Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in the Online News Letters of ExxonMobil and SPDC in Nigeria

Introduction

Recently, wonderful innovations in digital communication particularly the various media platforms the internet provides have ignited the intellectual interest of many communication scholars and media practitioners and produced better channels for corporations to interact with their various stakeholder groups (Lister et al., 2009; Livingstone, 1999). Communication between organisations and their stakeholders have changed tremendously. The change has provided organisations with several media channels they could communicate with their various stakeholder groups and obtain their comment easier and faster (Friedman & Friedman, 2008).

Prior to the discoveries of these great innovations in digital communication which many communication scholars and media practitioners have regarded as New Media (Logan, 2010; Lister et al., 2009; Livingstone, 1999; Friedman & Friedman, 2008), interaction between organisations and their diverse stakeholder groups was one-way patterned and often only electronic media and print media were used. Today, because of these great innovations in digital communication, most organisations can communicate better with various stakeholders on a number of media channels the internet platform provides (Ath et al., 2018). Among these media channels are a company blog, website, Facebook page, twitter handle and others.

However, the use of these channels particularly the website by organisations to inform their various stakeholders about their programmes and contributions in the society seems not to be well acknowledged and effective or perhaps most stakeholders are not conscious of the information provided on these channels (Livingstone, 1999). Because most stakeholder groups of these organisations are not aware of their corporate social responsibility programmes, the contributions of some corporations in this regard have been questioned on several fora. In addition, some stakeholders appear to be biased in their appraisal of these corporations. Thus, their comments and actions lead to agitation, protest, corporate reputation and image deformation. For this reason, one may like to know if these organisations make available adequate information about these programmes on their managed media platforms. In view of this challenge in focus, this study seeks to investigate how two energy corporations have engaged the online newsletter medium to share information with their various stakeholder groups about their CSR programmes and draw attention of most of the stakeholder groups to the contents of online newsletters of ExxonMobil (Nigeria) and SPDC (Nigeria) through a comparative study from January 2013 to August 2014.