The green profiles : using social media for communicating corporate environmental issues to external stakeholders

Abstract

Sustainability is an essential part of doing business nowadays. Corporate sustainability communication (CSC) assists companies to conduct dialogues with stakeholders regarding sustainability topics. In addition, social media has emerged as both challenge and opportunity for CSC. This paper studied the situation of using social media platforms for communicating corporate environmental issues with external stakeholders at four Nordic aviation companies: Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), Finnair, Icelandair, and Norwegian Air Shuttle.

The findings display varied performance rates among the airlines and across the platforms. Norwegian has been the most- and Icelandair has been the least-active companies in environmental-related communications. Facebook and Twitter are evidently the most promising options, while video turns out to be a very effective tool for attracting more audience engagement. Besides, there is no need to create a lot of posts in order to gain high interaction rates, but adequate communicating frequency and content are advisable to maximise the outcomes. On another hand, the case companies have not involved actively enough in dialogues with stakeholders. That hinders conversation flows and reduces the total effects of CSC. Last but not least, one implication is identified specifically for the aviation industry: new aircraft fleets and the use of renewable energy sources (e.g. biofuels) are the most appealing themes to the audience.

Future studies could explore the situation in other industries, social media platforms, and geographical boundaries; or could work on external stakeholder perspective. While this study focused exclusively on the environmental aspect, future studies may examine the other two pillars of sustainability, especially social issues. New research could also invest more resources in expanding the studied timeframe and analysing data more exhaustively. Instead of evaluating the effects of contents, future studies may examine the effects of Web 2.0 platforms’ designs and utilities on CSC. Finally, it would be useful to identify correlations (if any) between organisational restructuring and CSC strategy change.