Towards a More Holistic Stakeholder Analysis Approach. Mapping Known and Undiscovered Stakeholders from Social Media

Abstract

This paper proposes a conceptual direction for organizations of how they could map their stakeholders in a more holistic way. Study suggests, that stakeholder theory is useful in identifying and prioritizing stakeholders that organization is aware of. However, theory is argued being ineffective in finding stakeholders on new environments (social media), where connectivity and relationships play a key role. The argument stems from the need to assess stakeholder presence beyond the dyadic ties. Consequently, the combination of the Stakeholder Salience Model (SSM) and social network analysis (SNA) is proposed as a more holistic solution for stakeholder identification including those from social media. A process of finding “unknown” but important stakeholders from social media was identified incorporating the content search and the principles of SNA. Consequently, stakeholders from social media are identified based on the dimensions of connectivity and the content shared. Accordingly, the study introduces four groups of important actors from social media: unconcerned lurkers, unconcerned influencers, concerned lurkers and concerned influencers and integrates them into the existing Stakeholder Salience Model (SSM).

Notes

¹In this context importance refers to: “the degree to which managers give priority to competing stakeholder claims” (Mitchell et al., 1997, p. 854).

²In this context, the dyadic relationships are those that occur between a focal organization and its stakeholders.

³In this context the newly found stakeholders refer to social media stakeholders that were identified by incorporating SNA.

⁴In this paper “stakeholder” and “actor” are interchangeably used. SNA scholarship uses ‘actor’ to define individuals active in social networks. “Actors” in social media can become stakeholders when they express a stake in an organization, product, service or brand. When actors do so, they can be named online and/or social media stakeholders.

⁵In this context, hubs are understood as highly dense (many connections among nodes) communities within a network.

⁶Power is a result of patterns of relations. “Individuals do not have power per se in social media, they have power because they can have some control on others —ego's power is alter's dependence” (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005).

⁷Equations that can be used to measure Degree centrality and Prestige can be found in Wasserman & Faust (2007).

⁸Nonadjacent nodes are nodes that are not connected directly with each other (Wasserman & Faust, 2007).

⁹A complete guide on how to estimate centrality in directional relations can be found in the latest book by Wasserman & Faust (2007).

¹⁰Specifically, this is possible by analyzing the network while assessing the key measures indicated earlier in this paper – network density, actor centrality, and prestige.

¹¹Power, Legitimacy and Urgency attributes (as noted in the SSM by Mitchell et al., 1997).

¹²Stakeholders from dense areas of the network who possess high prestige and centrality indices would be highly visible to other network members. As a consequence using their central position, they can potentially command certain attention among other members within the network.

¹³In Twitter both in- and out-degrees relevant for actor centrality estimation can be traced. Whereas in Facebook, friendships are only mutual (in SNA it is known as nondirectional relations), therefore the number of incoming and outgoing relations will be equal. It follows that different approaches should be used to estimate actors' centrality (detailed explanation can be found in Wasserman & Faust, 2007).