Effective corporate messaging on geopolitical issues – Scholar Q&A with Yi Grace Ji

A cross-institutional team of Page Center scholars is studying corporate advocacy initiatives that will help build a model for companies to effectively and ethically communicate geopolitical issues. Their two-part study will examine social media communication from Fortunate 500 companies in the United States to learn how these corporations approach controversial global topics – in this case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the second part of their proposal, they will conduct survey research to investigate how corporate communication can endanger prosocial engagement among consumers. The research team is Yi Grace Ji, Boston University; Yufan Sunny Qin, James Madison University, Linjuan Rita Men, University of Florida; and Zifei Fay Chen, University of San Francisco. Ji, Men and Chen have been funded as Page Center scholars before. The current project is part of the 2023 research call on prosocial communication. In this Q&A, Ji discusses the project and its relevance to the topic of prosocial communication and the corporate communications industry.

Can you talk about how the team of scholars came together, along with the research idea?

The proposal we submitted was actually a phase two of a corporate communication study focusing on geopolitical issues. We started phase one approximately a year ago and we have already presented it at IPRRC [International Public Relations Research Conference]. The whole thing started because Rita is a Page member. She goes to the annual meetings and meets with CCOs and some CEOs. One of the themes was “How does corporate communication deal with geopolitical issues?” This was around when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, and there was no question whether companies needed to speak out. The question was “How?” For example, many leading corporations in the U.S. economy communicated about their initiatives regarding gifts/donation matching, addressing employee wellbeing, shutting down their operations and business and more. Even in the literature, we have had a long history of looking at corporate communication addressing social responsibility and social advocacy. However, the geopolitical issue is a very niche and new area.

How does this research project fit in the research call and the prosocial communication topic?

We try to operationalize proposal communication in our research in three ways. One, we focus on social media. So, if corporations are talking about global issues, how likely will the general public be educated in their awareness level? How likely is it that the public will share those social media posts coming from corporations that focus on the Russian-Ukraine war? Another way is looking at it from a stakeholder perspective. What are the chances that someone would donate time or efforts and participate in a geopolitical-related advocacy campaign? The third way is buycotting, and behavior intervention to supporting the initiatives related to the issue. These are the specific operationalizations we would like to implement in our research through the two studies proposed.

As you’re continuing this research, what is your expected timeline for completing the project?

There are two parts to our project. Part one, we are currently collecting social media posts. We have finished collecting Twitter posts from the Fortune 500 companies through March of this year, which marked one year since the Russia-Ukraine war started. We're also in the process of collecting Facebook data because we want to cross compare across different social media platforms. Are the topics and strategies different? And of course, how would the platform impact the social media communication?

Part two, we are building the items for our questionnaire for the second phase of the study, which is survey research. We have to wait until we finish the first part, hopefully by August, because the insights we generate from the social media and analytics research will solidify the questionnaire.

It’s early in the process, but what practical uses do you foresee uncovering with this project?

Some of the practical insights from part one will have more of a computational approach to analyzing the social media data, such as structural topic modeling approach based on the algorithm Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). For example, what are the naturally occurring themes coming out the data? So, hopefully we can let practitioners know the common themes that Fortune 500 companies have been practicing. Then we can let them know how those things impact the public’s engagement on social media. If some of the things work better, than the other companies can follow through those example posts.

And with the second part of the study, the survey, we will be able to understand how corporations talk about things and how their external stakeholders perceive the corporate communications. We can cross-validate the messages we find on social media and ask stakeholders what they think regarding both society and corporate-oriented outcomes. Stakeholder reactions will provide insights and a unique perspective for practitioners.

Why are these insights important for practitioners and corporate leaders?

We really want to address the social impact of corporate communication. I think moving from a company-centric approach to a more societal-centric approach, we acknowledge that when any corporation practices CSR or CSA, it's important to address the right trends. But as social actors in a society, it’ll be more for stakeholders to evaluate whether the communication is having an impact contributing to the general well-being of a society. We have an online perspective (part 1) and an offline perspective (part 2), We are being very ambitious in building a conceptual framework by mapping multiple perspectives using mixed-methods in our investigations, but hopefully we’ll be able to address these components.

Can you share the Page Center’s role in your current and past research? How has it helped your projects succeed?

The research calls are an opportunity to advocate for our own research. Looking at public engagement and how companies can play a role in social communication is relatively new. So, I see the Page Center’s calls as a way to advocate for this important line of research that has not been getting much attention. That, and of course the financial support, is very important. It offers us a great platform for the cause, which is prosocial communication. We’ll be able to communicate and discuss insights with other scholars who are interested in prosocial communication. And not only from a corporate perspective, for example, Nicole’s O’Donnell’s interview where she talks about her research on bone marrow donations helps us from a different theoretical perspective. That can spark further interdisciplinary discussions so we can all move prosocial communication forward.