The Impact of Social Media on Stakeholder Engagement

Online tools such as social media provide new opportunities for citizens and stakeholder groups to be informed, identify common interests, express and share opinions and demands, organize, and coordinate interventions. Therefore, the Internet could be expected to be a powerful tool for corporations' stakeholder engagement efforts. In order to provide an overview of current findings on the impact of new digital media on stakeholder engagement, we conduct a systematic literature review. Our analysis reveals five topical categories of inquiry, which we term political/civic, business, cultural, health, and education participation. We analyze studies from the field of business participation and find a strong bias towards consumer engagement and marketing issues. Only few studies are found to critically explore the effect of online media on power and value distribution between corporations and stakeholders. We then turn to the more established field of political and civic participation in order to further analyze antecedents, forms and outcomes of online participation. Finally, we derive propositions for future research into online stakeholder engagement.