Towards a More Holistic Stakeholder Analysis Approach. Mapping Known and Undiscovered Stakeholders from Social Media

Abstract

This paper proposes a conceptual direction for organizations of how they could map their stakeholders in a more holistic way. Study suggests, that stakeholder theory is useful in identifying and prioritizing stakeholders that organization is aware of. However, theory is argued being ineffective in finding stakeholders on new environments (social media), where connectivity and relationships play a key role. The argument stems from the need to assess stakeholder presence beyond the dyadic ties. Consequently, the combination of the Stakeholder Salience Model (SSM) and social network analysis (SNA) is proposed as a more holistic solution for stakeholder identification including those from social media. A process of finding “unknown” but important stakeholders from social media was identified incorporating the content search and the principles of SNA. Consequently, stakeholders from social media are identified based on the dimensions of connectivity and the content shared. Accordingly, the study introduces four groups of important actors from social media: unconcerned lurkers, unconcerned influencers, concerned lurkers and concerned influencers and integrates them into the existing Stakeholder Salience Model (SSM).