Digital Communication and Corporate Reputation

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.