Testing Crisis Communication Strategies And Effectiveness In Social Media Environment

The widespread use of social media makes the crisis communication situation more complicated.The changes in the factors of crisis communication affect the state of the crisis situation,and the change of the situation directly affects the choice of crisis communication strategy.In the social environment that advocates instrumental rationality,the Western contextual crisis communication strategy cannot successfully resolve all crisis events.Whether the crisis communication strategy still works in the social media environment has caused controversy among researchers.In the police crisis,the police organization is an important force for maintaining social stability,and the public has higher requirements for its role.In the crisis,the public's truth-seeking and attention continued to rise,and its appeals were realized on social media platforms;social media evolved from a side to a catalyst for crisis,crisis situations changed,and communication strategies needed to be carefully selected.Based on the review and reflection of relevant literature,This study considers the following three questions: First,has the subject,object and channel of crisis communication in social media changed compared with the past? Second,what kind of crisis situations are police organizations facing in different crisis events? What communication strategies have been adopted in a targeted manner? Last,What is the effect of the crisis communication strategy,and what are the influencing factors?Due to the changes in the crisis communication environment,the factors of crisis communication have also undergone corresponding changes,such as the enrichment of subjects,the diversification of information dissemination paths,the initiative of objects and the diversification of channels.However,this series of changes brings convenience to crisis communication and brings more uncontrollable risks.Based on Bradford and Garrett theory of organizational response communication model and other theories,this paper has compiled a more comprehensive "situation-strategy" model proposal.Through the text analysis method,the crisis situation and its changes of the four police crisis events are defined,and the specific application of communication strategies is analyzed.The study found that the crisis situation has changed in different crisis stages.On the one hand,in the early stage of the crisis,the crisis events which were in the crime situation were forced to turn the consent situation because of the pressure of public opinion;On theother hand,because the accuser and the accused have different standards of accusation and reasons of defense,there are two kinds of situations of holding standards and consent in the same period,which is called standard consent situation in this paper.In the face of different crisis situations,police organizations do not follow the "situation-strategy" recommendations,but use a variety of communication strategies.For the test of communication effect,this paper analyzes the two aspects of media efficiency and public feedback through content analysis and text.According to the media efficiency theory,the statistical analysis of relevant news reports of Baidu news platform is carried out by citing the degree of sources of crisis institutions and the positive and negative evaluation of the media.It is found that in the crime situation,besides the communication failure caused by the vague tactics tabooed by crisis organizations,other situations have received positive support from the media.The public feedback mainly comes from Sina Weibo's comments on relevant events,and the public's attitude is divided into positive,negative and neutral as needed.Because of the conflict between the value of "ethics" and the value of "order",the particularity of the identity of the victims of the crisis,and even the police organization has adopted the most effective apology strategy in crisis communication,it is still unpopular.Under the game of official discourse and folk discourse,the media's agenda setting function is weakened,and communication phenomena with good media performance and public feedback failure appear.In terms of the research significance of this paper,on the theoretical level,this paper combines the relevant situational crisis communication theory to sort out a more comprehensive "situation-strategy" model proposal and put it into the social media environment for testing.It is rare and has certain innovations.At the research object level,this study takes different crisis situations as the starting point,and conducts comparative research on multiple cases involving police crisis events.Such research objects are not similar in China and have certain new ideas.