PRDV107: Crisis Communication

To answer research questions, it was important to determine participants' social media usage habits to see if their answers were relevant. In the survey, they shared which social media platform they use, how much they use it daily, whether they follow any brands on their social media accounts, and why. Their answers are shown in Table 2.

Clearly, participants are avid social media users who also predominantly follow some brands on their social media. This meant they were suitable to rate social media crisis communication seeing as they would, in the situation, be a target group for social media crisis communication.

After seeing a short video showing a situation that later turned into a crisis for a delivery service provider, participants shared their opinions. Their reaction to this kind of situation (if it happened with a delivery service provider that operated in their country), and what they seem to think would be a suitable reaction from the company itself are presented in Table 3.

Table 2. Social media usage habits among participants (N = 125)

Notes: SM = social media.

*Multiple-answer question. Participants could choose more than one answer and percentages could sum up to more than 100%.

**Upper values not included in the frequency and percentage of each row.

Table 3. Social media crisis perception (N = 125)

Table 4. Perceived and preferred tone of the crisis communication message (corporate versus personal) (N = 125)

Most of the participants would cease to use services from the particular delivery service provider. They elaborated their answers, and almost all of them (out of 74 participants who would stop using services) agreed that they would be afraid for their packages. One of them wrote: "If one employee does this, who will guarantee that my expensive monitor will be delivered undamaged?" Considering almost 60% of possible service users would never do business with a company due to a video going viral on social media, the impact of (possible or actual) crisis is undeniable.

More than 90% of the participants would expect a response, but mostly on social media excluding YouTube (which is the social media where the crisis occurred) and/ or on company's official website. It is curious that not even 20% of participants would expect a response in the form of a YouTube video – perhaps they deem this kind of media too extensive.

After seeing a video showing a response to the aforementioned situation, a video of a senior vice president of the company acknowledging the situation and apologizing for it, participants were asked to rate the specific crisis communication. The overall score, on a scale from 1 to 5 (where 1 was "Extremely bad" and 5 was "Extremely good") for the specific crisis communication, was 3.5. Their opinions on the tone of the message (corporate versus personal) are shown in Table 4.

Clearly, perceived and preferred tone of the message differ by quite a bit. The participants would want a personal message, but the company opted (according to them) for one a bit more corporate in tone. Ideally, the tone would be slightly more personal than corporate (average score = 6.2). But, in reality, it was slightly more corporate (average score = 4.3).

The participants were also asked to determine whether they agree with statements regarding the specific situation and crisis communication they saw, and crisis communication in general. Average scores (on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 was "Strongly disagree" and 5 was "Strongly agree") are shown in Table 5.

All of the statements regarding the specific crisis situation and communication got an average score between 3.2 and 3.6. The participants obviously are not too satisfied with it, but they are also not dissatisfied. However, some stronger opinions are visible for the statements regarding crisis communication in general. They disagree that organizations should choose only one social media channel to communicate during a crisis, which leads to believe they feel organizations should choose more than one social media channel to communicate during a crisis. The participants also disagree that crisis communication should be corporate, and somewhat agree it should be personal. However, the strongest disagreement is noticeable for the statement "Crisis communication should offer only an apology", while simultaneously, the strongest agreement is noticeable for the statement "Crisis communication should, besides an apology, offer a strategy for future prevention of similar situations". Somewhat similar scores to these were given by the participants to the statements "Organizations should communicate at all times during a crisis", which they agree with, and "Organizations should wait until the crisis is over to communicate", which they disagree with.

Table 5. Average scores regarding a specific crisis communication event and crisis communication in general (N = 125)