Message vs Medium - When Crisis and Social Media Collide: Managing Corporate Reputation in the Digital Age

The increasing use of social media by the public during a crisis consequently rises the need for companies to incorporate an appropriate crisis management strategy to utilize these tools effectively in order to protect their corporate reputation. Given that social media platforms are public and visible, makes it very challenging for companies to manage online conversations. This combined with the unexpected nature of a crisis makes it relevant to explore this topic with new perspective. In this study, the focus was on using two crisis response strategies from Coombs’ SCCT, namely apology and diminish, on social media platforms with high and low information richness during a preventable crisis. Although crisis response strategies on social media has been widely researched, little research is done where level of information richness played a central role combined with a response strategy during a preventable crisis. Moreover, there is no clear guidance in literature to create explicit managerial understanding and provide a selection of appropriate crisis response strategies. Traditional theories on crisis communication may not be sufficient in representing the social media context. Therefore, the results of this study provide good insight in which characteristics in a social media platform and which response strategy are most beneficial for companies to utilize. The following research question was posed in order to find out: “How do medium (low info richness vs high info richness) and the message (apology vs diminish) affect the effectiveness of corporate crisis management in a preventable crisis?”. Based on this research question, four hypotheses were established. By means of an online experiment using online tool ‘Qualtrics’, the research question was answered. The online experiment is conducted using a 2 X 2 factorial between-subject design for a total four conditions. The experiment is based on 1 crisis type (preventable crisis) X 2 crisis response strategies (apology vs diminish) X 2 social media platforms (Facebook vs Twitter). A convenience sampling method was used and a total of 184 participants were collected. After cleaning the data, 168 respondents remained for the final dataset. For the experiment, a fictitious news article and coffee franchise were used called Coffee and Cream. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions. For each condition, the company description and the news article were the same. The stimuli 2 were the statements Coffee and Cream made after the incident. This was either an apology or diminish strategy on either Facebook (high info) or Twitter (low info). Several statistical tests were conducted after all the data was collected. The findings showed significant relationships between the independent variables ‘Response strategy’ and ‘Level of information richness’ and test variables ‘Post-crisis reputation and ‘Behaviour intentions. As a result, all four hypotheses were supported.