Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.     

How publics react to situational and renewing organizational responses across crises: Examining SCCT and DOR in social-mediated crises

The prevalence of social media among networked publics calls for more research regarding how organizations can conduct effective crisis communication on social networking sites. Based on the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) and the discourse of renewal (DOR) theory, this study examined how social media publics’ sentiments were affected by situational and renewing organizational responses in various clusters of crises. Twitter data of six crises representing three crisis clusters varying in the responsibility attribution (i.e., ambiguous, accidental, and preventable) were collected. We conducted a content analysis on organizations’ official tweets during crises (N = 59) and sentiment analysis on publics’ replies on Twitter (N = 4,340). The results showed that publics’ positive sentiments toward organizations were affected by organizational crisis responses that included instructing information, sympathy, systemic organizational learning, and effective organizational rhetoric. We recommend that crisis managers express sympathy toward publics as well as organizational learning that prevents a crisis from happening again.     

Social media dialogues in a crisis: A mixed-methods approach to identifying publics on social media

Despite the promise of social media to engender dialogue, the common approach to studying social media may prioritize monologue, whereby research considers the strategies organizations use in targeting publics, particularly in a crisis. This study uses a mixed-method approach to analyze dialogue in a crisis—semantic network analysis and content analysis. Specifically, this study examines the emotional expression and crisis coping behaviors on social media during two separate terror attacks: the Paris terror attacks in 2015 and the Barcelona terror attacks in 2017. Results demonstrate how publics may be identified and understood through semantic network analysis and content analysis. This study also shows the connection between emotions and coping, expanding the crisis communication literature in public relations, and suggests the need to consider agenda-setting and resilience in crisis communication research. Finally, we discuss this study’s implications for assuming a dialogic orientation in public relations.     

Dealing with the COVID-19 crisis: Theoretical application of social media analytics in government crisis management

Little theory-grounded research addresses how to use social media strategically in government public relations through machine learning. To fill this gap, we propose a way to optimize social media analytics to manage issues and crises by using the framework of attribution theory to analyze 360,861 tweets. In particular, we examined the attribution of crisis responsibility related to the spread of COVID-19 and its relations to the negative emotions of U.S. citizens on Twitter for six months (from January 20 to June 30, 2020). The results of this study showed that social media analytics is a valid tool to monitor how the spread of COVID-19 evolved from an issue to a crisis for the Trump administration. In addition, the federal government’s lack of response and inability to handle the outbreak led to citizens’ engagement and amplification of negative tweets that blamed the Trump White House. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Crisis collective memory making on social media: A case study of three Chinese crises on Weibo

Social media users collectively (re)construct narratives to create memories surrounding past crises. In this study, we connect the concept of collective memory with a public-oriented approach to crisis communication to examine how crisis response frames and collective memory narratives were displayed by different social actors (government, organizations, and publics) on one of China’s social media platforms, Weibo. Findings from a content analysis of 9238 unique posts on three national crises (the 2010 Yushu Earthquake, the 2015 Tianjin Explosions, and the 2018 Vaccine Scandal) reveal that Chinese publics tended to adopt social issue and blaming frames, while the government and organizations were more prone to using informing and corrective action frames. When recalling and reconstructing crisis memories, Chinese publics used more power and contestation narrative, while the government frequently adopted the nationalism narrative; with trauma being the predominant narrative displayed across the three crises and social actors. Crisis response frames of blaming, crediting, and corrective action were significantly associated with narratives of power and contestation, heroism, and nationalism, respectively. Theoretical implications for future research on crisis collective memory making on social media and suggestions for governmental crisis communication are discussed.     

Revisiting social-mediated crisis communication model: The Lancôme regenerative crisis after the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

The widespread use of social media has stimulated the number of crises on a global scale and given rise to regenerative crises which involve multiple crisis stages and publics. Using the Social-Mediated Crisis Communication model and the regenerative crisis model, this study explores a real-life organizational crisis related to Lancôme Hong Kong, which was driven by the socio-political environment after the Umbrella Movement. It aims to examine the engagement strategies by different publics, and also the influence of information forms and sources on the trends of emotion among social media publics. Results also provided an empirical evaluation of the regenerative crisis model driven by a socio-political environment. An online content analysis of selected 10% sample with an online data acquisition and analysis tool (3902 Facebook posts and comments, 1178 forum posts and comments, and 244 online news articles) revealed the interlocking connection among the involved publics along with the social-mediated regenerative crisis life cycle. Followers’ emotional responses were not only attached to Lancôme, but also to third parties as information sources. Four subcategories of influential social media creators were identified. Refinement on the Social-Mediated Crisis Communication model and practical implications are suggested.     

Revisiting the SMCC model: How Chinese public relations practitioners handle social-mediated crises

As social media are used widely by Chinese organizations, this study comprehensively examines how Chinese public relations practitioners cope with social mediated crisis and how culture interacts with social mediated crisis response. An in-depth interview was conducted to collect data from 23 Chinese public relations practitioners who had experience in dealing with crises and issues via social media. The results showed that Chinese public relations practitioners use diverse social media platforms to satisfy the publics’ needs and social media usage preferences. In addition, the results also showed the importance of matching information platform and information sources in response to social-mediated crises. Furthermore, we revealed how the uniqueness of Chinese culture moderated information platforms and information sources, such as face-saving strategies, collaborating with opinion leaders and influencers to shape the publics’ opinions, using no response, apologizing, and self-mockery, and emphasizing the importance of media relations.     

Revisiting contingency theory in regenerative social-mediated crisis: An investigation of Maxim’s and Yoshinoya in Hong Kong’s polarized context

This research investigates how the social media-based crisis response of two organizations operating in a specific polarized context unfolds along a regenerative crisis lifecycle in line with the contingency theory of accommodation. By analyzing two crises that affected the Maxim’s and Yoshinoya groups during the Hong Kong social unrest in 2019, the paper commits to explicate how internal, socio-environmental, and external publics’ factors shape the communication patterns of the crisis. By focusing on Facebook posts and information available online, this study examines how the two selected organizations responded to specific crisis situations, and how publics reacted during the regenerative crisis lifecycle. Results show that Maxim’s took the advocative, while Yoshinoya engaged in the accommodative stance initially. Then, they both turned to an avoidance stance to deal with active online publics with opposing political stances. Contingent factors driving the organizations to adopt specific stances were relevant to internal members, organizational characteristics, social media environment, and external publics. Results provide insights about the complexities organizations face to respond to online publics in regenerative social-mediated crises. They also advance the contingency theory by refining the advocacy-accommodation stance continuum, re-defining contingent factors, and explicating the interactive effects of contingent factors on organizational response decision making in a polarized and social-mediated context.     

Ethnography and the digital fields of social media

Qualitative researchers struggle to study the transient fields of social network sites like Twitter through conventional ethnographic approaches. This paper suggests that, in order to step further, we should distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online communities and the fluid, ‘meta-fields’ resulting from the aggregation of scattered communicative contents based on their metadata. Both these two intertwined layers of the digital environment interplay with users’ online social practices – which are embedded within offline everyday life and vice versa. While Internet ethnography largely dealt with contextual digital fields, recent developments in the realm of online research allow the ethnographic exploration of digital meta-fields and their publics. This shift recalls Marcus’ appeal for a multi-sited ethnography but, in fact, goes further beyond, towards a truly ‘un-sited’ ethnography. I highlight and discuss the main methodological implications of meta- and contextual fieldworks by presenting an exploratory study of European exchange students’ Facebook identities.     

Populism and social media: how politicians spread a fragmented ideology

Populism is a relevant but contested concept in political communication research. It has been well-researched in political manifestos and the mass media. The present study focuses on another part of the hybrid media system and explores how politicians in four countries (AT, CH, IT, UK) use Facebook and Twitter for populist purposes. Five key elements of populism are derived from the literature: emphasizing the sovereignty of the people, advocating for the people, attacking the elite, ostracizing others, and invoking the ‘heartland’. A qualitative text analysis reveals that populism manifests itself in a fragmented form on social media. Populist statements can be found across countries, parties, and politicians’ status levels. While a broad range of politicians advocate for the people, attacks on the economic elite are preferred by left-wing populists. Attacks on the media elite and ostracism of others, however, are predominantly conducted by right-wing speakers. Overall, the paper provides an in-depth analysis of populism on social media. It shows that social media give the populist actors the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their messages. The paper also contributes to a refined conceptualization and measurement of populism in future studies.     

Breaking bad news with CONSOLE: Toward a framework integrating medical protocols with crisis communication

This paper develops the CONSOLE (Coherence, Orientation, Nuance, Support, Ongoing, Leadership, Emotions) framework to guide practitioners on how to break bad news effectively to stakeholders during crises. Arguably the first study integrating well-established medical protocols such as SPIKES (Baile et al., 2000) and COMFORT (Villagran et al., 2010) with crisis communication literature, the CONSOLE framework is applied on four aviation crises to examine the manner in which organizations communicate bad news on social media platforms, which are increasingly used to communicate with stakeholders (Siah, Bansal & Pang, 2010). Data was obtained during the height of the crises (Vasterman, 2005) from official Twitter and Facebook pages of Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia and Asiana Airlines. Findings showed that the airlines’ communication of bad news to stakeholders suffer from emotional deficit. Practitioners can use the CONSOLE framework to break bad news in a holistic and empathetic manner during crises.     

Getting emotional: An emotion-cognition dual-factor model of crisis communication

The effect of emotional experience on cognitive processes is an under-explored phenomenon in crisis communication research, despite indications of the increasing importance of emotion-based communication in the digital era. Emerging evidence indicates that the emotional experiences of publics play a critical role during organizational crises and determine the degree to which organizations are able to successfully devise communications that help them deal with such crises. Yet no comprehensive, theoretically sound model exists for analyzing how emotions influence the cognitive processing of crisis information. Our study proposes just such a model, capable of describing how cognition and emotion, separately or interactively, influence the publics’ processing of crisis information and consequently their attitudes and behaviors. Our model describes how emotional variables determine whether the publics take a cognition-oriented approach or an emotion-oriented approach to information processing and subsequent formation of interpretations, evaluations, and judgments directed toward organizations. Moreover, our model explains how an emotion-to-cognition assessment of publics’ attitudes is possible and makes a case for how it is critical for predicting and influencing the publics’ behavior during organizational crises. The hope is that this model will aid practitioners and academics in understanding why the publics’ emotions matter during crisis communication as well as how to craft more effective communication strategies as a result. Finally, several avenues for future research are suggested in order to test the validity of our conceptual model in different contexts.     

Does the medium matter? A meta-analysis on using social media vs. traditional media in crisis communication

There has been a growing body of crisis communication research that treats social media as a critical variable, which might alter how people perceive and react to crisis communication messages. The meta-analysis of 8 studies (k = 22, n = 3209, combined n = 9703) compared the impact of social media vs. traditional media in crisis communication. Five studies (n = 1896) contained 8 relevant effect sizes on crisis responsibility, representing 3294 individuals. Seven studies (n = 3185) contained 14 relevant effect sizes on persuasiveness, representing 6409 individuals. Compared to traditional media, using social media significantly lessened consumers’ perceived crisis responsibility (r = -.134, 95 % CI -.212– -.054, p = .001). There was no significant difference between using traditional media and social media in crisis communication on persuasiveness (r = -.039, 95 % CI -.114– .035, p = .30). The moderator analysis indicated that for both crisis responsibility and persuasiveness, the effect size was more noticeable when an organization communicates with college students vs. non-student publics. The ability of social media in dampening crisis responsibility was more pronounced for fictitious organizations compared to real organizations. Compared to traditional media, social media was significantly more negative for preventable crisis, the influence was weak for accidental crisis. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as well as directions for future research.     

How publics use social media to respond to blame games in crisis communication: The Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg 2010

Crisis communication scholarship has been criticized for its “managerial bias” and for its tendency to marginalize the perspective of publics and audiences. However, the understanding of how publics cope with and interpret crises is crucial for developing the body of knowledge in crisis communication, from both critical and managerial/functionalist perspectives. This case study of the Love Parade crisis in Germany 2010 aimed at exploring how publics perceived the crisis response of the festival organizers and how they used social media to communicate about it shortly after the outbreak of the crisis. A content analysis of 1847 postings at two relevant message boards produced support for the assumption that attributions of cause and responsibility are important predictors of publics’ evaluations of organizations in crisis situations. Findings also revealed that stakeholders actively engage in such attributional inferences spontaneously without being prompted by researchers. The analysis of responsibility perceptions as well as evaluative judgments over time supported the situational crisis communication theory. Blaming others and denying responsibility in the context of a crisis that was perceived as human error accident triggered negative reputational outcomes for the organizations involved in the Love Parade.     

An emotional step toward automated trust detection in crisis social media

To this date, research on crisis informatics has focused on the detection of trust in Twitter data through the use of message structure, sentiment, propagation and author. Little research has examined the usefulness of these messages in the crisis response domain. In this paper, we characterize tweets, which are perceived useful or trustworthy, and determine their main features as one possible dimension to identify useful messages in case of crisis. In addition, we examine perceived emotions of these messages and how the different emotions affect the perceived usefulness and trustworthiness. Our analysis is carried out on two datasets gathered from Twitter concerning Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the Boston Bombings in 2013. The results indicate that there is a high correlation between trustworthiness and usefulness, and, interestingly, that there is a significant difference in the perceived emotions that contribute to each of these. Our findings are poised to impact how messages from social media data are analyzed for use in crisis response.     

Mapping the structures of international communication organizations’ networks and cross-sector relationships on social media and exploring their antecedents

Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the alliance theory and the collective action theory, this study examines the global network structures of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and their cross-sector relationships on social media and explains the predictors of the relationships. More specifically, we conduct a network analysis to examine the network structure of international communication organizations and their cross-sector relationships on Twitter. This study found that INGOs and IGOs are more likely to establish following relationships on Twitter with the same type of organizations. Furthermore, educational level and cultural context influence their cross-sector relationships. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.     

What is Flint? Place,storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the Flint water crisis

ABSTRACT

The Flint Water Crisis became a national news story in January of 2016, when major publishers such as The New York Times began covering the story. In the same month, an influx of social media activism occurred in response to the crisis, with citizens developing hashtag campaigns such as #FlintFwd in order to disseminate news and stories from a citizen’s perspective; these campaigns often positioned Flint positively ? as a recovering community ? rather than a city in the middle of a public health crisis, and often addressed not a national public but a local audience. This paper considers Flint-based social media activity to investigate the emergence of place-based activism within the ostensibly global network of social media. In doing so, it identifies three key themes; 1) leveraging social media to forward a critique of deficient journalistic storytelling; 2) using the affective process of storytelling via social media to claim authority over their own material offline existence, and 3) using place-based storytelling to implicate others as witnesses via the global network of social media. These themes coalesce around a distinctly critical logic of connectivity. This logic extends the notion of connectivity articulated by Van Dijck and Poell [2013. Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14.] and the strategies of platform activism explored by Tufekci [2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven: Yale University Press.] to explain how social media works to expose discrepancies between the public story of the water crisis and material, lived conditions of Flint, rendering visible a discursive identity of Flint thus far unrecognized.     

Managing and sharing H1N1 crisis information using social media bookmarking services

Social media outlets are becoming main stream venues for risk and crisis communication, and how information is shared is critical. Analysis of social bookmarks regarding H1N1 demonstrate the CDC was the most popular reference for information, individuals were strongly present, blogs were the most popular type of documents, and Twitter is the most popular source being referenced. The crisis communication literature has just started to address those stakeholders that are creating their own influence and messages online.     

Timeliness,responsiveness and the human voice: The effects of dialogic strategies and the mediating role of perceived communication ethicality on social media relationship building

This study investigates how social media can be better managed to cultivate positive organization-public relationships. It advances an expanded and integrated conceptual model to test how the communication features of corporate pages on social networking sites may influence publics’ perception of the organization’s communication ethicality, which further predicts organization-public relationships as a compound index of trust, commitment, and satisfaction. The results, based on structural equation modeling, showed that three important communication strategies are success factors that could shape perceptions of communication ethicality: timeliness, responsiveness, and the use of human voice in a dialogic framework. In particular, publics’ perception of the organization’s communication ethicality emerged as a key mediator driving communication effects to foster positive relationships with stakeholders in an online environment.     

Mapping networks in corporate social responsibility communication on social media: A new approach to exploring the influence of communication tactics on public responses

Grounded in the networked stakeholder management theory and two-way communication, this study provides a snapshot of networks between companies and publics on Twitter in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. Results showed that CSR communication activities (i.e., informing, retweeting, and mentioning) empowered a corporation through centralizing its network position and gaining public support (i.e., emotional, influencer, and knowledge support). In addition, degree centrality mediated the relationship between corporate retweets and stakeholder support and between corporate response and stakeholder support.