TY - JOUR
T1 - How publics react to situational and renewing organizational responses across crises
T2 - Examining SCCT and DOR in social-mediated crises
AU - ZHAO, Xinyan
AU - Zhan, Mengqi
AU - Ma, Liang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Inc.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Crisis communication
KW - Discourse of renewal
KW - Sentiment analysis
KW - Situational crisis communication theory
KW - Social media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086710066&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.pubrev.2020.101944
DO - 10.1016/j.pubrev.2020.101944
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85086710066
SN - 0363-8111
VL - 46
JO - Public Relations Review
JF - Public Relations Review
IS - 4
M1 - 101944
ER -