| Many companies have involved in corporate social responsibility(CSR)issues,especially in industry who is labeled stigma.Being controversial,corporations in stigmatized industry have tried to communicate their corporate social responsibility practices to change their image of bad image and to link themselves to social cause.However,the previous studies had the following problems: they more focused on general industry,and ignored the charactors of stigmatized business.The impact factors in the previous studies about CSR were not associated with communication and social media.It is important to explore factors which influence the effect of CSR communication and their mechanism in the social media environment.The study explored the factors,the influence of these factors on the effectiveness of ―CSR‖ communication in microblogging and Wechat,the re-communication mechanism and effect of CSR communication by using correlation analysis,analysis of variance,linear regression,structural equation modeling on the basis of the methods,such as content analysis,experiments and survey research.The findings and conclusions are as follows:(1)The methodology of content analysis was used.CSR information disclosure by 102 core-stigmatized corpotates on the microblogging in six years was used as samples.The results of correlation and linear regression analysis indicated that: firstly,the influence of microblogging users(four characteristics about the "the number of friends","the number of followers","the number of messages","the time of using microblogging")had significantly positive effect on the amount of comments,amount of retweeting on its CSR information.However,the influence of microblogging users would negatively affect amount of praise.The relevance between the source of core-stigmatized business and social cause would have significantly negative effect on the amount of comments and amount of retweeting.The characteristics of the richness of the media,relevance of current affairs,the label of public service and interactive strategies would influence the effect of CSR communication.(2)CSR information released by 102 core-stigmatized corporates on Wechat Public Platform in four years was as the sample.Then content analysis categories were created accordingly to Corporate Identity System,communication content,communication strategies,communication effect.The results of linear regression showed that the only Wechat LOGO composition would influence the amount of praise.The font-size of title and whether the headline or not will be significant positive indicators of the amount of reading,but they would not affect the amount of praise.Factors of the communication content,such as domains of social cause,the relevance of corporate and social cause can influence the amount of praise and the amount of reading.Lastly,the interactive strategies in communication,media richness,relevance of current affairs would also affect the amount of reading and the amount of praise.(3)Two experiments were designed to examine the re-communication mechanism of core-stigmatized corporate social responsibility information in the social media.The influence of social cause(either relevant or irrelevant to the consequences caused by business,involvement of social cause),conditional or unconditional information,the source of CSR communication on the information re-diffusion was examined.And the mediating effect of motivation attribution was also explored.The results in Study One indicated that involvement of social cause had significantly positive effect on the retweeting intention of CSR information.And the relevance between the core-stigmatized business and social cause moderated these effects: In the low relevance conditions,involvement of social cause can effectively promote the intention of the retweeting;while in the high relevance conditions,involvement had no effect on retweeting intention.The Study Two showed that the relevance between core-stigmatized business and social cause,conditional information and source type in CSR communication had interactive effect on intention of the retweeting.When the corporate took the initiative to actively disseminate CSR information,conditional information and relevance had no interactive effect on retweeting intention and higher conditional information can effectively promote the intention.While other source disseminated CSR information,the conditional information and relevance had interactive effect.In the low relevance conditions,higher conditional information can increase favorable ratings of retweeting.In the higher relevance conditions,un-conditional information became more accessible to users.Motivation attribution exerted a mediating influence on the effects described above.(4)Three studies were conducted to examine the effect of CSR communication on the brand.The effect of communication content(the dominance of social cause or business in the picture image,message sidedness)on the brand attitudes and purchase intention was examined.And the perception of public service source moderated these effects.The results indicated that the dominance of social cause can exert more positive influence on the consumers‘ attitude and purchase intention.When the source was public service source,the dominance of social cause can promote positive brand attitude and purchase intention.While the source was commercial,the effect above did not exist.At the same time,message sidedness had significant effect on the consumers‘ attitude and purchase intention.And the perception of public service source moderated this effect: in the low perception of public service source condition,two-sided messages can effectively promote the evaluation of the brand.In the high perception of public service source condition,message sidedness can not impact brand attitude or purchase intention.The perception of hypocrisy exerted a mediating influence on the effects described above and it negatively impact the brand attitude and purchase intention.Finally,according to the findings,this dissertation discussed the implications of CSR communication for core-stigmatized business in social media,pointed out research limitations and indicated the possible future research.The study extended the research of CSR communication and combined social media and corporate social responsibility.Compared with previous studies,the main innovations of the present dissertation were as follows:Firstly,the data was from microblogging and WeChat.The results both showed the current situation of CSR communication for core-stigmatized business in social media and also verified the determinants of communication effect.Secondly,new variables were introduced.1.The measurement of CSR communication effect took the characters of social media into consideration.The amount of comments,amount of retweeting,amount of praise became the dependent variables.2.The results confirmed the mediating role of motivation attribution in the re-communication.The perception of hypocrisy was introduced into the study of CSR communication for core-stigmatized business as mediating variable.3.It extended the brand–cause fit to relevance between the core-stigmatized business and social cause.And the effect of cause involvement was also checked.Thirdly,re-communication mechanism of core-stigmatized corporate social responsibility information in the social media was explored.Not only did the paper confirm the importance of social cause choice,but also it verified the positive effect of conditional information.Last,but not least,the paper confirmed the effect of CSR communication on the brand itself.The results showed that the effect of dominance of social cause or brand,message sidedness by examining the moderating effect of the perception of public service source.It effectively extended the applicability of the theory of information persuasion. |
