Reputation Management of Organisations in the Public Sector: Social Listening as a Method for Analysing Big Data

Abstract

Reputation management in the public sector has scientifically been rather neglected in the past. Nevertheless, the literature suggests that the strategic management of reputation has become more important for public organisations in recent years. Therefore, big data analysis with the help of social listening, i.e. retrieving relevant communication from online sources via web-crawling and analysing the results using artificial intelligence, is applied here to three public sector organisations. The results show that social listening is at least in principle suitable for measuring reputation in the public sector. Also, the reputation of public companies and private companies is different. As a consequence, public companies should aim to improve their reputation and at least an awareness of the weaknesses of public company reputation should be built.