Social media and strategic communication : A neglected playground for strategy as practice research?

This study investigates how are strategists framing strategic issues on social media to build ambient awareness. While strategic communication was traditionally carried out by peripheral actors such as public relations departments (Heavey et al., 2020), social media has democratised strategic communication as it affords direct strategic communication from strategists’ broad stakeholders (Baptista et al., 2017; Heavey et al., 2020). Therefore, social media offers distinct opportunities, and also challenges, to the conventional roles and work of strategists (Heavey et al., 2020; Morton et al., 2020). Utilizing a netnography method, we study the (strategy focused) social media posts of strategists from FTSE 100 companies, specifically looking at LinkedIn. Our findings revealed three key components of strategic framing through which the strategic leaders build ambient awareness, with the aid of multimodality of social media: framing strategic issues with style (identity), framing everyday achievements as part of strategy implementation, and framing strategy as responsible.