UPPER ECHELONS AND B2B SOCIAL MEDIA: THE CEO AND CMO POSTING INFLUENCE
(A2023-113997)

AUTHORS

Roberto Mora Cortez, Southern Denmark University; Ayan Ghosh Dastidar, Clark University

ABSTRACT

This study investigates whether LinkedIn posting of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), as relevant members of the top management team (TMT), in a business-to-business (B2B) setting affect how firms generate sales revenue. Drawing on upper echelons and media exposure theoretical underpinnings, we explain how different types of posts (sales, technical, social, and hiring) are interconnected with more traditional marketing and sales indices (meetings with firm representatives, website visits, website leads, and number of quotes) to increase firm performance (sales revenue). Using data from 158 weeks of a B2B service multinational firm, we specify a VAR model with exogenous variables (VARX). We focus on the cumulative effects (i.e., contemporaneous, and non-contemporaneous) of the types of posts communicated by both the CEO and CMO in a growing market, and compute elasticities with impulse response functions (IRFs). Our findings indicate that TMT posting is associated directly with firm performance measures, and indirectly via other related intermediary marketing and sales mechanisms (e.g., website visits).