The Attribution Of Social Media Users In Crisis Communication

Recently, there is a dramatically increasing of the numbers and frequency of the crisis,which means crisis have to be considered as a normal state of the society. On the other hand,the emerging social media is playing a more important role than before. Not only used as aneffective way to communicate with the audience by the organizations, has social media beenalso used as an essential medium for the audience to participate in the crisis communication.Basing on the Situational Crisis Communication Theory, the research attempts to focuson the attribution style of the social media users in crisis communication, illustrate the factorsthat affect the attribution, as well as the influences of media contact by the method ofquestionnaire and literature review. Then the research sums up the attribution characteristicsof social media users in crisis communication, discusses the reasons, willing to guide thesocial users be aware of avoiding the attribution bias in the crisis communication. Moreover,the research gives the organizations the advices of how to plan and arrange the particularcrisis response strategies according to the characteristics, in order to reduce the negativeinfluence and the loss that brought by the crisis.The research studies the case of “Aflatoxin excessive” of Mengniu Corporation, and thencomes to a conclusion that how the social media users attribute in crisis. To be specific,1. The attribution style of social media users has a strong tendency of beinginternal-control, in other words, social media users tend to attribute that the organizationcauses the crisis on purpose;2. There are correlations between the attribution of social media users and the severity ofcrisis, the crisis response strategy, the reputation of the organization;3. There are correlations between the attribution of social media users and the firstmedium that get the crisis information, the medium that spend the most time on getting thecrisis information, the time length that spend on getting the crisis information.