Analyzing Social Media's Role in Amazon USA's Reputation Management

This report investigates the relationship between Amazon USA's use of social media and its reputation management. It is a longitudinal study analyzing 10 years of data from open-review platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, focusing on user engagement, reviews, and the company's response rates. The study aims to assess how these social media activities impact Amazon's financial performance. The research explores the role of social media in enhancing the company's reputation, examining how factors like customer engagement and online reviews influence the company's image and financial outcomes. The report reviews literature on organizational reputation, the impact of social media on it, e-reputation, and the challenges of online reputation management, including the use of mashups and managerial responses to online reviews. The study's significance lies in providing insights into how large organizations can leverage social media to manage their reputation, build customer loyalty, and drive financial success in the digital age.

1Social media and reputation management
Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
Role of social media in improving reputation management of Amazon USA
Name:
Course:
3750 words

2Social media and reputation management
Abstract
This research investigates the relationship between Amazon USA use of social media and
its reputation management. It is a longitudinal study that investigates 10 years of recorded data in
the social media channels analytics of Amazon open-review platforms, Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube. It considers users' data about their engagement and reviews and the company
reputation management concerning, number of posts and response rates. Also, Amazon USA
financial performance data will be investigated to measure the progress of the relationship
between the two variables to be able to judge the research hypotheses. The independent variable
will be measured by (people engagement and reviews) and the dependent variable will be
measured by (number of posts, response rates and financial performance).

3Social media and reputation management
Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................4
1.Research purpose…………………..............................................................................................5
2. Literature review..........................................................................................................................5
3. Hypotheses and Research questions………………..................................................................12
4. Methodology……………………..............................................................................................12
5. Significance of the study………………...................................................................................16
Conclusions....................................................................................................................................17
References......................................................................................................................................19

4Social media and reputation management
Introduction
The social technologies era provides various opportunities for organizations in terms of
connecting people and sharing ideas. The social media platforms are highly adopted by
contemporary organizations to enhance their reputation and gain customer satisfaction and
loyalty. The matter that led large and multinational organizations who are heavily dependent on
social media to use mashups to manage their various social media accounts and satisfy the needs
of their customers and facilitate the social media reputation management (Wu & Shenghua,
2014).
Amazon started its business in the 1990s by acting as an online bookstore. Currently,
Amazon is a multi-business company; it is an asset builder, service provider and technology
creator. Since the emergence of Amazon.com, it is used to be a business to customer (B2C)
platform, today people can use business to business (B2B) portals at Amazon Business and
customer to customer (C2C) on Amazon.com. Despite this, B2C is its core business. Most of the
company business depends on e-commerce, where Amazon Web Services (AWS) significantly
contributes to its total revenues. Amazon.com represents a retail business platform that connects
sellers and buyers in one place. AWS represents a platform for platforms that provides tools to
build other platforms, where Amazon Mechanical Turk represents a mediating platform that
allows companies to crowdsource certain tasks. Its AWS grows by 43% annually and its total
international sales increases by 23% annually. Amazon acquired the chains of grocery stores of
Wal-Mart and Whole Foods in 2017, their sales accounted for $11.5Billion. (Wu & Gereffi,
2018).
This research is meant for investigating the role of social media in improving reputation
management of Amazon USA depending on a longitudinal study. The following section declares

5Social media and reputation management
the importance of the research, relative literature review of the phenomenon of investigation,
research questions and hypothesis and significance of the study.
1. Research purpose
This research investigates a highly important issue for contemporary organizations that
seek to respond to the customer needs, build a huge base of customers and gain their loyalty.
From another side, it focuses on company success through improving its reputation by utilizing
social media platforms. Organization reputation is an intangible asset, which is more difficult to
be managed compared to tangible assets. Reputation significantly contributes to organizational
financial growth and success. The increase of the user-generated content (UGC) platforms
resulted in a high dependency on organizations' reputation on the content and reviews that
customers share online. The emergence of the internet second generation (Web 2.0), enabled
customers to share their opinions in cyberspace the matter that resulted in a power shift from the
market to the customers. Therefore, reputation management became vital for business success
and growth (Alrawadieh & Dincer, 2019).
Amazon USA represents an excellent example of a successful organization in reputation
management by utilizing social media, the matter that reveals the importance of investigating it
as an ideal case.
2. Literature review
2.1 Organizational reputation
The organizational reputation represents the knowledge of an organization characteristics
that are recognized by its stakeholders. The past actions of the organization and its direct and
indirect experiences collectively represent its outcomes that result in its image of being good,

6Social media and reputation management
trustworthy and reliable. Therefore, reputation is considered to be an intangible asset for any
organization. The desired and favorable reputation is related to significant outcomes, like
attracting clients, gaining investors' interest and retaining talented employees, contributing to
positive media coverage, being trustworthy with a good word of mouth. In addition, a good
reputation can create a halo effect that influences the stakeholders to trust the organization
despite negative claims and help in fixing its reputation. Therefore, effectively managing a good
reputation gains the attention of organizations and scholars as well. Effective reputation
management involves creating a positive perception to the public. The stakeholders develop a
positive image of an organization through communication (Ye & Cheong, 2017).
According to Hutton, as cited in Dutot, Galvez, & Versailles (2016), the Fortune 500
companies customers believe that corporate communication and spending on it is positively
linked to organizational reputation.
2.2 Social media and organizational reputation
Social media refers to the manipulation, use and information exchange across social
interaction platforms. The highly attracted generation to these tools is generation Y customers,
who range between 15 and 25 years old (Dutot, Galvez, & Versailles, 2016).
The establishment of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn in the 2000s has witnessed a
rapid acceleration. Social media platforms witness an increasing use; Facebook accounted for
1.59 billion on a monthly basis, Instagram had 400mn active users and Twitter s 320mn users by
the end of 2015. The social media channels provide online platforms that enable organizations to
communicate with their stakeholders, know their feedback and reply to their inquiries. The
increasing importance of social media is due to its ability to build good relationships between
organizations and their stakeholders that represent a reputation capital. Also, it is a low-cost

7Social media and reputation management
method to reach customers compared with traditional media. According to Stelzner (2015), as
cited in Ye & Cheong (2017), about 96% of marketers participated in the social media channels
by 2015. Also, the Fortune 500 companies use of Facebook represented 74% and Twitter 78%.
In addition, social media spending is expected to increase by 23.8% of the marketing budgets.
Organizations that publish blogs succeed in creating positive customers' thoughts.
Accordingly, creating effective content strategies should focus on the type of content that attracts
the attention of the stakeholders. Stakeholders' engagement via social platforms succeeded in
building strong relationships. High public engagement influences the stakeholder's perception
and guides them to recognize the organization to be transparent, trustworthy and authentic (Ye &
Cheong, 2017).
According to Floreddu & Cabiddu (2016), organization reputation comprises that:
● Reputation intangible nature contributes to the organization achieving sustainable competitive
advantage.
● Reputation represents the stakeholder's collective perception that develops over the time
through organization communication.
● Reputation accumulates the organization past actions and stakeholder's perception, either
directly or indirectly that influence the company's future expectations.
2.3 The relationship between corporate reputation and organization communication
Organizations can use communication to stimulate their holders and build strong
relationships. The organization communication affects its reputation through its selected
messages that enable stakeholders to realize the organization operations that contribute to the
organization overall evaluation. Organization communication creates a dialog with the
stakeholders to enable the organization to better understand their interests. There are three

8Social media and reputation management
different communication types that organizations can use; the primary communication that
represents the different effects of product and service, the secondary communication represents
the formal communication that uses traditional communication channels, like advertising and
finally, the tertiary communication, including the word of mouth and media interpretation. The
three types of communication affect the organization reputation with various degrees. The
widespread of the internet succeeded in transforming the unidirectional communications that
organizations used to disseminate information to their stakeholders into two-way
communication. Interactive social media enables stakeholders to communicate with each other
and express their message about the organization the matter that could enhance the organization
reputation or threatens it. The negative word of mouth of an organization spreads more rapidly
around the world compared to a good word of mouth. Therefore, “a complex narrative web of
meaning” determines the organization reputation in social media. Organizations should play a
proactive role to use social media channels to disseminate information (Floreddu & Cabiddu,
2016).
2.4 e-Reputation
The organization identity is considered to be its personality, it refers to the basic features
of organizations. Identity has to be defined internally within the organization and externally to
the public. The organization image could be positive or negative. The e-reputation is created
form various perceptions that stakeholders create from the information circulating the internet
(Dutot, Galvez, & Versailles, 2016).
2.5 The challenge of online reputation management
Trust plays an important role in virtually mediated transactions, where consumers depend
on online peers' reviews posted on social media platforms. The fellow customers have direct

9Social media and reputation management
knowledge of the business, its products and services. The customers' reviews directly impact
online sales that increase the importance of their evaluation and judgment. The rapid spread of
bad word of mouth led organizations to lose customers and generate losses, the matter that led
them to create reputation management systems. The technological advances, like file sharing,
web-based profiling and web portals suggest that ethical activities might influence business
norms. The online customer reviews shared across the reputation management systems affect the
customer decision to purchase (Kuratko, Brown, & Wadell, 2015).
2.6 A brief review of mashups
Mashup represents a website or an application that mixes internal and external data
sources. The set of combined data is likely to produce an interesting web application or new
online services. The architecture of a mashup composes of mashup site, content providers and
the web browser that the user can access. The mashup services could be flexibly combined
through application programming interfaces (APIs) to match certain needs. Amazon has
published APIs according to web standards and allowed them for end users to be able to develop
various mashups (Wu & Shenghua, 2014).
2.7 Managers' readiness for the B2B
People are becoming rapidly adapted to social media. Despite this many B2B companies are
still highly tentative about using social media for many reasons that will be identified according
to Bernard (2016), as follows:
 They consider it to be irrelevant to the buying decision of their customers.
 They are influenced by their employees' opinions.
 Fear of negative feedback, where organizations seek avoiding the risk of the circulating bad
word of mouth.

10Social media and reputation management
 Lack of skills that can interact with customers across social media channels.
 It is perceived to be a tool for B2C marketing.
According to the situational crisis communication theory, when organizations face a
crisis situation, they tend to use several strategies to effectively respond to the crisis. The crisis
outcome is a factor of how the situation is circulated. The organization repetition is insulted in
the case that the organization succeeded in building a good and ethical relationship with the
public for a long time before the occurrence of the crisis. The external stakeholders are likely to
express negative reaction on the corporate statement in the case of an unusual crisis, ambiguity
or decision making or declaring unfair decisions (Sisson & Bowen, 2017).
2.8 Managerial response to online review
Reputation management represents the organization web care. They devote managerial
efforts to manage online stakeholders and interact with them. Therefore, providing a timely
managerial response to the negative reviews represents an essential strategy in reputation
management. The positive management response increases the customer satisfaction level.
Accordingly, a positive response is likely to result in enhanced financial performance. The online
reputation management strongly associated with e-complaints rather than e-compliments.
Managers can use generic responses to the clients' reviews that represent little attention to them,
while the specific response reveals personalized responses that significantly impact customer
satisfaction (Alrawadieh & Dincer, 2019).
2.9 Bolstering e-reputations
Many companies tend to improve their public image by providing false information about
their interest in environmental issues, aiming by this to improve their reputation through the
open-review platforms. This process is called "green washing" that involves high risk if people

11Social media and reputation management
discovered it. The corporate social responsibility communication with the public positively
affects the company reputation and e-reputation when communicated through the open-review
platforms and social media platforms (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2016).
2.10 Amazon US e-reputation management
Person-oriented platforms allow individual communication that is also public in nature.
The social media platforms, like Facebook, enable users to communicate, but their conversations
can be published to the public. Amazon has its own open-review platforms that share the aspects
of the person-oriented platform. Therefore, Amazon is devoted to uncontrollable communication
of various opinions, where the combination between the content individually generated and
publicly displayed resulted in high spillover effect. The quantity and quality of people
contribution to open-review platforms and social media channels are related to the individual
users' motivation.
Amazon reviews are limited to the individuals who search for a certain book or similar
content. This represents the community that is close to purchasing and hence other people
opinions significantly affects their purchasing opinion (Greve & Song, 2017).
Amazon USA new and changing trend helped to gain huge reputation and popularity. The
social media platforms spread and heavy usage by customers played a significant role in Amazon
USA growth. Also, Amazon succeeded in utilizing the spark platform to boost its business
through facilitating product discovery, increasing engagement rate through attracting reliable
reviews and product recommendation (Marvin, 2017).
Amazon USA is effectively using innovative ways to enhance its e-reputation; it tends to
add every representative name in each tweet to personalize the tweet and effectively
communicate (Simplify 360, 2016). The company customer orientation succeeded in enhancing

12Social media and reputation management
its rating and reviews and gaining customer loyalty (Miller, 2018). The matter that enabled it to
gain most of its revenues from social media. The social media channels enabled Amazon USA to
increase its revenues on an annual basis. According to Perrin (2019), the company will increase
its brand reputation and revenues in the coming year by using social media channels effectively.
This argument could be supported by Boston (2019), who claims that Amazon USA is able to
gain a high level of customer engagement across social media platforms in every stage.
Indicators of Amazon US success in reputation management could be driven from Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube published metrics (Colicev, et al., 2018).
These arguments reveal the fact that e-commerce is not only devoted to buying and
selling products and service, but it is also meant for innovation, collaboration, communication
and reputation management (Turban, et al., 2017).
3. Hypotheses and Research questions
Based on the literature, the following research questions were posed:
H1: Amazon USA has efficiently used social media platforms in reputation management
H2: Amazon USA engagement rates on social media platforms are efficient to its reputation
management.
H3: The presence in an evaluation platform improves Amazon reputation management
H4: The rating in an evaluation platform improves Amazon reputation management
4. Methodology
4.1 Research philosophy
The research paradigm refers to applied scientific philosophies and assumptions about the
world phenomenon of investigation. It indicates the scientific way that research should follow.