Getting More out of 140 Characters or Less: Media Reputation and Agencies' Communication Strategies

Media reputation, defined as the overall evaluation of the organization by the media is an important measure of reputation as a strategic resource a public agency may rely on. Indeed, media coverage and media reputational threats have been pivotal to our understanding of how public agencies rely on communication and blame-avoidance strategies to defend their reputations. When an agency’s reputation is weak, challenges imposed by media opinions are less likely to be dismissed and demand investment in reputation-defensive strategies. However, is this also the case for those unique agencies that hold favorable media reputations? As competitors in political reputation markets, agencies with favorable media reputations hold a clear competitive advantage compared to other public organizations. One of their competitive advantages is related to the fact that these agencies do not face the same reputational concerns. As a consequence, these agencies do not need to invest in the strategic management of reputational threats, e.g., through tailored communication strategies. Considering that there are a few agencies that may count on a favorable media reputation as a unique strategic resource, we anticipate that their overall communication strategies will be substantially different compared to that of agencies that face negative media reputations. So how are public agencies’ communication strategies affected by their media reputations? Assuming that a favorable media reputation is a unique strategic resource that few agencies are able to develop and that such reputation shapes agencies` communication strategies, this article employs machine learning techniques and interviews with communication & public relations` teams in two different regulatory agencies, who were able to build distinctive media reputations, aiming to compare their communication strategies. We rely on thematic diversity indicators and sematic networks as proxies for the communication patterns that agencies adopt in their official website press releases and on Twitter, which is the most utilized social media platform for reputation management. Our findings demonstrate that those few public agencies that hold a unique media reputation enjoy its comparative advantages, investing fewer resources in communication strategies compared to agencies plagued by negative media reputations. The observed consistency in agency communication in both corpora, the agency website and Twitter, is ultimately an expression of the relative autonomy the agency enjoys, which is enabled by its unique reputation. On the contrary, agencies with strong negative media reputation strategically draft their communication strategies and, simultaneously, tailor social media, such as Twitter, to become defensive-reputational platforms. They maneuver the thematic diversity of their Twitter communications compared to their website releases and infuse their tweets with public values to actively defend their reputations. Interviews indicate that reputational-defensive communication strategies are also conditioned by existing organizational capacities. Bureaucratic interpretation of their organizational mission demarcate what is considered or not a reputational threat, and how they tailor reputational-defensive communication strategies. Our study adds to scholarship on reputation-management strategies by including the strategic control of communication themes and content in social media platforms and shielding light on the repertoire of reputational-defensive strategies public agencies rely on.