Crisis communication strategies and reputation risk in an era of social media: A study of online users' perception and engagemen

Over the past few years, social media have become surprisingly popular. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are growing as important pathways for communication means among individuals and organizations. Throughout these tremendous platforms, organizations can reach to their stakeholders and interact with them through building online communities. Individuals, on the other hand, can join to these online communities, express themselves, and have unlimited access to massive amount of information like never before. However, the uncontrolled information of social media environment raises concerns such as the information credibility. Rumors, false, and biased information can quickly circulate among social media platforms and consequently organizations confront with unexpected incidents, which could expose their reputation at risk.;This dissertation aims to explore the prospective changes that have appeared along with the emergence of social media. Furthermore, this dissertation attempts to put in to perspective what organizations need to know about social media risks and opportunities, and how they should customize their activities and strategies fitting to the requirements of social media environment. For this reason, the present dissertation investigates three particular research questions: (i) how do organizations communicate and respond to social media crisis to avoid and prevent undesirable outcomes?, (ii) how online users perceive the credibility of social media information?, and (iii) how users' social media adoption relates to their engagement in online brand communities?;To address the first research question, an in-depth analysis of eight social media case studies was conducted in order to explore organizations' crisis communication strategies in the online social media environment. In order to address the second and third research questions, an online survey was conducted among a sample of social media users to investigate their perceived credibility of social media information, and to assess the factors that could explain their engagement in online brand communities.;Based on the results of case study analysis, a model of social media crisis communication strategy is proposed which is built upon the channels of crisis information diffusion, crisis origins, reasons, response, and outcomes. The findings of the online survey reveal that online users allocate different levels of credibility to information sources based on their actual situation. The survey results also confirm that factors like "social media activities", "perceived trust", "subject of interest", and "country of origin" could explain some of the users' engagement behavior in online brand communities.;This dissertation is organized as follows: the first chapter of the dissertation explains the context and significance of social media, which have revolutionized the communication sphere among individuals and organizations due to its popularity and growing use. The second chapter includes a careful review of the related literature mainly focusing on six areas, including: Web 2.0 and social media, organizational crisis in social media environment, the credibility of social media information, reputation risk, crisis communication strategies, and users' engagement in online brand communities. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction and ends with a conclusion on the examined subjects. The third chapter unfolds the research methodology and the three research questions. The research methodology includes a case study research to address the first research question that is: "how do organizations communicate and respond to social media crises to avoid undesirable outcomes?". The methodology also includes an online survey addressing second and third research questions as: "how online users perceive the credibility of social media information in normal time and during a crisis", and "how users' social media adoption relates to their engagement in online brand communities?". The fourth chapter entitled "crisis communications strategies and reputation risk in the online social media environment" carefully addresses the first research question and contributes to a better understanding of organizations crisis communication strategies in form of a published scientific article. The findings of this chapter result in proposition of a crisis communication model including the requirements of responding to a crisis in social media environment. The fifth chapter entitled "perceptions of information credibility during a social media crisis" addressed the second research question of the dissertation and contributes to understand the users' perceived credibility of social media information in normal time compared to crisis time in form of an article. The results of this chapter confirms that national press is the most credible information source in normal time, whereas online search engines (e.g. Google) perceived to be the most credible information source during a crisis. Chapter six titled "users' engagement in online brand communities: a study of commenting behaviors in social media environment" addresses the third research question and explains the links between users social media adoption and their engagement in online brand communities. This chapter contributes to a better learning on driving factors of social media users' comments on brand posts in form an article. The results represent that users' "online presence", "social media activities", "perception" and "topic of interest" can explains some of their commenting behaviors. Chapter seven summarized the general findings of the previous chapters. Chapter eight explains the theoretical and practical contributions of the dissertation. This chapter also includes practical recommendations for crisis managers and public relation to revisit their crisis communication strategies to properly respond to the risks associated with social media environment. This chapter includes recommendations for marketing strategists and brand practitioners to consider social media users' activities as an explanation for their commenting practices in online brand communities. This chapter includes the limitations of current research and recommendations for further researches.