The Effects of Paracrisis Origin and Response Strategy on Facebook Audience’s Perceived Organisational Reputation and Behavioural Intentions

Abstract

Paracrisis in social media issues needs to be anticipated, identified, monitored, and managed. While PR practitioners already have to deal with this phenomenon on a daily basis, only few studies have examined paracrisis response strategies to find adequate ways of handling these reputation threats. The objective of this study is to test selected paracrisis response strategies on Facebook that have not yet been combined by other researchers and identify the most recommendable strategy. Drawing on social representation principles and the SCCT model (Coombs in Corp Reput Rev 10(3):163–176, 2007) as well as the SMCC model (Liu et al. in: Duhe (ed) New media and public relations, 2nd edn, Peter Lang, New York, 2012), four organisational response strategies—reform, humour, refuse, and refute—are examined in two within-subjects experiments, with self-imposed and external paracrisis origins, respectively. This experiment uses fictional paracrisis in fictional international IT suppliers. Differences and effects in respondents’ perceptions of organisational reputation and paracrisis behavioural intentions are analysed. In both experiments, results show that a reform strategy is significantly the most recommendable, and a humorous strategy is the least recommendable for this paracrisis situation. This component of Public Relations practice and research can prevent potential real-world crises and protect organisations’ reputations. Paracrises are social crises, and thus organisations should be able to adapt (accommodate) to communities by explaining the situation and exchanging information horizontally.