Evolving Publics, Evolving Messages: Analyzing Publics’ Information Sharing Network in a Social-Mediated Crisis

As more publics disseminate and exchange information on social media during organizational crises, social networking sites become essential platforms for strategic communication. However, the current literature offers little insight regarding the dynamics of publics and their shared information in social-mediated crises. By integrating the Social-Mediated Crisis Communication (SMCC) model, Information Utility Perspective, and Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) model, our study examines the types of social media publics, their information sharing behavior, and the correspondence between publics’ shared messages and the corporation’s responses in different stages of a crisis. By applying network analysis and content analysis to the six-month Twitter data of the Chipotle crisis, we identify broadcasters as a new type of social media publics, along with influentials and followers. Moreover, the results show that publics’ shared message features (i.e., prevalence, diversity, and form) significantly changed based on the specific stage of the crises. Our study contributes to the crisis communication literature by empirically differentiating types of publics based on information flows on social media and unveiling the evolution of publics in the social media network by stages. In addition, the results provide meaningful insights for crisis managers to understand the progression of crises on social media.