How is identity defined and understood by marketing professionals in online organisational settings such as B2B Twitter sites?

The purpose of this research is to examine the day-to-day management of organisational Twitter sites from the perspective of UK marketing professionals, within five B2B case-study organisations. Specifically this study examines how marketing professionals as ‘organisational storytellers’ engage in a process to communicate the official organisational story to customers, while maintaining an element of their personal identities, due to the less formal and brief (140 character) nature of tweets. This results in a fusion of organisational and self-narratives through conversational dialogue, appearing as ‘narrative public voice’ within the tweets. Adopting an abductive, interpretivist research design, this study initially analysed the content of tweets from five B2B Twitter sites over a three-month period, utilising a corporate web identity framework (Elliott & Robinson, 2013). The tweet examination informed the qualitative interviews with 15 marketing professionals across the five case-study organisations. The emerging results suggest a purposeful unification of personal/organisational identities as more marketing professionals are tweeting from personal Twitter feeds into the organisational site, and sharing many of the same followers in the hope of achieving greater interaction with customers.