Kiyoshi Murata    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Commerce    Position   Professor
Date	2012/08/17
Presentation Theme	Reputation Management in the Age of Social Media
Conference	APCIM 2012
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Publisher and common publisher	Lin Xi and Kiyoshi Murata
Details	Thanks to the tremendous development and widespread availability of WEB 2.0 applications or social media and mobile communication terminals such as feature/smart-phones and tablet PCs, Net users have been able to enjoy disclosing their mind lightheartedly at any time and any place. On the other hand, this technological environment has made it difficult for business organisations to manage their reputation, which directly relates to their trustworthiness recognized by their existing and potential customers and, thus, to their corporate performance. Whereas there are online word of mouth (WOM) sites such as @cosme (http://www.cosme.net/) and tabelog (http://tabelog.com/), social media including blogs, microblogs, social networking services, bulletin board systems and community sites can function as a platform of online WOM regardless of their original purposes. Due to the rapid increase in social media users and their reinforced power over corporate reputation, many business organisations cannot ignore what is posted and argued online by Net users using social media. If incorrect or inaccurate things concerning their products and services are posted online based on misunderstanding or malicious intent, business organisations can argue against them by right. However, detecting such posts is not necessarily easy (may be costly and time-consuming) and, moreover, it seems that, in general, people tend to believe individual's online allegation more than organisation's one. Given the current Net environment described above, this study addresses the ways of managing corporate reputation suitable to the age of social media. A questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews to investigate young Net users' online behaviour using social media will be conducted, and a policy recommendation to business organisations to favourably manage their reputation based on the results of the surveys will be made.