Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 63, October 2016, Pages 350-361
Computers in Human Behavior

Full length article
Understanding the use of social media by organisations for crisis communication

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Many organisations did not use the full potential value of social media for crisis communication.

  • Six positions are proposed for organisational social media crisis communication.

  • SCCT should be further extended to accommodate the social media context.

  • A taxonomy of stakeholder crisis messages received by organisations is developed.

Abstract

Many businesses have commenced using social media for crisis communication with stakeholders. However there is little guidance in literature to assist organisational crisis managers with the selection of an appropriate crisis response strategy. Traditional theories on crisis communication may not adequately represent the social media context. This study took a qualitative approach and explored organisational use of social media for crisis communication at seventeen large Australian organisations. An analysis of 15,650 Facebook and Twitter messages was conducted, drawing on the lens of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) (Coombs & Holladay, 2002). Findings suggested that when large Australian organisations responded to crises via social media, they lacked an awareness of the potential of social media for crisis communication. Organisations often did not respond to stakeholder messages or selected crisis response strategies that may increase reputational risk. The paper contributes important understandings of organisational social media use for crisis communication. It also assists crisis managers by providing six crisis response positions and a taxonomy of social media crisis messages that stakeholders may send to organisations. Key implications are discussed.

Introduction

Social media is important recent addition to organisational crisis communication tools. Conveniently and quickly accessible by vast numbers of individuals and organisations, social media can be deployed by organisations to communicate crisis information to dispersed stakeholders (Park, Cha, Kim, & Jeong, 2012). According to experts, there is an important dimension to organisational crisis communication (Bucher, Fieseler, & Suphan, 2013), extending to crisis communication by social media (Ki & Nekmat, 2014). When using social media, organisations can respond to stakeholders’ questions and concerns, potentially improving organisational understandings of stakeholders’ crisis needs, providing greater clarity and preserving or enhancing organisational reputation (Hurk, 2013).

While social media has enabled organisations to have direct communication with stakeholders, it has increased organisations’ vulnerability during a crisis as it can facilitate the spread of it (Ngai, Tao, & Moon, 2015). Despite the importance of social media, still businesses find it challenging using social media effectively for crisis communication (ContinuityInsights, 2014, Li and Li, 2014, Parsons, 2011). So far limited number of studies have examined the use of social media as a communication tool during real organisational crises not in experiments (Ki & Nekmat, 2014) explaining why various researchers have called for more research to be conducted in social media crisis communication (Floreddu et al., 2014, Jin et al., 2014). This research adds to the nascent body of studies in the field. As the researchers resided in Australia at the time of study, and as large organisations (defined by Australian Bureau of Statistics (2002) as organisations with 200 or more employees) are the main Australian organisational users of social media (Sensis, 2014), we elected to study crisis communication by social media at large Australian organisations.

This paper aims to explore how organisations use social media to interact with stakeholders during crises. The paper makes several important theoretical and practical contributions. Firstly, it contributes to filling the knowledge gap associated with organisational use of social media in crisis communication as a novel communication method by providing valuable insights in terms of the use of social media by organisations for crisis communication and responds to recent calls for systematic studies in the field (Jin et al., 2014, Ki and Nekmat, 2014). Secondly, it increases scholarly understandings of organisational social media usage for crisis communication by identifying a set of six positions that organisations can take in their communication with stakeholders on social media during a crisis. Thirdly, it develops a unique taxonomy of social media crisis messages that organisations may receive from stakeholders and examines organisational response to each message cluster. This taxonomy increases the scholarly understanding of stakeholders’ interactions with organisations via social media during a crisis and helps organisations planning for crisis communication to prepare an appropriate response for each stakeholder message cluster. Fourthly, this study applies situational crisis communication theory in a social media context and provides useful insight in terms of the need for further development of this theory in the social media context.

The remainder of the paper is set out as follows. First, we establish a theoretical background from a review and synthesis of relevant literature. Following a description of the research method we present key results and findings. Finally we discuss academic and managerial implications from the findings, draw conclusions and offer final remarks.

Section snippets

Literature review

This section provides a theoretical background synthesised from a literature search of the information systems, social media and crisis communication academic literature, where we sought articles on social media crisis communication and underlying concepts. The section briefly reviews (1) social media, (2) crisis communication and situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) (Coombs & Holladay, 2002) and (3) the use of social media in organisational crisis communication.

Method

Organisations’ social media content, much of which is readily accessible in the public domain, provides invaluable opportunities for studying crisis communication. From May 2013 to January 2014, 15,650 social media messages during crises at seventeen large Australian organisations were collected and analysed by qualitative content analysis.

Findings

This section provides key results and findings.

Discussion

The findings from this study drew on recent data on crisis communication posted on social media. Such data is unavailable from other interactive communication media (such as telephone or individual/group meetings) or from one-way communication channels such as non-interactive company websites, broadcast emails, posted letters or printed newspapers. As mentioned earlier, few studies of social media content for crisis communication exist and this study adds to the fledgling body of research.

The

Future research suggestions

Several limitations in this study can be addressed in future research. First, while data was collected over a nine month time period, only seventeen crises cases were captured and not all crisis types were represented. Future studies could explore crises over a longer period, increasing the data set. Second, this study adopted a qualitative approach to gain a deep understanding of the phenomenon. Future studies could adopt a quantitative approach and study a larger number of organisations.

Conclusion

The study reported in this paper explored the use of social media for organisational crisis communication by a qualitative content analysis of Facebook and Twitter messages posted during crises at seventeen Australian organisations. The paper provided detailed analyses that led to support for existing understandings and important new understandings on how organisations use social media for crisis communication. Supporting the findings of Ki and Nekmat (2014), the study found that many

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