‘Show Me Your People Skills’ - Employing CEO Branding for Corporate Reputation Management in Social Media

Digitization has led to increased social media utilization among companies to connect with their customers. We know that particularly CEOs, as the representing face of a company, can exert great influence to build corporate reputation. While reputation management in general has been researched extensively, we know little about the dimensions of CEO reputation management in social media. This paper deals with the distinction of organizational and personal branding in Twitter, and moreover, aims to determine eligible dimensions for CEO reputation management, based on the widely accepted Reputation Quotient. Therefore, we collected 3,604 social media postings of companies and their respective CEOs from Twitter. Through statistical and content analyses, we determined two supplementary dimensions for CEO reputation. Shared Interests and Personal Logging add private aspects to the spectrum of CEO reputation management, which have the capacity to foster consumer engagement