the online brand ambassador

42 Pages·2014·1.33 MB·English

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF
COMMUNICATION SCIENCE
www.uva.nl AMSTERDAM

THE ONLINE BRAND AMBASSADOR: THE EFFECTS OF EMPLOYEES’ PERSONAL
AND PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA USE ON RELATIONAL OUTCOMES

Boukje Smit (5789060)
Supervised by dr. J.W.M. Verhoeven

July 2014

Master’s Thesis
Master’s programme Communication Science
THE ONLINE BRAND AMBASSADOR
Abstract
Although there is much research available on brand ambassadorship and relations,
there is still little known about (a) how employee social media use affects the relation
between the general public and organizations and (b) what role conversational human voice
plays in that respect. Four hypotheses (1a-d) were posed to analyse the effect between two
types of employee social media use (mixed/professional) and relational outcomes (trust,
commitment, satisfaction and control mutuality). In addition, a second hypothesis was posed
that tested whether mixed social media use lead to a more positive evaluated relationship
between public and organization. Because conversational human voice plays an important
role in relationships, four additional hypothesis (3a-d) were posed to examine a potential
moderation effect of conversational human voice on the four direct relation assumed in the
first four hypothesis. In total 138 respondents participated in the experiment. No support was
found for a direct relationship between social media use and relational outcomes and a
moderation effect of conversational human voice. Participants exposed to solely professional
and mixed shared content did not have a significantly different perceived level of trust,
commitment, satisfaction and control mutuality. In contrary to the expectation posed in the
second hypothesis, results show that solely professional social media use leads to a higher
level of perceived conversational human voice than participants exposed to mixed employee
social media use.

Keywords: brand ambassadorship, relational outcomes, trust, commitment, control mutuality,
conversational human voice, tone of voice, social media, employee social media use,
exchange relationship, interpersonal relationship, organizational relationship

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Introduction
Brand ambassadorship is no new phenomenon (Kent, 2010) as people always have
talked (and will talk) about personal and professional matters at dinner parties. However,
through the advent of social media it has become more important and apparent as these media
have increased social reach. This has changed the ambassadorship role. Employees are in any
case ambassadors for their organization. However, through the increased social reach, and
simultaneously increased visibility, they are even more now than before.
The fast growth in popularity of social media has triggered people all over the world
to express themselves through social media. In 2012, almost 58% of the global population
used social networks (“Social Networking Statistics”, n.d). Even more impressive, of all
people between the age eighteen and twenty-four, almost 98% makes use of social networks.
With over a billion accounts and 100 million tweets send every day (Smith, 2014), Twitter is
considered one of the biggest social media beside Facebook.
Social media have been explicitly been designed for relationship building purposes
(Fournier & Avery, 2011) and have become more than an efficient exchange of information
between people as they are becoming increasingly rich and will have greater depth (Miller,
1995). As a result, people will increasingly perceive social media as human communication
instead of electronic communication (Miller, 1995). This is also reflected in the fact that
social media are very highly integrated into our daily lives. Nowadays, when we are on the
road, we check our Facebook or we post a snapshot of our take-away coffee on Instagram.
Social media caused a great shift in communication patterns and changed our vehicles
of social interactions (Naaman, Boase & Lai, 2010; Sánchez Abril, Levin & Del Riego,
2012). In particular, they have caused the boundaries between professional and personal lives
to become porous and increasingly blurred the already intangible lines that existed between
professional and personal life (Sánchez Abril, Levin & Del Riego, 2012). This ‘boundary-
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crossing’ phenomenon is an outcome of the technological revolution as peoples’ professional
and personal lives become intertwined through these media (Sánchez Abril, Levin & Del
Riego, 2012). Because social media use has shifted communication patterns, changed social
interactions and lead to increasingly blurred boundaries between personal and professional
life, it has created a great gap in scientific knowledge about the effects of this ‘boundary-
crossing’ phenomenon on relations.
Most common uses for social media are personal oriented (Collins, n.d) because they
are mainly used to satisfy socio-emotional needs (Kent, 2010). Although social media are
mainly designed for interpersonal relationship building, it also allows organizations to engage
with customers at low costs and high level of efficiency (Kaplan & Heanlein, 2010).
Nowadays, everything is about social media (Kaplan & Heanlein, 2010) as they are
increasingly used for brand promotion (Van Noort, 2012). In addition, brand ambassadorship
is also becoming increasingly important within brand development (Hatch & Schultz, 2009).
However, many organizations are considered unwelcome guests on social media (Fournier &
Avery, 2011). Online brand ambassadorship could allow organizations to partially bypass this
‘hostility’ problem as employees have powerful impact on consumers’ perceptions of brands
and organizations (Harris & De Chernatony, 2001).
The goal of this research is to study the effects of employee social media use on the
relationship between the public and an organization. First of all, because still little is known
about the effects of the ‘boundary-crossing’ on relations. Secondly, because employees have
great impact on consumers’ perceptions and could therefore play an important role in
overcoming the ‘hostility problem’ organizations face online. Hence, the main research
question in this study is as follows: does the type of employee social media use (professional
vs. mixed) affect the level of trust in an organization, the level of perceived satisfaction,
commitment and control mutuality? In addition, as conversational human voice is one of the
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most important features of online communication (Kelleher, 2009), the mediating influence
of conversational human voice will be analysed as well.
As research concerning strictly professional or mixed social media use by employees
is still relatively new in scholarly literature, an experiment was carried out to examine
whether strictly professional or mixed (personal and professional) employee social media use
has different effects on the relationship between public and organization. In addition, the
concept of brand ambassadorship in the context of marketing and business is quite new
within scholarly literature as well (Andersson & Ekman, 2009). By means of this study, an
attempt was made to address the existing research gaps.
Social media have changed the media landscape as they have caused a shift in social
interaction and blurred boundaries between personal and professional life (Sánchez Abril,
Levin & Del Riego, 2012). At the same time, employees are becoming increasingly important
tools for organizations (Van Noort, 2012). These developments simultaneously lead to
increased organizational social media policy. Social media policy enables organizations to
preserve and look after the way employees engage with customers (Kietzmann, Hermkens,
McCarthy, Silvestre, 2011). Although the importance of employees as marketing tools and
social media use are frequently emphasized in scholarly literature, there is still little
knowledge about the effects of professional and a mixed (professional and personal)
employee social media use on the relationship between the public and the organization. This
makes it very important for organizations to know how employee social media use affects
their relationship with the public. Therefore, this study hopes to provide useful implications
for practice as well. In this matter, organizations can obtain more knowledge on how to
improve employee social media use.

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Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework is structured as follows: first, the meaning of brand
ambassadorship is discussed. Subsequently, employees’ social media use is reviewed.
Hereby, two particular uses by employees are pointed out, namely professional and personal
social media use. Furthermore, relationships and relational outcomes will be discussed in the
context of ambassadorship.
Brand ambassadorship
A brand ambassador is seen as “…the interface between a brand’s internal and
external environments and can therefore have a powerful impact on consumers’ perceptions
of both the brand and the organization” (Harris & De Chernatony, 2001, p. 441). This
definition points out the important role employees play in relationship building between
organizations and their public. In addition, scholars have emphasized the increasing
importance of employees in brand development (Hatch & Schultz, 2009). In order to build
relationships, employees often use their personal social media, such as Facebook and
LinkedIn (Skeels & Grudin, 2009). This indicates that employees are, through their personal
social media accounts, important representatives of their organization.
Brand ambassadors have been around for decades (Kent, 2010) as many people talk
about their profession at birthday and dinner parties. Therefore, with the advent of social
media, the role of employees has not changed so much. This new technology offers nothing
genuinely new than completing an old task in a new way (Kent, 2010). However, social
media have made the role of an employee more visible and increased social reach, due to
their global reach capabilities (Mangold & Faulds, 2009). Social media have turned
employees into activists of and for their organization through the use of their personal social
media accounts.
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Employees’ social media use
Social media have caused user generated content to exponentially grow into a mass
phenomenon (Hennig‐Thurau et al., 2010). Media, like Facebook and Twitter, have
empowered the public to promote and distribute their own offers and content (Hennig‐Thurau
et al., 2010; Fournier & Avery, 2011). As a result, the public and employees have
increasingly gained power over organizational content (Fournier & Avery, 2011; Mangold &
Faulds, 2009). Simultaneously, organizations increasingly lose control of content, reach,
frequency and message timing (Mangold & Faulds, 2009).
Social media are initially not meant for marketing or branding, but for personal
relationship building purposes (Fournier & Avery, 2011; Kent, 2010). As organizational
branding has increasingly shifted towards online activities, organizations are more often
confronted with a certain degree of hostility on social media as most brands seem inauthentic
and their presence is often seen as intrusive and out of place (Fournier & Avery, 2011).
Although a relationship between an employee and the public is referred to as organizational,
because employees make use of their own personal social media accounts, chances are great
that the public will perceive this relationship more as interpersonal instead of organizational.
Employees can therefore act as an important (marketing) tool for building organizational
relationships as they could help organizations to bypass the hostility problem they face on
social media.
Social media have become much more than just an efficient way of exchanging
information between people and integration of these media in our lives have caused them to
have gained a human character (Miller, 1995). What is meant by this, is that social media is
becoming increasingly rich and will gain greater depth over time (Miller, 1995). As Miller
(1995) rightly pointed out, communication through social media was yet not rich enough and
did not have enough depth to be considered equal to interpersonal relationships. However,
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social media and their use have changed since 1995 as they have now been fully integrated in
daily life. Therefore, it is interesting to know whether relationships, that are built through
social media, are being seen as more interpersonal than almost ten years ago.
Boundaries between personal and professional life have become porous and
intertwined (Sánchez Abril, Levin & Del Riego, 2012) as employees use their personal
accounts for personal as well as professional purposes. For example, retweeting an
organizational tweet, making comments on Facebook about new exciting projects or simply
sharing a vacancy on LinkedIn. The reason why ‘boundary-crossing’ has emerged, is because
someone’s’ professional life is just as much a part of their identity as their personal life (Lam,
Ahearne, Hu & Schillewaert, 2010). Therefore, people tend to both share professional and
personal content on social media. This ‘boundary-crossing’ phenomenon can best be
explained by the use of social identity theory (SIT). This theory describes social identification
as “…a perception of oneness with a group of persons” (Ashforth & Mael, 1989, p.20). It can
also be described in the context of belongingness with or to an organization (Dainton &
Zelley, 2010). This indicates it is actually very natural for people to also define themselves in
terms of that organization (Mael & Ashforth, 1992). Because offline and online relationships
are complementary and thus not very different from each other (Reich, Subrahmanyam &
Espinoza, 2012; Valkenburg & Peter, 2009b), SIT can be applied to explain why employees
post both professional and personal content on social media.
Because employees use their own personal social media accounts, organizations do
not have direct control over shared content. Regarding employee social media use, the source
of the message is a person instead of an organization. As there is a certain degree of hostility
towards organizational activities on social media (Fournier & Avery, 2011), it is assumable
that employee content could come across as more authentic, sincere and appropriate than
content with a clear organizational source.
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Social media have caused boundaries to fade between personal and professional life
(Sánchez Abril, Levin & Del Riego, 2012) and indicates that employees use social media for
both personal and/or professional purposes. Some employees will probably prefer to use
social media solely for professional purposes, for example through LinkedIn, whilst others
might prefer to share both professional and personal content through Facebook. Therefore,
two types of employee social media usage can be distinguished, namely; professional or
mixed (professional and personal). Employees have great impact on public perception (Harris
& De Chernatony, 2001). This gives enough reason to believe that this also applies to
employee social media use.
It is assumable that the level of trust or commitment is higher in case of exposure to
content shared by employees than in case of an organizational source. Reason for this
assumption is that an ambassador is seen as a trustworthy source as the public has more
confident in the views of people than in views that come from an organization (Andersson &
Ekman, 2009). Ambassadors are an effective tool to build a positive image and to influence
the public (Andersson & Ekman, 2009). Furthermore, research has shown that trust affects
the level of commitment in a positive way (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). Therefore it is assumable
that employee social media use is positively related to organizational commitment by the
public.
Ambassadors are an effective tool to create a positive image. In addition, corporate
image is often seen as “a function of the cumulative effect of customer (dis)satisfaction”
(Andreassen & Lindestad, 1998, p. 8). This indicates that image is positively related to
satisfaction, which means that a positive image should increase the level of satisfaction. As
employee social media content has a higher source credibility than organizational messages
(Andersson & Ekman, 2009), employee social media use will assumedly affect corporate
image, which will effect satisfaction. This gives reason to believe that employee social media
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use is indeed positively related to satisfaction. In addition, the public could have greater
feeling control mutuality as well. This assumption can be made, because an employee-
customer relationship is probably seen as more interpersonal instead of organizational as
employees make use of their own personal social media accounts. This interpersonal
character of the employee-public relationship will cause the public to have a greater feeling
of control mutuality.
The four outcomes (trust, commitment, satisfaction, control mutuality) that were
mentioned are also known as relational outcomes (Hon & Grunig, 1999). Relational
outcomes will be further discussed in the next sub-section.
Relationships and relational outcomes
Relationships between publics and organization defined
Relationships have been defined as “routinized, sustained patterns of behaviour by
individuals related to their involvement with an organization…” (Kelleher & Miller, 2006,
p.396). People have relationships to satisfy socio-emotional needs (Kent, 2010) and come in
different forms and can have different functions, for example a relationship between you and
your mom or between a customer and an organization. Within scholarly literature, the
importance of relationship building and -maintenance have long been underpinned (Henning-
Thurau, Gwinner & Gremler, 2002).
As people are very social beings and have the need to be included and acknowledged
(Kent, 2010), it is also very natural to have relationships with organizations (Dainton &
Zelley, 2010). Especially because organizations also shape our identity. This clearly shows
that relationships with organizations play an important role in the lives of people. Therefore,
organizational relationships are central to this study.
Visibility of relationships
The boundary between personal and professional lives become porous and intertwined
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