Attitude and ability of frontline employees in customer interaction influence company reputation. Since respective theory is scarce, this paper – based on a qualitative interview study – presents an examination of the status quo of the topic in luxury watch retail. Theories of service quality, identity and impression management are briefly addressed.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between firm size and organizational actions on adopting social media for corporate reputation management. The sample group of 198 companies is selected with a simple random sample method from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listings: Sixty nine companies were from the Fortune 500 listings, seventy one companies from the NYSE midsize capitalization and fifty eight companies from the NYSE small capitalization listings. This study employs cross tabulations and Chi-square analysis, and the Kruskal-Wallis that enables the comparison of three samples that are independent. The results of the study show that (1) large firms have more social media ownership than small firms, (2) large firms respond to social media posts at a greater frequency and quickly than small firms, and (3) firm size is less likely associated with response styles to social media for online reputation management. The results show that reply time and response styles of organizations to social media customers in the 2015 survey has no significant change compared to that of 2011. There appears to be a pervasive lack strategic framework as most firms in the study were found not to be adequately monitoring or leveraging social media communication for their reputation management.