Presenter(s): Gillian George
Co Presenter(s): Vanessa Zamudio
Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Markowitz
Poster 140
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
Does a brand’s engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility lead to higher financial returns and positive consumer engagement? This study evaluated four Fortune 500 companies (Campbell’s, Pepsi, Nike, and Kellogg’s) that made public ethics statements on current social issues (e.g., same-sex couples, interracial families, among others). We analyzed these companies within a two-week period, one week before and one week after their ethics statements were made, to understand if their social media activity (e.g., the number of favorites per Tweet) and stock price changed after the campaign period. We gathered Twitter data computationally through the R computing interface to collect number of favorites for each company before and after making their ethical statements public. We also evaluated the language data of each Tweet and performed an automated text analysis with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to evaluate changes in language patterns related to authenticity (e.g., first-person singular pronouns) from before and after the ethical statements. The language data suggest that there was a marginally significant increase in authenticity from before to after the ethics stance (p = .075). However, stock price was not significantly different after evaluating company performance before or after the ethics campaign and stance (p = .987). We propose that changes in authenticity relate to a credibility mechanism as prior work suggests that people attempt to boost their credibility by using more “I” statements. We did notice a 10% increase in levels of authentic language as well as no change in stock price. Overall, there was no significant findings to prove a correlation between stock price, twitter engagement, and level of authenticity in language when comparing Tweets before and after an ethical campaign.