ECREA16-Abstract

489

Friday, November 11

1 8 : 0 0 – 1 9 : 3 0

OSC07

Mediatization of Corporations andMedia/News Relations

PP 480

Business and the News Media: The Corporate and Media Frames of the Ten Biggest Dutch Companies Compared

P. Verhoeven

, D. Trilling

, J. Jonkman

, A. Kroon

, T. Van der Meer

, J. Boumans

University of Amsterdam, Communication Science, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Corporations are an important source of news for journalists. In the interdependent hybrid practice of news production of strategic communication profes‑

sionals and journalists, corporations have substantial influence on business news. Studies show that media usually follow the frames presented to them by

corporations, except when environmental, health or financial fraud issues are at stake. Until now these studies were based on samples of press releases and

media content messages. Technological developments allow us to investigate the complete population of messages concerning corporations and media

instead of samples. Sometimes studies like this are labelled ‘big data’ or ‘computational social science’ studies. The research question of this paper is to

what extent frames that corporations present about themselves are similar to the frames presented about those corporations in the media. As a case study

the corporate frames and media frames of 2015 of the ten biggest companies in the Netherlands are analyzed. The companies in this study are based on

research from Elsevier and include: Royal Dutch Shell, Vittol Holding, EADS The Airbus Group, Unilever, Aegon, LyondellBaselIndustries, ING Group, Ahold,

Inga Holding IKEA and Achmea. The overall hypothesis is that media frames are more often the same as corporate frames than they are not, except when

environmental, health or fraud issues are involved. Using automated content analysis all press releases of the companies involved as well as all online and

offline media messages about those corporations of the Dutch national and regional newspapers in 2015 will be analyzed. Using a specially developed

interface, we apply Natural Language Processing and methods like Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Principal Component Analysis, and word co-occurrence

analysis to identify frames in press releases and news articles. Based on these results, in a second step, we will statistically test whether, to what extent,

and in which cases the corporate frames and the media frames differ. To facilitate interpretation, visualizations of the frames will be presented. By relying

on these advanced methods to identify frames and by taking a census of news and business media messages, this study makes a strong contribution to our

understanding of the relationship between news and corporate frames, above and beyond sample or event-specific variation.

PP 481

International Social Media Public Relations: Examining Determinants of Corporate Facebook Page Usage

C. Ruehl

, D. Ingenhoff

University of Fribourg, Media and Communication Research, Fribourg, Switzerland

Today, many multinational corporations maintain brand pages on social networking sites (SNS) to publicly communicate with geographically disperse audi‑

ences. However, we still know little about how and why people in different cultural environments use brand pages on SNS. Therefore, our study investigates

stakeholders’motivations to use, consume, and engage on international corporations’Facebook pages. So far, organizational communication scholars’inter‑

est in corporate SNS usage has largely focused on the meso-level and investigated how corporations use SNS for image and reputation management (Balaji

et al., 2016), as well as customer service activities (Linke, 2015). The few existing micro-level studies which take a look at what drives consumers to use SNS

brand pages were conducted in China and the USA (Men & Tsai, 2013; Tsai & Men, 2014). Thus, we are facing a lack of studies investigating individuals’use

of corporate SNS in Europe.Therefore, our research questions are: RQ1:Why and how do stakeholders use corporate Facebook pages? RQ2:Which differences

exist between users from different cultural backgrounds within Europe?We apply the socio-cognitive approach to uses-and-gratifications (LaRose & Eastin,

2004) to investigate respondents’ motivations in regard to three usage types of SNS use, i.e. consumption, participation and production (Shao, 2009). For

each user type, we test a model of brand page usage employing confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained our sample data (N=1294, n♂=801, n♀=493;

ageØ: 40 years old) in summer 2015 by having international European corporations post our online survey URL on their French and German-language

Facebook pages. Our results show that consumption motives are best represented by activity, monetary, and a mix of novel and self-reactive incentives.

Participation is best explained by three factors describing status, practical-novel, and self-reactive-idealistic incentives. Production motives are represented

by a three factor model containing social, self-reactive and status incentives. Cultural differences exist in regard to monetary incentives, self-reactive, social,

as well as status incentives. Implications for international social media PR will be discussed in the full paper. Literature: Balaji, M. S., Wei, K. K., & Chong, A.

Y. L. (2016, in press). Determinants of negative word-of-mouth communication using social networking sites. Information & Management. LaRose, R. L.,

& Eastin, M. S. (2004). A social cognitive theory of internet uses and gratifications. Journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 48(3), 358–377. Linke, A.

(2015). Talking with or at stakeholders? In E. Ordeix, V. Carayol, & R. Tench (Eds.), Public relations, values and cultural identity (pp. 45–57). Bruxelles: Peter

Lang. Men, L. R., & Tsai, W.-H. S. (2013). Beyond liking or following: Understanding public engagement on social networking sites in China. Public Relations

Review, 39(1), 13–22. Shao, G. (2009). Understanding the appeal of user-generated media: a uses and gratification perspective. Internet Research, 19(1),

7–25. Tsai, W.-H. S., & Men, L. R. (2014). Consumer engagement with brands on social network sites. Journal of Marketing Communications, 1–20.

PP 482

German Lawyers and Their Media-Related Behavior. Litigation PR as a Facet of the Mediatization of the Legal System

D. Nölleke

University of münster, Department of Communication, Münster, Germany

Legal actors increasingly embrace mass media in order to influence public opinion about a legal case and the outcome of the respective trial. These com‑

munication strategies in the course of legal proceedings are measures of the so-called Litigation PR (LPR). In this paper, we conceptualize LPR as a facet

of the mediatization of the legal system. Like actors from other social fields (e.g. politics, sports, science), legal professionals increasingly recognize the po‑

tential benefits that accompany media presence. Referring to the concept of mediatization, we argue that media-related measures are taken to improve

the performance within the respective social field. In this sense, LPR serve the aims of the legal system as they are ultimately applied to support the judicial

dispute resolution. From this point of view, media-related measures should be considered as a self-made (and reasonable) adaptation of processes within