Dr Mark Badham

Podcast

This comprehensive Handbook offers an extensive overview of current knowledge of corporate communication from a digital perspective. It provides a state-of-the-art view of the ubiquitous impact, both positive and negative, of digital technologies and digitalisation processes on corporate communication. Bringing together insights from leading thinkers in the field of digital corporate communication (DCC), the book explores how digitalisation is transforming organisations and corporate communication. Chapters examine new, emerging and progressive topics and future trends in DCC, including digital hijacking, disinformation and the role of artificial intelligence. Collectively, they present over 30 case studies from around the world to help relate theory to practice. Analysing the changing practices and functions of digitalisation, the Handbook illuminates how organisations are striving to be continuously available 24/7 while embracing the new demands of digital stakeholders. Addressing future challenges facing increasingly digital organisations, this Handbook will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in strategic management, branding, marketing and organisational behaviour. Its overview of CommTech development will also be beneficial for communication practitioners and organisational leaders seeking to navigate the expectations of digitally-active stakeholders.

As masses of digitally savvy stakeholders master the means of 24/7 communication technology, so must communication professionals. This chapter introduces digital corporate communication (DCC) as an important and emerging field of research and practice. Despite the growing yet disparate body of research examining how digital technologies are shaping ways in which organizations and stakeholders communicate with each other, this chapter identifies the need for a more unified body of scholarly knowledge about DCC. It also systematically builds on existing DCC research to offer conceptual clarity of terms such as digital, digitalisation and digital infrastructure, as well as corporate communicationitself, to propose a definition of DCC. It subsequently introduces this handbook’s four over-arching sections that cover: (1) digitally-influenced changes to legacy corporate communication functions, (2) digitally-influenced issues that corporate communication must address, (3) corporate communication’s adoption of digital technologies, and (4) corporate communication’s role in managing digitalization’s effects in society.

This chapter identifies, defines and explores four news media roles of conduit, facilitator, mediator and political actor through which the media participate with corporate, social and political actors in agenda-building processes. The framework of the media’s four agenda-building roles sheds light on how the news media perform their various roles as well as how other actors, such as organizations and media audiences, are able to mobilize the media performing these roles. This framework helps explain how and why media roles affect the way actors are able to influence the media agenda with the intention of shaping the public agenda.

This chapter presents a case study exploring the use of strategic ambiguity in a national government’s strategic external communication addressing multiple and diverse stakeholder demands during a major pandemic. The case study is culturally placed in Finland, a country with high public trust in government authorities. The analysis of discursive strategies in two events occurring during early 2022 showed that the Finnish Government and its authorities used strategic ambiguity when publicly communicating their views, decisions and recommendations about the pandemic. Due to high uncertainty of the long-term effects of COVID-19 on public health, and the need to balance public safety with getting back to normal life, the Finnish Government communicated its pandemic messages in ambiguous ways utilizing five different rhetorical strategies that helped it to change its positions without losing public face. In discussing the benefits and drawbacks of using strategic ambiguity in government communication during a public health emergency, this chapter offers learning opportunities for communication professionals rather than generalizable conclusions about government communications during a pandemic.

Purpose This paper refines the Digital Media–Arena (DMA) framework to address the diversity of stakeholders contributing to the production, (re)appropriation and (re)distribution of organisational messages in digital environments. It also presents a case analysis for the purpose of demonstrating the applicability of the revised conceptual framework to a critical situation. Design/methodology/approach Grounded in key public relations, corporate communication and strategic communication research, this study first extends the DMA framework by introducing six new forms of media-arenas. Next, the study takes a public sector perspective to analyse the revised framework against a critical situation involving the Finnish prime minister in summer 2022. Findings The application of the revised DMA framework to analyse the critical situation shows the importance of mapping and understanding diverse discourses across multi-arenas and their communication role in a rapidly unfolding scandal surrounding the prime minister of Finland. Findings also reveal the diversity of stakeholder voices forming their own versions of organisational messages and sometimes converging organisational messages within and across DMAs. Practical implications The DMA framework can offer practical suggestions to guide communicators to make strategic choices in what, where, how and with whom they can communicate. Originality/value The revised DMA framework contributes expanding the field's knowledge of the strategic communicative use of the digital environment in typically highly volatile and multi-vocal situations by offering instrumental understanding of the conflicting challenge between subjugating and liberating organisational messages across the digital spectrum.

During the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, the Finnish and Swedish governments followed two very contrasting COVID-19 approaches. Using a ‘test, trace, isolate and treat’ strategy, the Finnish government adopted a hybrid approach which saw relatively heavy government intervention to contain community transmission. The Swedish government adopted a de facto ‘herd immunity’ approach in which relatively light government intervention resulted in higher community transmission. These two approaches shaped the way the Finnish and Swedish governments communicated COVID-19 messages as well as the way people perceived their government’s handling of the pandemic and their subsequent behavioural responses. Particularly, this chapter examines public trust in these governments as a source of information and the role of - and public trust in - intermediaries as government stakeholders in the COVID-19 communication process. Trust in government is vital during major health crises as it affects the way the public responds to government recommendations about the way they should behave, such as social distancing and mask-wearing measures. This study shows that public perceptions in both countries were overall positive and public trust in the respective authorities remained high. The chapter concludes with recommendations for government health communicators on how to use strategic communication to build and manage public trust. The Finnish and Swedish governments handled the COVID-19 pandemic very differently in 2020, with contrasting results in terms of number of deaths and infected people. This chapter examines that public perceptions in both countries were overall positive and public trust in the respective authorities remained high. The trust people have in their government, health authority and fellow citizens is an important variable during public health crises. Trust is a multifaceted concept often related to a state, belief or positive expectation. Global health crises affect a very broad and diverse set of stakeholders. The chapter focuses on the specific role of intermediaries as strategic communicators engaged by the government in risk communications. It then concludes with recommendations for government health communicators on how to use strategic communication to build, manage public trust.

During highly uncertain times such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, it is vital to understand and predict individuals’ responses to governments’ crisis and risk communication. This study draws on the Orientation-Stimulus-Orientation-Response (O-S-O-R) model to examine (1) whether uncertainty reduction motivation (a pre-orientation factor) drove Americans to turn to traditional news media and/or social media (stimuli) to obtain COVID-19 information; (2) if these media preferences shaped their COVID-19 knowledge, cognitive information vetting, and trust in government communication (post-orientation factors); and finally (3) whether these factors contributed to their intended and actual behaviors (responses), such as getting vaccinated. Thus, this study explores how multiple communicative and cognitive mechanisms contribute to public compliance with government health recommendations during a pandemic. Mediation analyses showed positive indirect effects between uncertainty reduction motivation and behavioral outcomes via use of social media (in relation to traditional news media) and COVID-19 knowledge and cognitive information vetting. This study discusses theoretical and practical health communication implications of these findings.

Public relations scholarship has drawn on organisational legitimacy theory to show how organisations appeal to stakeholders’ acceptance of their existence and importance in society. Studies have shown how different types of organisations utilise communication strategies in social media to gain legitimacy. This chapter contributes to public relations research by examining how a sample of business schools implemented legitimation strategies in their social media posts when their legitimacy was threatened. The findings show that when ten world-class European business schools faced declining institutional rankings between 2016 and 2019, they made use of four legitimation strategies—authorisation, rationalisation, moralisation and mythopoesis—in their Facebook posts as they sought to regain their legitimacy.

This chapter examines factors influencing Americans’ preventive behaviours, including their COVID-19 vaccination intentions, in response to the U.S. government’s strategic communication about COVID-19 guidelines. This chapter draws on the theory of planned behaviour to shed light on three factors that can help strategic health and risk communicators predict future behaviours during a pandemic: attitude toward a recommended vaccine, social norms (i.e., the likelihood that individuals will follow others’ opinions about recommended behaviour), and self-efficacy (i.e., individuals’ confidence in their own ability to follow recommended behaviour). Based on an online survey of American adults in October and November 2020, the study found, first, that a relatively high proportion of Americans were adopting government-recommended behaviours to prevent infection and spread of the virus. Second, Americans who follow the government’s recommended behaviours tend to have higher vaccination intentions. Third, younger Americans are more likely to be influenced by social norms to adopt recommended behaviours. Fourth, younger Americans have higher levels of self-efficacy than older Americans. Finally, Americans with higher education levels tend to have higher self-efficacy to follow recommended actions, thus leading to higher levels of preventive behaviours. These findings have important implications for strategic health and risk communicators, particularly when attempting to persuade the public to follow government health recommendations during a public health crisis. This chapter examines factors influencing Americans’ preventive behaviours, including their COVID-19 vaccination intentions, in response to the US government’s strategic communication about COVID-19 guidelines. The infectious disease threat (IDT) appraisal model advocates that it is critical for strategic health and risk communicators to identify those factors that might boost the public’s preventive behaviour in the face of an IDT. Mixed COVID-19 messages about recommended personal behaviours and pandemic severity were emanating from the US Government, particularly from President Trump himself. In a health-related crisis setting, organizations and publics are both regarded as being affected by the crisis. Informing people of recommended behaviours and persuading them to follow the instructions are among the top priorities in managing public health crises. A series of multivariate regression analyses were conducted to examine which factors affect preventive behaviour and vaccination intentions. The lack of trust in government sources may lead to negative attitudes toward vaccines.

Public health messages disseminated by trusted government authorities are likely to have more influence over individuals’ intentions and behaviors. However, individuals worldwide have different levels of trust in government authorities, which leads to varying levels of compliance intentions. Additionally, these trust levels may vary during major public crises, such as pandemics. Based on a COVID-19 pandemic communication survey (N = 3,065) disseminated throughout six countries (Australia, Finland, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States), this study examined the association among trust in distinct government sources, cultural orientations, and health behavioral intentions. Findings indicated that trust in official health communication sources at four governmental levels (i.e. national government, the head of the national government, the national health authority, and the chief representative of the national health authority) was related to vaccination intentions and other behavioral compliance intentions (i.e. willingness to prevent COVID-19 infection in other ways). Meanwhile, these direct associations were mediated by the cultural orientations of power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Findings also revealed that the direct association of trust in government sources and the indirect relationship through the above cultural orientations varied by country. This study offers insight into the important role of credible sources and individuals’ cultural orientations in the domain of health communication aimed at influencing behavioral intentions.

Digitalization is affecting not only the corporate communication function within organizations, but also giving rise to numerous new and unpredictable digitally-influenced societal issues. The more these changes occur, the greater the responsibility of communicators to monitor and manage these effects. To make sense of these effects, this article introduces the novel Digital Media-Arena (DMA) Framework (Badham et al., 2022, 2024) which outlines 14 digital spaces where organizations, stakeholders, and publics communicate today. The article then examines new emerging roles for corporate communications in the digital realm.

This research investigates individuals' reactions and coping strategies during a prolonged health crisis over distinct temporal phases (i.e., early and late stages of the pandemic) and geographical locations (i.e., Australia, Finland, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States). Using the infectious disease threat (IDT) appraisal model as a guide, we conducted two separate studies at different intervals to investigate the coping strategies individuals utilised in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Findings revealed cross‐country differences in cognitive (i.e., COVID‐19 risk perception and vaccine uncertainty), affective (i.e., hope, fear, shame, and anger), and conative (i.e., preventive behavioural intentions, vaccination intentions, and preventive behavioural engagement) outcomes, shaped by cultural and policy influences. Mediation and moderation analyses showed that the coping mechanism of cognitive appraisal indirectly influenced conative coping through affective responses, which could be contingent on pandemic fatigue. This research contributes to crisis and health communication literature by offering a more nuanced understanding of how individuals across different countries cope with and manage a long‐lasting public health crisis and provides key takeaways for advancing pandemic communication theory and practice.

The news media plays a vital role in influencing public perceptions about topics, issues and crises. They also act as important intermediaries between organizations and public, enabling organizations to shape how people think about crisis topics and actors. Monitoring news coverage and assessing the news media's agenda‐setting role in a crisis can help organizations respond more effectively to emerging situations. When crises are prolonged and affect many countries, media analysis can become a tedious task for crisis managers. This study demonstrates how natural language processing (NLP) methods can be utilized in news media analysis of crisis situations, such as an extended cross‐national pandemic. Specifically, it demonstrates the possibilities of using NLP to identify and compare the salience of diverse crisis topics and how the media treat these topics and crisis actors (first‐ and second‐level agenda‐setting) across countries, news outlets, and time. The COVID‐19 pandemic serves as an illustrative case study to showcase the application of NLP techniques to provide insights into public perceptions of a major health crisis shaped by the news media in two Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden). Findings show the suitability of NLP methods to detect nuanced differences in news media coverage and offer relevant knowledge of how public perceptions and responsibility attribution fluctuate across time and countries.

This project investigated issues pertaining to COVID-19 related communications by different social actors, such as governments, news media, health authorities, experts, business organizations, and their impact on the general public’s attitudes and behaviours. It sheds some light into the news media’s role during pandemics, thus exploring the extent by which news media contributed to specific understandings of the COVID-19 pandemic by their journalistic choices of issues, tone, and crisis narratives. This project is comparative in nature, including data on public perceptions across six countries (Australia, Finland, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, and USA) and news media analyses of two countries’ main news outlets (Finland and Sweden).

This state-of-the-art textbook provides a wide-ranging foundation to communication management-including corporate communication, public relations, and strategic communication-from an exclusively digital and global perspective. The book covers the core principles necessary for introductory students of both university and executive programs, with a particular focus on how digital technology is shaping communication management in the increasingly volatile environment. To help bring theories, concepts, and challenges to life, it features captivating real-life stories, case examples and studies, and insightful Q&As with senior practitioners-collectively representing almost 40 organizations (of various types and sizes) from 20 countries across the world. Thought-provoking exercises and critical and reflective questions contribute to a deeper level of understanding of each chapter’s topics. These and other pedagogical tools-as well as the newly emerging Digital Media-Arena (DMA) Framework-orient readers with the fast-changing, global, and volatile world of digital communication management. Additionally, the book extensively incorporates emerging topics and future trends in communication management (e.g., digital communication hijacking, misinformation, virtual influencers, and AI-enabled predictive modeling). This book is designed for courses or modules that cover an introduction to communication management, corporate communication, public relations, and/or strategic communication in communications and business schools. Online resources also accompany the text: an author-created podcast, PowerPoint lecture slides, tutorial/workshop exercises, case studies, reading reflection forms, quizzes, and instructions for assignments (case study, essay, and podcast reflection). Please visit the hyperlink: www.routledge.com/9781032671307

Digital technologies have empowered an increasingly participatory communication environment that challenges the ability of organizations to maintain control over their messages. In this new environment, stakeholders not only receive these messages through organizational digital media, which this chapter argues are typically understood as transmission channels, they also are able to re-interpret and re-communicate these messages across multiple participatory, omni-directional digital arenas seemingly beyond organizational strategic control. This chapter examines the tension in strategic communication between a traditional message-controlling approach through digital media and a more nuanced message-facilitating approach in participatory digital arenas. It addresses this challenge by proposing a framework of Digital Media-Arenas (DMA) to assist strategic communicators in navigating the conflicting digital terrain where stakeholders reign. Drawing on the PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned) model, the framework incorporates newer forms of communication such as Advocated, Rented, Hijacked and Searched DMA. Implications of this framework are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought several challenges to businesses and societies. In response, many corporations have supported local communities and authorities in the management of the pandemic. Although these initiatives, which can be considered forms of corporate social responsibility (CSR), were highly coupled with explicit CSR communication campaigns, little is known about whether these campaigns were effective. Previous research indicates that culture can shape people’s perceptions of CSR initiatives and communications, suggesting that businesses pay attention to careful consideration of cultural norms for effective CSR communication. However, the COVID-19 pandemic as a new CSR setting may challenge earlier findings. This study empirically investigates whether three cultural factors (individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance) affect public perceptions measured as recall of and favorability towards corporate COVID-19 response initiatives across six countries. Findings from a representative survey of adults across these countries show that respondents in individualistic and collectivistic countries recall these CSR communication campaigns about these corporate COVID-19 response initiatives quite differently, and these are related to differences in power distance and uncertainty avoidance. However, no difference was found in overall corporate favorability, indicating that cultural factors did not affect levels of favorability towards such initiatives. This, we argue, can be explained by the global dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the context of these CSR initiatives. This study contributes to CSR communication literature with empirical findings from a global pandemic setting. It offers businesses and managers empirical grounds to understand the communicative impact of COVID-19 response initiatives, which can inform future CSR actions.

Although there is evidence of crises spreading quickly across multiple social media and other online media channels, crisis communication scholarship has not yet adequately explored this phenomenon. Building on corporate communication theory related to online arenas, we introduce the Crisis Arena Crossover framework to examine the process in which a crisis emerging in one online arena can cross over to other arenas synchronously or asynchronously. We apply this framework to the Apple 2018 #ChargeGate case to show the factors that contribute to crisis arena crossovers. Amid today's fast-changing and less-controlled digital communication landscape, this framework offers insights into factors that influence crisis arena crossovers and which corporate communication practitioners should be mindful of.

This chapter adds to emerging research exploring the construct of joy by drawing attention to the value of more loving stakeholder relationships. Relationship management research has focussed attention on the antecedents, outcomes and quality of an organization's relationships with various publics and stakeholders and has examined strategies that can nurture these relationships. However, not much of this research has addressed intimacy and passion in these relationships. Accordingly, this chapter draws on the theory of brand love developed in relationship marketing research and the theory of love from psychological research to build a theoretical framework of organization–stakeholder love (OSL) that can be applied to organizational relationships with publics and stakeholders. An OSL framework switches emphasis from how organizations can attract stakeholder affection (e.g., love) towards organizations to how organizations can and should love their stakeholders. The proposition put forward in this chapter is that OSL can and should become a driving force behind organizations' interactions with stakeholders, thus contributing to ethical public relations practices. OSL is important because it has the potential to contribute to addressing public relations' image problems (e.g., relating to terms such as spin and corporate greenwashing); it offers a new love orientation that guides organizations towards a focus on the primacy of stakeholder needs and values, which in turn may shape the way organizations initiate and manage relationships with stakeholders. This chapter concludes with practical ways to implement OSL and a research agenda suggesting ways OSL may open up new research opportunities in public relations.

People are increasingly turning to social media for their news and for sharing and discussing news with others. Simultaneously, media organizations are becoming platform-dependent and posting short forms of their news on their social media sites in the hope that audiences will not only consume this news but also comment on and share it. This article joins other media and journalism studies exploring this phenomenon through a relational approach to media audiences to better understand how media organizations, particularly newspapers, are cultivating relationships with audiences via social media. Drawing on public relations theory about organization–public relationships, the article examines how news organizations nurture relationships with audiences via social media, such as through engagement and dialogic communication strategies. This article empirically examines organization–public relationships strategies (disclosure, access, information dissemination, and engagement) of nine newspapers with the largest reach in Australia, the US, and the UK. A content analysis is conducted of these newspapers’ posts (total 1807) published in March 2021 on their Twitter and Facebook sites to identify and examine these strategies. Findings show that their social media accounts are predominantly used for news dissemination rather than audience engagement. The implications are that although media professionals are frequently distributing news content among their audiences via their social media sites, they are not adequately engaging with them.

As communication professionals seek to manage corporate reputation by utilising digital technologies and infrastructures to engage in communication with internal and external stakeholders, these same digital technologies and infrastructures also are being used by stakeholders to construct their own reputational messages. This chapter argues that today's digital communication environment is less suited to an organization-controlled model of communication and more suited to a stakeholder-centric and less message-controlling participatory communication approach. So how can strategic communicators navigate the tension between controlled and uncontrolled communication in the digital environment as they try to build and protect corporate reputation? The chapter presents the Digital Media-Arena (DMA) Framework as one way to address this duality. Each of the 14 DMAs contributes in unique ways to shaping stakeholder judgements about organisations across seven dimensions of reputation.

Purpose Relationship management research within public relations literature highlights the value of organizations gaining stakeholders’ affection for them. However, what has not been explored much is a reciprocal focus on organizations’ affection for – or affective orientation toward – stakeholders. Accordingly, drawing on and extending brand love research within marketing literature, this study explores stakeholders’ (i.e. Gen Z) perceptions of an organization–stakeholder love (OSL) orientation toward them. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on Finnish Gen Z participants’ (n = 290) responses to an online structured interview in which three dimensions of brand love (i.e. intimacy, passion and commitment) were explored. Findings Findings indicate that Gen Z perceive an organization demonstrating an OSL orientation toward them when (1) brands/organizations use technology to nurture closer ties with them and (2) organizations take a stand on issues with which they too strongly identify. Practical implications Results of the study offer insight into how organizations may convey an affective orientation toward stakeholders in their communication strategies as well as their organizational culture, systems, policies and practices. Originality/value The study contributes to relationship management literature by providing some initial empirical evidence on the manifestations of love that young adults in Finland see occurring in contemporary brand–customer relationships, thus contributing to an emerging body of work adopting a stakeholder-centric approach to relationship management.