A New Framework for Evaluating Social Transparency Factors and Personal Brands in Social Networks

Abstract

A personal brand is represented as promoting skills, experience, and career goals to other professionals. The business process of the internet as the media for information and communication technology is known as e-trade which encourages the display of creation on e-trade sites or digital markets as cost-efficient. It makes brands hard to follow the suggestions due to their vagueness and is an obstacle to estimating efficiency. Thus, this study stripped the personal brand down as well as integrated social transparency theory to develop a unique framework evaluating how social transparency factors affect the personal brand which is highlighted to audiences. A survey was performed based on audiences’ responses to posts and active audiences from Facebook and Instagram, and applied SEM to build the proposed model. The empirical results showed content and interaction transparency were significantly related to competency, standards, and relationship commitment. Identity transparency was found to have a negligible relationship with competency, standards, and relationship commitment. This study also researches brand ethics and brand research methods from the ethical perspective. The contributions of this study are twofold. First, the proposed framework provides a new view of evaluating personal brands in social networks in depth, which encourages more theory development in this area. Second, the empirical results clarified the association between the factors of social transparency and personal brand. The effective methods of improving personal brands were discussed for practitioners.