Research On Brand Crisis Communication In The Enviornment Of Social Media

Since its birth, social media has expanded in an astonishing way,exerted immense social influence, and also were listed on the agenda ofbrand managers. This study mainly discusses about how new mediaenvironment influences brand crisis information communication, or inother words, how brand crisis information is circulating on social mediaplatforms at the age of social media like micro bogs, SNS, virtualcommunities and so on.Compared with those of mass media time, the main characteristics ofsocial media include the instantaneity and liveness of informationcommunication; user-generating of contents; and also the dependence ofinformation diffusion on the social networks of users. According to thesefeatures, the study conducts empirical studies on the topics of activetime of brand crisis information; consumers forwarding willingness ofbrand crisis information; the structure of discussion networks of brandcrisis event and the prestige of network members from three perspectivesof information characteristics, individual receiver, and socialnetworking, respectively.In the study of active time of brand crisis information, theresearcher depicts the survival functions and hazard functions of theposts, and discusses factors that may influence the active time of theposts through the methods of survival analysis. It turns out that mostof the posts（72%） keep avtive only in a very short time (less than1day); the number of comments, the originality of posts and the attachementof pictures or short links all have significant influence on the activetime of posts, while the effects of features of posters are insignificant. In the study of consumers forwarding willingness of brand crisisinformation, through two progressive controlled experiments, theresearcher finds that the valence of messages and brand commitment havean interaction on consumers forwarding willingness of messages; forhigh-/low-commitment consumers, the diagnosticity of brand crisismessages and the satisfaction of self-presentation desire affect theforwarding willingness differently; besides, the diagnosticity also hasa positive influence on the brand attitude of consumers.In the study of the structure of discussion networks of brand crisisevent and the prestige of members, applying the approaches of socialnetworking analysis and HLM, the researcher depicts the basicdistribution of discourse power in the networks through quotas andconcepts like centrality, structure hole and brokers and so on. Meanwhile,factors of discussion participation, contents of discussion, networkcentralization and network size are also found influencing membersprestige differently.