Everyday micro-influencers and their impact on corporate brand reputation: 21st ICIG Symposium

Social media influencers (SMIs) are an important actor within the social media domain impacting upon organisations and brands. Traditionally SMIs are seen as individuals with millions of followers (Audrezet et al., 2018), however, there are also micro-influencers who have a relatively small follower base of less than 10,000 followers (Lin, Bruning, & Swarna, 2018). These micro-influencers are now being recognised in the practitioner domain as having higher engagement and trust factors than a professional-type of influencer/ celebrity with their millionplus follower-base (Main, 2017; Hyman, 2018).There remains a dearth of research on (EDMIs) everyday micro-influencers (unpaid, noncommercial, social media micro-influencers who share their experiences of corporate brands with their followers as a part of their daily lives). This study sought to understand the impact that EDMIs can have on a firm's corporate brand reputation through receivers being exposed to their positive and negative experiences. Secondly, we aimed to establish the specific variables that influence a receiver's evaluation of a firm's corporate brand reputation after exposure to positive and negative tweets from EDMIs