Managing Crisis Communication via Social Media

Literature Review

Crisis communication management

One part of crisis management is crisis communication in all its forms. "When crisis communication is ineffective, so is the crisis management effort". Fearn-Banks describes crisis communication as "the dialogue between the organization and its public(s) prior to, during, and after the negative occurrence", which can hurt the organization's image. The main goal of crisis communication is to reduce or eliminate the negative effects a crisis situation can cause. To prevent crisis communication from being ineffective, and simultaneously crisis management, it is crucial to manage crisis communication.

Bernstein offers ten steps to crisis communication management and divides them into pre and post-crisis actions. Pre-crisis actions include anticipating the crisis, followed by identifying a crisis communications team, identifying, and training a spokesperson, establishing notification, and monitoring systems, identifying, and knowing organization's stakeholders and developing preliminary messages. It is clear that effective crisis communication management depends on preparation. When a crisis develops, there is not enough time to be proactive, which leaves insufficient time to carry out all the necessary steps from the beginning.

Social media crisis communication

Considering that prompt and honest communication increases consumers' trust in an organization and its actions, social media is a more than acceptable channel to communicate through as well. Social media, and any other interactive communication media/tool, offers both one-way and two-way communication during a crisis, which is something organizations try to combine to maximize the outcomes. New media forms are especially effective during initial crisis events because sometimes, but notably in the beginning, the public perceives lower levels of crisis if exposed to social media communication than traditional communication via mass media, such as newspapers.

Researchers recognized that social media communication has a human (more personal) or corporate (more impersonal) voice which have a different effect on communication success, including in the time of a crisis. The research questions, based on these findings, for this study, were as follows:

RQ1 – What kind of communication do consumers active on social media expect from an organization when a crisis occurs?

RQ1a – Do consumers active on social media prefer a specific (social) media channel when it comes to crisis communication?

RQ1b – Do consumers active on social media prefer a specific tone to crisis communication messages that are shared via social media channels?