How Public Opinion Affect Corporate Behavior In Social Media Context

It has been a long time since the traditional media is in charge, and corporates have got used to this due to the long time interaction. The appearance of Internet changes the situation, and with the emerging of social media based on the Internet technology, not only does people’s life style change, but also the environment those companies survive in. Social media which leads to the collapse of the corporate-centric and a more uncertainty environment also make corporate events upgrade to social problems. During the analysis of three typical cases, we divide public opinion into two parts, namely attention and opinion. From the attention perspective, it focuses on the factors that cause people to pay attention to corporate events under social media environment. From the opinion perspective, it focuses on how public impact corporates by laying stress on the important direct stakeholders of the corporates and further prevent companies from realizing their objectives and force them of change behaviors. Because corporate event usually emerges in a particular social media platform, it also analyzes how different characteristics of the social media platform affect public attention and work during corporates dealing with public opinion. At last, from the communication perspective, using attention and opinion as two dimensions, we establish a matrix to classify stakeholders and come up strategies to manage public opinion in order to help corporates manage them and understand the social media context better.