Session 11 Blog Post

This week, I read more journal articles on literature review. To be honest, although I have written some literature reviews as one part of my academic paper in my undergraduate study, I had no idea about how to complete a literature review as a separate assignment. By doing some research, I found it is of much importance to clarify the main questions in mind and learn how to manage the recourses which can lead to the answers of the questions. I downloaded Mendeley to help manage and compile what I am learning from the article recourses and it works well so far. To answer my research question: How can Internet companies succeed in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication through social media? I plan to include three to four main parts in my literature review, including the definition of CSR communication, the relationship between CSR communication and social media, CSR communication strategies for Internet companies and case studies on CSR communication through social media.

In addition, I paid more attention to the related cases of my topic. After reading Professor Gorski’s comment last week, I also agree that how a company behaves in times of crisis often reveals its true values, and it can be interesting to look at how company respond to corporate crisis. When I come to consider this topic, I found it may be more related to Crisis Public Relations management, which is also a field that I have great interest in. Nevertheless, I am a little bit confused when including this topic to my primary research question, as CSR activities are more often related to some long-term planned projects of the company.    

(the screenshot of the H5 pages of “Children’s Gallery” conducted by Tencent)

Here I also want to mention a specific case of Tencent. Though I have already talked about it in my previous blog post, I think it is literally a successful example of how Internet company use social media to conduct influential CSR activities. This September, Tencent conducted an online donation activity called “Children’s Gallery” in WeChat Platform. People spend ￥1 to buy digital paintings drawn by autistic children and this donation is expected to help autistic children live a better life. Nearly all the participants would like to share the painting they bought in their social media account—which made this public-spirited activity a phenomenal success and achieved the ￥15,000,000 donation goal in 9 hours. Utilizing social media, Tencent not only get the public easily engaged in this online activity, but also successfully make them forwardly create more social media content to add value to this campaign. However, because it is a quite new event, it may be difficult to find previous academic studies on it. For the following week, I will keep doing more research on it and find more related cases.