Abstract
While social media has become an important platform for social reputation, the emotional responses of users toward bad news have not been investigated thoroughly. We analyzed a total of 20,773 Twitter messages by 15,513 users to assess the influence of bad news and public apology in social media. Based on both computerized, quantitative sentiment analysis and in-depth qualitative analysis, we found that rapid public apology effectively and immediately reduced the level of negative sentiment, where the degree of change in sentiments differed by the type of interactions users engaged in. The majority of users who directly conversed with corporate representatives on the new media were not typical consumers, but experts and practitioners. We extend the existing cognitive model and suggest the audiences’ psychological reaction model to describe the information processing process during and after an organizational crisis and response. We also discuss various measures through which companies can respond to a crisis properly in social media in a fashion that is different from conventional mass media.
Highlights
Social media has recently become a game changer in how modern businesses operate [1]
This study addressed a significant question of how a rapid public apology took place in social media and of what was its effect in changing the sentiments of users
We have analyzed a total of 20,773 tweets by 15,513 users that are relevant to the Domino’s Pizza incident from Twitter to assess the influence of bad news and public apology by the CEO on Twitter users’ sentiment and the direct communication patterns between individuals and corporate accounts during the crisis
Summary
Social media has recently become a game changer in how modern businesses operate [1]. We attempted to address the following key questions: First, how do Twitter users respond to negative news on corporate crisis and public apologies in social media? To deeper understand the reaction of social media users toward a popular crisis, we gathered to analyze a total of 20,773 tweets by 15,513 users that were relevant to the Domino’s Pizza incident, drawn from the complete pool of 1.7 billion tweets and 54 million users of Twitter at the time of summer 2009. The unit of analysis was each tweet content
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