‘Are you joining?’ Relationship-building strategies and cultural value appeals: How companies in Brazil and in the Netherlands are creating stakeholder dialogues using Facebook.
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2015-07-16
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en
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Users of the World Wide Web have increasingly relied on social media to exchange information and to obtain organizational information. Nowadays, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites among individuals. The collaborative and participatory nature of this online medium requires that companies interact constantly with their audiences. Engaging in dialogues with publics is a useful tactic that may lead to the establishment of organizational-public relationships. Because this communication channel is so recent, the creation of stakeholder dialogue by companies of culturally diverse countries remains an under-researched topic. In the present study, the corporate usage of Facebook by Brazilian and Dutch companies was compared. Specifically, it focused on the creation of dialogues by organizations: the attempt of global communicators to initiate conversations with their stakeholders through Facebook. To she! d light o n how organizations of these two countries vary in the creation of dialogues, a cross-cultural research based on two content analyses was carried out. The employment of relationship-building strategies was checked on the corporate Facebook pages of 18 companies. Additionally, the present study explored which cultural values are reflected in 80 corporate messages collected from the investigated pages. Unexpectedly, the results showed no significant differences between the two groups in the usage of relationship-building strategies, even though previous studies indicated that cultural values have an impact on the use of these strategies. Also, and above all, the Dutch corporate pages reflected more collectivistic values than the Brazilian pages. This last outcome was surprising due to the individualistic orientation of the Netherlands. The results of the present study would seem to support the theory of a “virtual culture” on the Internet, where traditional cultural value! s are not necessarily being followed by communicators.
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