In spring 2013, Hertz, the car rental company, began formally accepting complaints through the micro-blogging site Twitter. Hertz’s program is an example of a move by corporations to actively manage their brands in the online conversations enabled by social media. This activity is particularly targeted at consumers who are seen to be driving a shift in marketplace power structures. Social media are quietly, but rapidly, changing the ecosystem of influence in the virtual sphere (Hanna, Rohm, & Crittenden, 2011).

Social media have enabled users to exert their power to virally affect organizational decisions. Consumers were found to be highly aware of their influence over others online and the collective power that they may exert over companies (Li & Stacks, 2014). Through the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, communicating more freely, and building stronger rapport through various online groups. The connectivity established through social media can enhance users’ abilities to take collective actions and demand for social change (Shirky, 2011). This empowered action could spread to a large population with rapid speed, thus making a considerable impact. The most active users groups, who are often the opinion leaders on the virtual sphere, can influence the organizational decision-making in, sometimes, a rather dramatic manner, such as crisis situations.

Investigation of public empowerment has been a popular topic in community psychology and marketing research. In public relations research, social media empowerment has received nothing more than passing mentions. Involving direct public engagement, empowerment falls under the realm of the public relations discipline, but has received little empirical attention other than in organizations’ internal communication setting, such as employee empowerment (Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Men, 2011; Men & Stacks, 2013) and empowering the public relations function as organization’s dominant coalition (Berger, 2005; Grunig, 2006; Holtzhausen & Voto, 2002). In the external context, the role of the public relations endeavor in the power dynamics certainly deserves attention. It is a much-needed investigation in our field to understand the underlying psychological mechanism of the rising power of external audiences. From a practical perspective, one of the key challenges for the organization’s social media monitoring team is to identify the opinion leaders in these social networks. These are usually empowered social media users who are actively engaged with content creation.