The text analysis in the web disclosure: which stakeholders?

In a competitive environment driven by reputation and digitalization, the web disclosure has become a critical element in order to achieve business results. In this contest websites act an important role; in fact it’s not disputed that websites are information vehicle able to influence stakeholders. Many studies focused their attention on the analysis of reporting documents provided by companies. An analysis method is given by the text analysis. In the same direction this work aims to evaluate the aptitude of the web disclosure to provide information to a widest possible group of stakeholders. The identification of recipient stakeholders is based on the IAS Framework: investors, suppliers, customers, the public, employees, government and their agencies. More specifically this work moves from the comparison of the web disclosure and the company external reporting considering that they aim to inform the same population of stakeholders. In this sense, selecting a sample, it’s possible to verify the most used words and match them with stakeholders in order to evaluate which are the most considered ones in the communication process. From these assumptions, after the identification of the sample, the first step consists in the extraction of text contents from the investor relation pages. Then most frequent words are matched with stakeholders. This way, aware that the external reporting is mainly addressed to the investors, we are able to evaluate the weight that the other stakeholders have in the disclosure process.