Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility Through Microblog

Communication of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is corporation invest on social responsibilities to fulfill social goals while gain sustainability.It includes related concepts as CSR, Cause-related marketing and Corporate philanthropy. Communication of CSR had reached international standards due to the promotion by international organizations as Global Report Initiatives, now it’s a behavioral norms of global business.With the development of social media, communication of CSR has taken into microblog.This integration combined IT with business creation are quite new both in practice and theory. With questions like the status quo and effect yet to be known. To correct the present theoretical skew of utilitarian studies, this project will investigate how Chinese and Danish corporation communicating CSR on microblog by using qualitative methods oriented towards its social effects.The sampling frame of this research is corporation’ microblog account that specifically communicating CSR, and the samples are consisted of text sent by corporation user as well as other users’ feedback(follower’s comments and@text). According to the sampling rules, three Chinese corporation users on Sina Weibo:Dell China (@戴尔公益),Chinese oil&Foodstuffs corporation (@中粮美好生活)and Ping An Insurance(@平安爱心公社), one Danish corporation user on Twitter Novo Nordisk (@NovoNordiskTBL) had been choosen as the source of samples.Then the samples are collected, including all the texts these four corporations had sent during six successive months in2012, as well as the feeback they got during the same period of time.With the tools and research methods provided by Corpus Linguistics, this research carried out a Hermeneutic content analysis from four dimensions:technology application, Brand strategy, rhetorics and stakeholder dialogues.According to the characteristics of communication on microblog, a dialogue model had created to map the interaction between corporation user and its followers.At last, a correlation study had conducted between the operation of communicating CSR and the public trust and feedback statistics it earned, it reached basic results of this research as:To earn trust and feedback of users through communicating CSR on microblog, the corporation needs endorsement as information from diversified third parties, good at using video links to attract users, and carried out CSR behavior and off-line CSR programme. It is obvious that behavior of CSR would be the key factor to convince users on microblog platform.As the main contribution, this research had accomplished a qualitative research into weibos/tweets, explored into the cutting-edge situation of CSR communication, providing new knowledge on how to gain social impact of CSR communication from a public perspective. The importance of social impact to CSR communication had been emphasized by introducing the indicators of public trust developed by Leizpig University.More importantly, it had built a model of CSR communication on microblog based on results of public trust. And revealed that the Brand Strategy won’t help with communication of CSR. At the same time, the quality of products and services are important to CSR communication.As the globalization of CSR communication, the large corporations are in keen needs to communicate CSR in other countries, especially those located their supply chain. Through the similarities and difference of CSR communication of Chinese and Danish corporation, it instructed corporations how to communicating CSR in the other context, and provided reference for a cross-cultural model of CSR communication. The conclusion that integrating the emotional relationship usually built by Chinese corporation and their stakeholders, and the professional spirits of western counterparts might synergize together, is relevant for Chinese corporation to improve the current operation of CSR communication, and it is beneficial for both Chinese and foreign corporations to communicate CSR in the other context.