Introduction to the Handbook on Digital Corporate Communication

Abstract

The future of corporate communication is unreservedly digital. Indeed, due to digital technology's incremental yet ubiquitous influence on this field over the years, digital corporate communication (DCC) is already here, and it has been nudging the profession and its professionals towards changes in attitudes, skills, strategies and priorities. Some changes have been seismic, such as the way social media networks and digital platforms have democratized corporate communication, empowering digitally savvy stakeholders and disempowering organizations, often challenging old fashioned attitudes to stakeholder relationships and communication. Now, all kinds of stakeholders, from investor activists to past employees, can and do take over organizations' communication reins, steering organizational communication in new and uncharted directions, shifting organizational roles from gatekeeping (Shoemaker, 1991) to gatewatching (Bruns, 2005(Bruns, , 2011. For example, collectives of organizational hateholders (Luoma-aho, 2015) frequently are hijacking communication campaigns by taking over corporate hashtags in social media and retargeting them against corporations. A corporate crisis forming among posts in one Facebook account can spread fast and furiously across online social networks, damaging a corporation's reputation within hours.These are both exhilarating and challenging times for practitioners and scholars within the profession. As masses of individual consumers and stakeholders master emerging means of 24/7 communication enabled by technology, so must the professionals of communication. New services, devices, apps and software are emerging onto the market to help organizations solve existing and future communication challenges. Many organizations are responding proactively to the opportunities these present. Increasingly, customers are interacting with chatbots on corporate websites, enabling organizations to be continuously 'open for business' 24/7, as illustrated in this Handbook's cover image. In 2023, TikTok influencers are creatively collaborating with organizations who share their values and passions. Google Assistant is telling coffee lovers where their branded coffee was grown and roasted. Employees are proactively advocating for their employers' social causes in their personal social media posts. At the same time, the ease of clicktivism and the superficial world of social media and data privacy concerns is contributing to masses of passive and disengaged stakeholders who fail to see the value added by technology.This volume is titled Digital Corporate Communication in recognition of these omnipresent, significant and fast-changing influences, both positive and negative, of digital technologies on the communication profession and on the external economic, cultural and societal forces shaping it. Despite this, academic studies to date have not been well integrated into a coherent research perspective. This Handbook argues that current theorizing on digitalization in the corporate communication literature has...