Helping those who help us: co-branded and co-created Twitter promotion in CSR partnerships

Abstract

Partnerships between brands and non-profit-organisations (NPOs) must be strategically managed for each to maximise their benefit from the relationship. Twitter, with its potential for pass-along of messages, provides an ideal channel for reciprocal promotion within the network of an NPO and its supporting brands. For any one brand within that network, brand building will be amplified if messages are passed on to others using co-branded and/or cocreated communications, providing an opportunity for a brand to engage a new audience of consumers who are part of another organisation's network. This research examines the extent of co-branded and co-created communications by a popular NPO and its network of corporate partners on Twitter, and compares that Twitter promotion with promotion of the same activity in traditional news media. The findings revealed surprisingly limited use of Twitter to promote brands' partnership efforts with the NPO, and only limited evidence of the expected reciprocity between the NPO and its partners. We find even less evidence of co-branded communications between partner brands in the network, and no co-created communications. The results have important implications for CSR partnerships, suggesting that more innovative use of social media could provide reciprocal benefits from brands' partnerships with NPOs.

Journal of Brand Management: year end review 2017

“…The second SI article unpacks co-branded and co-created Twitter promotion in CSR partnerships (Burton et al 2017). Focusing on a non-profit organisation and its networks of corporate partners, the findings reinforce earlier research that such organisations are not using Twitter to full capacity as a stakeholder engagement vehicle, leading to calls for further research to understand why.…”

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): A Survey of Topics and Trends Using Twitter Data and Topic Modeling

“…Previous studies suggested that organizations use social media platforms strategically to communicate their efforts with the public [47]. Our study indicates that Twitter is an important medium for organizations to communicate with stakeholders [15,60], especially for promoting, hiring, reporting, and announcing. In this regard, CSR communication in Twitter appears to be different from that of traditional mediums, being less formal and more emotional.…”

Exploring digital corporate social responsibility communications on Twitter

“…That is, these brands may not make full use of digital CSR communication on Twitter to actively engage customers in supporting the brands' co-creation activities. While some may argue that higher levels of follower engagement in Twitter may not be always desirable, we believe that such engagement is a crucial prerequisite for the brands to use followers to increase the reach of cocreated tweets and promote their CSR efforts and/or those of other partners in the CSR network using their own, co-created, or customer-generated tweets (Burton et al, 2017;Gensler et al, 2013;Hudson et al, 2016;Shmargad & Watts, 2016;Soboleva et al, 2017).…”