Social media strategies to protect brand image and corporate reputation in the digital era: a digital investigation of the Eni vs. Report case

Over the last decade digital technologies have significantly affected branding strategies and corporate reputation monitoring. Due to the diffusion of digital platforms, stakeholders and consumers have become more engaged in marketing strategies. Specifically, the “consumer decision journey” has represented a new paradigmatic shift in recent marketing literature. The advent of social networking sites has indeed caused an increase of digital touch points, which foster the connection between brand strategists and consumers. Hence, nowadays consumers may directly express their opinions about companies’ practices and products using the Internet. Because of this emerging phenomenon, modern marketing strategies are progressively focusing on preserving corporate reputations in the digital environment. In order to better understand how monitoring corporate reputations and responding to consumers to avoid the rise of negative brand perceptions, this explorative paper analyses the digital response strategy implemented by Eni, the largest Italian oil and gas company. The case explored consists of a digital investigation on Twitter, aimed at investigating how Eni’s digital counterattack strategies affected consumers’ perceptions after accusations moved by Report, a popular Italian journalism TV programme. The conclusions suggest that real-time digital counterattack strategies on social networking sites represent effective strategies to preserve corporate reputations as perceived by customers

Studying Instagram beyond selfies

Of approximately 40 billion photos posted on Instagram, only 282 million are selfies—just 0.7%. Thus, for all its zeitgeisty appeal, the selfie is in fact a niche phenomenon in the larger context of Instagram genres. Noting this fact, we identified an opportunity to engage with scholars from all over the world with the challenge of proposing new theories and approaches capable of unlocking the full socio-anthropological potential of Instagram. As the articles collected in this special issue testify, Instagram has an enormous impact on people’s everyday lives on many levels—socially, culturally, economically, and politically—and so, indubitably, it deserves rigorous academic attention. Given the scale and complexity of these impacts, studying Instagram poses different kinds of challenges and many gaps are still to be filled. With this special issue we don’t claim to resolve all the issues noted above. More modestly, our goal is to kick-start a fruitful conversation among social media scholars interested in furthering Instagram studies

Every Breath You Take, I’ll Be Watching You. Explicit Surveillance and Algorithmic Countersurveillance in Healthcare

In this chapter we explore resistance practices applied to algorithmic surveillance in the health domain, with a specific focus on the Italian contact-tracing app “Immuni” specifically developed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Algorithmic resistance is indeed a specific reac- tion against the power of algorithms as largely described in the literature (Velkova & Kaun, 2021). Although localised within the Italian context, we believe that the Immuni app is a good case to reflect on some inter- esting aspects since it entails some key features of algorithmic resistance in general and introduces an up-to-date case study for health control

The platformization of consumer culture: A theoretical framework

This special issue, together with this position paper that accompanies it, aims at providing a comprehensive framework to address this issue, introducing and theorizing the concept of platformization of consumer culture. The overarching scope of this essay is to discuss what is distinctive of the process of platformization in relation to consumer culture (and research); what are its most important aspects, its critical controversies, its innovative dimensions and main risks. Accompanying this positional essay are the seven exceptional contributions that compose the special issue, which we believe will come to represent a pivotal reference in the quest to address this phenomenon. These showcase the manifold empirical, semantic and methodological dimensions of this emergent phenomenon, concurring to define the key dimensions that identify, describe, and explore the ways in which consumer culture has been "platformized," from the perspective of consumer culture theory. Specifically, we identify four key "tensions" characterizing the platformization of consumer culture: datafication vs liquification; standardization vs ephemerality; interaction vs mediation; immateriality vs materiality

The Platformisation of Consumer Culture

This book offers a unique methodological guide for social and marketing scholars interested in understanding and using digital methods to explore the processes of platformisation of consumer culture unfolding on digital media. The book introduces the reader to key digital methods concepts, strategies, and techniques through a set of ad hoc case studies focused on the most prominent digital platforms (such as Facebook, Spotify, or TripAdvisor) as well as emerging trends in digital consumer culture (such as, the consumption of nostalgia, the radicalisation of taste, or ephemeral consumption)

Analyzing the main types of co-created experiences

espanolProposito La presente investigacion se propone analizar en profundidad como las marcas pueden estar de acuerdo con la co-creacion de las experiencias de los consumidores. En particular, el objetivo de la investigacion es aclarar cuales son los principales tipos de experiencias co-creadas que los consumidores pueden experimentar debido a su participacion en las comunidades de marcas de redes sociales. Diseno/metodologia/enfoque Para hacerlo, en primer lugar, se han identificado los factores que influyen en la co-creacion de las experiencias de los miembros de las comunidades de marcas. En particular, el punto de partida de esta investigacion esta representado por el papel de otros consumidores y de la marca en la co-creacion de experiencias. Con el fin de identificar los principales tipos de experiencias co-creadas, se ha utilizado una investigacion digital como el principal metodo de analisis. Dibujamos nuestra investigacion digital en el paradigma de Metodos Digitales. Hallazgos Se identificaron y conceptualizaron cuatro tipos principales de experiencias co-creadas. Originalidad/valor Los resultados enfatizan la importancia de que los estrategas de marca involucren a los miembros de las comunidades de marcas de medios sociales para estimular la co-creacion de experiencias. Especificamente, surgio como la interaccion simultanea de otros miembros de la comunidad y la marca puede afectar la co-creacion. EnglishPurpose – This paper presents an in-depth investigation on how brands may concur to the co-creation of consumers' experiences. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the main types of co-created experiences that consumers may encounter as a result of social media brand communities. Design/methodology/approach – To identify the main types of co-created experiences, a digital investigation has been used as the main method of analysis. The authors draw their digital investigation on the digital methods paradigm. Findings – Four principal types of co-created experiences have been identified and conceptualized, namely, brand's products' individual usage experiences, auto-celebrative experiences, brand's products' communal usage experiences and collective celebration experiences. Originality/value – Results stress the importance for brand strategists to involve members of social media brand communities to stimulate co-creation experiences. Specifically, it emerges that the simultaneous interaction among members of the community and the brand may directly affect co-creation experiences

Twiplomacy in the age of Donald Trump: Is the diplomatic code changing?

This study employs digital methods in conjunction with traditional content and discourse analyses to explore how the US President Donald Trump conducts diplomacy on Twitter and how, if at all, diplomatic entities around the world engage in diplomatic exchanges with him. The results confirm speculations that Trump’s diplomatic communication on Twitter disrupts traditional codes of diplomatic language but show little evidence that new codes of diplomatic interactions on social media are being constructed, given that other diplomatic entities around the world mostly remain within the confines of traditional notions of diplomacy in (not) communicating with Trump on Twitter

Framing #Brexit on Twitter: the EU 27’s lesson in message discipline?

This study examines the ways in which and reasons why the remaining Member States of the European Union, the EU 27, communicated about Brexit on the most popular social media in politics – Twitter, by drawing on a multi method examination of UK-based EU 27 diplomatic entities’ Twitter practices during the process of Brexit negotiations. The findings suggest that the EU 27 maintained message consistency on the topic of Brexit on Twitter, supporting the EU’s negotiating position, demonstrating internal cohesiveness and potentially contributing to the EU’s effectiveness in the Brexit negotiations. Our study also reveals that the framing of Brexit on Twitter was deliberate and strategic, but with a range of different motivations behind the promotion of certain frames. Finally, Twitter is seen by diplomats as a tool conducive to meeting public diplomacy’s aim of relationship-building, but not one to be used for advocacy and influencing interpretation of controversial Brexit issues

Repurposing sentiment analysis for social research scopes : an inquiry into emotion expression within affective publics on Twitter during the Covid-19 emergency

The scope of the article is to discuss and propose some methodological strategies to repurpose sentiment analysis for social research scopes. We argue that sentiment analysis is well suited to study an important topic in digital sociology: affective publics. Specifically, sentiment analysis reveals useful to explore two key components of affective publics: a) structure (emergence of dominant emotions); b) dynamics (transformation of affectivity into emotions). To do that we suggest combining sentiment analysis with emotion detection, text analysis and social media engagement metrics – which help to better understand the semantic and social context in which the sentiment related to a specific issue is situated. To illustrate our methodological point, we draw on the analysis of 33,338 tweets containing two hashtags – #NHSHeroes and #Covidiot – emerged in response to the global pandemic caused by Covid-19. Drawing on the analysis of the two affective publics aggregating around #NHSHeroes and #Covidiot, we conclude that they reflect a blend of emotions. In some cases, such generic flow of affect coalesces into a dominant emotion while it may not necessarily occur in other instances. Affective publics structured around positive emotions and local issues tend to be more consistent and cohesive than those based on general issues and negative emotions. Although negative emotions might attract the attention of digital publics, positively framed messages engage users more

The Algofeed project. A methodological proposal to assessing the effects of algorithmic recommendations on platformized consumption

This paper outlines the construction phase of the consumption profiling, algorithmic awareness, and digital literacy tool within the ALGOFEED project. ALGOFEED, funded as an Italian Research Project of Significant National Interest (PRIN), seeks to illuminate the socio-cultural impacts of platform-based feedback loops while developing a novel methodological and theoretical framework for the sociological examination of consumer culture algorithms. The project aims to produce unique empirical insights into cultural consumption patterns on digital platforms in Italy. Specifically, ALGOFEED investigates the effects of automated content recommendations on platforms like TikTok and YouTube on individual and collective cultural consumption behaviours over time. The primary objectives include acquiring distinctive empirical findings on platform driven cultural consumption in Italy, advancing a fresh methodological and theoretical approach for studying algorithmic consumer culture sociologically, and fostering algorithmic awareness among Italian consumers through impactful diffusion activities grounded in a transformative paradigm. In this study, the authors introduce the empirical tool designed to detect the feedback loop and define its components: digital skills, Platform Usage Type, and Algorithmic Awareness