Calling Firms Out: A Look into Micro-Reporting in Fortune 200 Firms’ CSR Social Media

Authors

Gregory D. Saxton & Chao Guo

Executive Summary

The business world is witnessing an era of heightened demands for accountability and increased pressure for CSR and sustainability reporting. The diffusion of new and social media has intensified the drive toward public, dynamic accountability and CSR reporting. Social media platforms such as Twitter are used not only by firms to send discrete visual and textual “microreports” but are also used by the public to engage with, converse, and even challenge firms for their CSR-related actions and inactions. By leveraging social media platforms, members of the public are continually “calling firms out” for their CSR actions, and firms’ decisions to respond or not respond constitute a new form of public, dynamic, interactive reporting and accountability behavior that has yet to be addressed by the extant CSR literature.