ABSTRACT
Social media are creating opportunities for organizations to demonstrate 'who they really are' to any stakeholder with a vested interest in the organization's behavior. Social media provide exponentially more opportunities for an organization and its stakeholders to interact, to create dialogues and to establish relationships. By using social media to facilitate relationships between stakeholders and the organization, organizations can establish their messages as more trustworthy and themselves as more authentic, in ways that ultimately contribute to the organization's reputation. Focusing attention on an individual's ongoing construal of an organization's reputation helps us anticipate why authentic communication matters and where social media can have the biggest impact on organizational reputation. Through social media, organizations and individuals can create relationships that, in turn, lead towards more authentic communication. The openness and public availability of an organization's communication on social media is not the same as organizational transparency.
