The Construction of Authenticity in Corporate Social Media

Abstract

Authenticity has been redefined and re-examined within sociolinguistics in recent years, and recent research has begun to address authenticity in online spaces. Research on authenticity as constructed by corporations on social media is lacking, however. This study investigates how linguistic resources are used by a large corporation to construct authenticity online, what the constituent parts of those authenticating features are, and how platform affects the construction of authenticity. This is investigated through a case study of the American diner chain Denny’s across three of their social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) and faceted classification (Herring, 2007) are used to identify the importance of Purpose, Activity, Topic/Theme, and Norms in constructing authenticity. Contrary to essentialist notions of ‘default speaker’ authenticity, authenticity in this context is found to be composed of two main elements: essential, fundamental identity characteristics and the performance of a target identity. In online spaces, Denny’s performs two identities in one: the casual social media user and the company with a vested interest, resulting in ‘mixed authenticity.’ These findings have implications for sociolinguistic research on authenticity as well as for corporations advertising in social media contexts.