How Social Media Drives Celebrity CEO Culture
Dave Thomas played himself in a popular ad campaign. Lee Iacocca’s books were on shelves in offices across the country. Howard Hughes was depicted by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Martin Scorsese film. Today, a CEO can achieve the same level of celebrity in 280 characters.
A new study in the Journal of Management Studies, co-authored by Ann Mooney Murphy, professor of strategic management at the Stevens School of Business, offers insights into what makes a CEO a celebrity in the age of social media. "The Power of Posting: An Examination of CEO Social Media Celebrity," examines more than a decade of data from 320 CEOs of S&P 1500 companies. By analyzing more than 250,000 CEO posts and 1.6 million user mentions across X (formerly Twitter), the team discovered a formula for CEO social media celebrity based on consistency, positivity and variety.
Unlike traditional media, where journalists determine which executives make headlines, social media enables CEOs to cultivate their own celebrity status by consistently and positively engaging with their audiences. The research shows that these online rewards extend far beyond social platforms, translating into real-world benefits for CEO reputation, corporate profile and even executive compensation.
With nearly five billion people using social media globally, the implications for corporate leaders are profound. Social media celebrity often serves as a launching pad to mainstream media coverage, amplifying a CEO's influence across multiple channels.
Q&A with Ann Mooney Murphy
Why did you and your colleagues decide to pursue research about CEO social media celebrity?
There is a growing number of CEOs who have personal social media accounts and are engaging with social media audiences and stakeholders of the firm and beyond. This wasn't necessarily the case five or 10 years ago. In fact, it's only recently that we can seriously study this, as there are now enough CEOs engaging online. There has been limited research that has looked at CEO online engagement. In our research, we took a novel look at how the way CEOs post affects the size of the audience they attract and the way that audience emotionally resonates with the CEO's message. The combination of those two things is really the ability for the CEO to become a celebrity on the social media platform.
What is the difference between celebrity and social media celebrity?
There has been some work on CEO celebrity, but it hasn’t looked at the online world. They've only looked at traditional media outlets. But traditional media outlets are really different because journalists are the arbiters of celebrity. They decide whether or not they like the CEO, if they're going to cover them favorably, or if they're going to cover them at all. CEOs looking to gain favor with journalists would do things like grant them interviews or send out press releases to get their attention. That self-promoting behavior of a CEO with journalists isn't applicable in a social media world. There’s a finite set of journalists that they can build this relationship with over time, but there are millions and millions of social media users. We decided we know a lot about how CEOs become famous and celebrities in legacy media, but what about in the social media world?
What were the key findings?
We looked at all sorts of things, and in the end, we found that CEOs were more likely to become social media celebrities when they posted a lot on a variety of topics in a positive tone. Moreover, we found that these posting behaviors had different effects on the two key dimensions of celebrity — the audience size and the emotional reaction of the audience. For example, we found that posting more often had a bigger impact on getting larger audience attention because you're just in front of them all the time. The quality of the CEO's content, including positivity and variety, captured more of the emotional resonance of the reaction.
Why would a CEO want to become a celebrity?
That question brings up another finding. We found that certain CEO posting behaviors led to social media celebrity, but we found strong evidence that a CEO’s social media celebrity helped them attain celebrity in the mainstream media. This finding is important because if a CEO is a celebrity, they get benefits. Celebrity helps them have higher salaries and bolsters their reputation, and the reputation of their firm. This can even lead to future job prospects for the CEO.
What were some of the biggest surprises you discovered in the analysis?
One of the bigger surprises concerned our findings related to posting about a variety of topics. Consistent with our findings that variety within a CEO’s multiple posts mattered a lot and helped them become celebrities, we expected that variety between CEOs would also help. However, we found it didn't help at all, and that it was more helpful to stay consistent with what other CEOs posted about. We don't know for sure why that is, but we suspect it has to do with CEOs having more legitimacy when they communicate like other CEOs online.
Why do social media users develop these connections to CEOs?
It has to do with parasocial interactions, which is a new thing to look at in the leadership world. Starting decades ago, parasocial interactions have been used to understand why people become fans of an actor or a sports star. For example, why are there “Swifties?” Even though by and large, Taylor Swift doesn’t have reciprocal relationships with her audiences, Swifties believe they do. Now with social media, these parasocial interactions are starting to occur with corporate figures. Previously, there was not much of an opportunity for CEOs to talk directly to the public. That's totally changed. CEOs can use social media to communicate with the public as much as they'd like, which is much more than they did previously, when they were limited to a handful of journalists who may or may not interview them or put them in their articles. Social media provides a new opportunity for CEOs to not just be out there in the social media world, but to actually start to encourage audiences to develop parasocial relationships with them, leading to celebrity.
How does this research apply to your work in the classroom?
I think it's a good example of how at Stevens, we're always trying to teach our students about the role of technology in business. With over 5.4 billion people estimated to be on social media, it is an important setting to understand, and our study starts to do that for CEOs. According to our findings, CEO’s use of social media has consequences for how they are socially evaluated, which has effects on their individual careers and their firms.
How can you and your colleagues build on this research?
I'd love to test whether our findings would be consistent in different social media contexts. I would also like to better unpack the relationship between becoming a celebrity on social media and how that then translates to the broader context with legacy media. We know one leads to the other, but we don't exactly know how that happens. I’d also like for research to better understand the role of the media, given the expanding use of social media to consume news. For decades, traditional media journalists set the agenda of what the public was talking about and what the public paid attention to, but not anymore. They're contributing to it, but the role they're playing is different. The ability for larger social media audiences, the collective, can now have a bearing on that agenda.
