How is your identity communicated online? - An investigation into managing Twitter sites within five B2B organisations

The purpose of this research is to examine the magic of Twitter management from the perspective of UK marketing communications 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 mystical fusion of organisational and self-narratives through conversational dialogue, appearing as ‘narrative public voice’ within the tweets. Adopting an abductive, interpretivist research design, and 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 case-study analysis, including qualitative interviews with 15 marketing communications professionals across the five case-study organisations. The emerging results suggest a blurring of personal/organisational identities as more marketing professionals are tweeting from personal twitter feeds into the organisational Twitter site, and sharing many of the same followers. Most of those interviewed consider Twitter to be an awareness raising communications channel in the B2B sector, rather than a means of building relationships with customers.