Online Stakeholder Interaction of Some Airlines in the Light of Situational Crisis Communication Theory
The purpose of this paper is to explore the participation of main actors in Facebook. The engagement shows different degrees of participation that directly affect the brand image and reputation. This research applies Situational Crisis Communication Theor
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Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to explore the participation of main actors in Facebook. The engagement shows different degrees of participation that directly affect the brand image and reputation. This research applies Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) to interaction in the social media. It provides possibilities for decision makers to monitor diverse messages online, understand stakeholder concerns and reply to them adequately, which is especially important in crisis situations. Seven airline organizations were selected for a comparative analysis concerning their online discussions. The verified Facebook and Twitter accounts of those airlines were investigated, the status updates of the airlines and comments issued by other users during 2009-2016 collected along the replies and comments issued by the airlines themselves. The main methods are sentiment analysis, categorization of the messages into four categories and counting. Keywords: Situational Crisis Communication Theory Airlines Sentiment analysis Facebook Twitter
Stakeholder theory
1 Introduction Nowadays all large organizations have established own verified accounts on all major social media platforms to gain attention for their brands and activities, because customers and other stakeholders are reachable through them. Organizations need to protect their reputational assets among stakeholders. They can publish new products or services, information about organizational changes and other news through their social media accounts. The globally accessible platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have attracted hundreds of millions of users, making the communication through them vitally important to society and business. This paper explores the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) with the observed communication behaviors of some airlines in Facebook and Twitter. SCCT deals especially with crisis situations. Particularly in them, negative word-of-mouth disseminates virally in social media [9] which may lead to damages in organizational image and harm the reputation. The literature on social media shows that also scholars © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved Y.K. Dwivedi et al. (Eds.): I3E 2016, LNCS 9844, pp. 183–192, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45234-0_17
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have begun to explore the multiple voices of stakeholders [1, 7, 12], including customers, Facebook account owners, crew, authorities and so on. Organizations have become more visible online attracting different voices and clearly being scrutinized by the public and governing organizations [10]. This paper reviews the interactions on the verified Facebook and Twitter accounts of seven airlines and investigates how these seven airlines performed in their customer interactions as exhibited by their Facebook and Twitter account behavior. The hypotheses are: organization in crisis communicates more/less with the stakeholders’ activ
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