Study of the impact of internal stakeholders' LinkedIn e-content on the e-reputation of Moroccan companies

Abstract

Corporate e-reputation is one of the keys to success and sustainable development, and is difficult to control and complex to manage. The influence of traditional corporate messages (direct signals sent by companies) has diminished in favor of the continued growth of earned media. For projects to succeed, companies need employee commitment (Igalens and Point, 2009). Employees are needed to create a company's reputation. Their online presence can also become an asset and a competitive advantage for the company. They constitute the company's human capital and social capital.

The electronic reputation of companies can therefore be analyzed from two angles: studying the effective use of LinkedIn company pages and LinkedIn personal pages, and determining the scale on which they are measured. These complementary approaches enable us to carry out a global analysis of the LinkedIn professional social network. In order to get closer to reality, we conducted a qualitative empirical study. The first phase enabled us to reflect the context and generate new results likely to refine our research model. This initial exploratory stage involved semi-structured interviews with ten managers, and the results were analyzed using Nvivo.10 software.

At the end of our analysis, we found that the actual use of e-content on LinkedIn Company Pages and LinkedIn Personal Pages influences the perceived e-reputation of companies in the automotive sector. Our results also revealed that perceived credibility mediates the relationship between our explanatory variables and our variable to be explained.