed to determine what were Twitter users discussing and feeling for both cases. Findings showed us that, the reactions were fundamentally negative for both case studies, which did not come as a surprise. As the aftermath of both cases, both companies suffered losses in regards to market value loss and shares price. However, for both companies, sales actually increased after the scandals, which contradicts the sentiment data retrieved. |
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