Crisis Communication Messages Research Articles

From Awareness to Risk Prevention: Developing Messages for Crisis Communication During Pandemics and Infodemics

This study aims to describe the crisis communication messages delivered by Kawal COVID-19 via Instagram social media in the pre-crisis and early crisis stages to deal with the pandemic and infodemic in Indonesia. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 190 posts by the Instagram account @kawalcovid19.id on March 1-May 24, 2020. The results of the study showed that the crisis and risk communication delivered were in the form of sensemaking messages (awareness/understanding), possible risks and potential crises that would occur, and education related to the COVID-19 virus. Efficacy messages (efficacy/success) were also presented. This study also found a combination of sensemaking and efficacy messages and linked them to the social and cultural context. Other messages related to identity and public relations strategies were used to build credibility and interactivity with the public.

Investigating social media users’ preferences of content and sourcing during a crisis

Crisis communication is not a linear communication occurrence as users seek out information from multiple sources and contribute their own opinions or frames to the discussion. This study focuses on a user-centered and public-oriented perspective of crisis communication on social media. The study investigated how users received and reacted to crisis communication messages from the media, organizations, and other users. A survey analyzed framed crisis communication consumption and examined source preferences for content and credibility during a crisis. Participants responded to crisis posts, determined overall source credibility, and indicated how they viewed crisis communication from other users. The results of this study indicate a needed shift in the role of media effects and an emphasis on credibility and reliance on organizational messages.

Social Media in Crisis Communication: A Case Analysis of the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes

This study examines the role of Twitter/X, a news platform, in crisis communication. The aim of the study is to contribute to the literature on crisis communication by understanding the importance, effectiveness, and applicability of social media. For this purpose, a qualitative research was conducted to determine how X was used as a communication tool during crises, specifically focusing on a case analysis of the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes. Within the scope of the research, 182 tweets shared between February 6th and 13th, 2023, from the official X account of the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD), were examined. Content analysis method was employed to analyze the tweets, focusing on content, frequency of sharing, and interaction rate. The research findings indicate that AFAD's tweets were categorized into four main themes: "information on processes, support services, announcements, and disinformation and communication." The findings suggest that the posts were predominantly made during the initial period of the crisis characterized by high uncertainty, with the most shared content focusing on search and rescue operations. Another research objective was to determine the interaction rate of AFAD's crisis communication messages. Accordingly, it is noteworthy that the theme with the least frequency of sharing, "disinformation and communication," received the highest interaction from users. The findings of this study, which focuses on the transformative power of social media in crisis communication, confirm that the need for reliable communication channels and verified information/sources increases during crises, and it confirms the significant role of institutional social media accounts in combating disinformation.

Will you forgive it? The interactive effects of crisis news framing and crisis communication message framing on tourists’ forgiveness

ABSTRACT The different effects of crisis communication on different negative emotions induced by tourism crisis news remain under-explored. Drawing on the appraisal tendency framework, this study analyzes and verifies the interactive effects of anger-inducing news with rational crisis communication messages and anxiety-inducing news with humorous messages on tourists’ forgiveness. Furthermore, perceived sincerity mediates the former relationship and destination trust mediates the latter. Our study contributes to the existing research regarding the applicability of humorous crisis communication. The results provide theoretical insight into tourism crisis communication from the perspective of message framing selection and promot the reconstruction and governance of post-crisis destination reputation.

Mixed messages in a VUCA world: How the New Zealand government altered its SARS-CoV-2 crisis communication messages

The SARS-COV-2 pandemic typifies a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) situation. For a time, Aotearoa New Zealand’s government was lauded for its quick and effective elimination response and clear communication strategy, which saw the citizens of the country enjoy months free from the trappings of SARS-COV-2. This changed with the arrival of Delta, a new variant of concern. It is against this context that we sought to analyse the two main speeches delivered by the prime minister of that time – Jacinda Ardern. The first, delivered on 17 August 2021, maintained the messaging of the previous years – let us eliminate the virus. However, the second speech, delivered on 4 October 2021, shifted to an emphasis on vaccination and living with the virus. Not unsurprisingly, the change in messaging prompted some factions of the public to express frustration and hostility towards Ardern and her government because of perceived inconsistencies and ambiguities in the messaging. Our findings highlight that while crisis communication in a VUCA environment needs to maintain consistency to garner trust, it also needs to be adaptive to respond to uncertainties. However, in being adaptive and engaging with the public to adjust their expectations, leaders can often be faced with resistance and even be perceived as failures. This adds further responsibility to the leader to address the adaptive challenges as effectively as possible. Our findings are a cautionary tale for scholarship and education in crisis communication to avoid emphasis on fixed solutions.

Examining employees' affective and behavioral responses to internal crisis communication in times of COVID-19

Communication is an essential component of crisis management strategies in hospitality and tourism. This study aimed to build on the integrated internal crisis communication framework. This study employed qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. Following a preliminary qualitative study, a conceptual model was developed and tested with a total of 806 responses. The results showed that the approach and content of internal crisis communication messages directly affected employees' evaluations of their organizations' crisis management efforts and their psychological safety, both of which further affected their perceived social resilience and turnover intentions. Furthermore, the results of multigroup analyses revealed the different impacts of internal crisis communication on participants who were in full-time positions vs. part-time positions and salaried employees vs. hourly employees. Finally, theoretical and practical implications were provided based on the research findings.

“Sanitary measures, social distancing, safety”: The evolution of Swiss hoteliers’ Covid-19 communication through three snapshots

Since the first reports of the Covid-19 virus in December 2019, the tourism industry has struggled to find solutions to this unprecedented crisis. During crises, organizational learning can develop crisis management and communication skills while enhancing organizational resilience in coping with crises. This research examines whether organizational learning for communicating during crises occurred in the Swiss hotel industry in the past 2 years. By tracking and visualizing the messages communicated by Swiss hotels on their websites, this study analyzes the communication strategies employed by hoteliers over the past 20 months through thematic analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and Situational Crisis Communication (SCCT) strategies. The results of this study identified the evolution of communication strategies over time. Specifically, ingratiation, corrective action, transferring, victimization, and justification are the five key strategies. This study also visualizes the crisis responses in concept maps in three snapshots (June 2020, June 2021, and February 2022). The concepts and colors of the visualization provide a different perspective on the evolution of crisis communication over the past 2 years. This study contributes to academia and practitioners by demonstrating the evolution of crisis communication messages through both the granular analysis of SCCT strategies and the bird’s-eye view of themes and concepts.

Hotel crisis communication on social media: effects of message appeal

ABSTRACT The hotel industry is vulnerable to various external crises, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Social media is one of the primary platforms for hotel crisis communication. Accordingly, this study adopted the perspective of message appeal and tried to develop effective hotel crisis communication messages. An online experiment was conducted where 260 Chinese customers were included. The results showed that emotional-appeal messages are more effective in attracting customers for luxury hotels, while functional-appeal messages are more suitable for economic hotels. The results also showed that perceived safety mediated the relationship between the message appeal and booking intentions and that this mediating relationship is moderated by the hotel type. This study further discussed theoretical and practical implications.

Canadian COVID-19 Crisis Communication on Twitter: Mixed Methods Research Examining Tweets from Government, Politicians, and Public Health for Crisis Communication Guiding Principles and Tweet Engagement.

To foster trust on social media during a crisis, messages should implement key guiding principles, including call to action, clarity, conversational tone, compassion and empathy, correction of misinformation, and transparency. This study describes how crisis actors used guiding principles in COVID-19 tweets, and how the use of these guiding principles relates to tweet engagement. Original, English language tweets from 10 federal level government, politician, and public health Twitter accounts were collected between 11 March 2020 and 25 January 2021 (n = 6053). A 60% random sample was taken (n = 3633), and the tweets were analyzed for guiding principles. A tweet engagement score was calculated for each tweet and logistic regression analyses were conducted to model the relationship between guiding principles and tweet engagement. Overall, the use of guiding principles was low and inconsistent. Tweets that were written with compassion and empathy, or conversational tone were associated with greater odds of having higher tweet engagement. Across all guiding principles, tweets from politicians and public health were associated with greater odds of having higher tweet engagement. Using a combination of guiding principles was associated with greater odds of having higher tweet engagement. Crisis actors should consistently use relevant guiding principles in crisis communication messages to improve message engagement.

The Effects of Dangerous World Beliefs on COVID-19 Preventive Behaviors in Singapore: The Moderating Role of Public Health Communication

ABSTRACT This research purposes to examine the role of strategic communication, specifically the effectiveness of government's crisis communication messages at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore, on disease preventive behaviors. It employed a mixed method research approach by first carrying out a content analysis of 7128 news headlines on COVID-19 to confirm our presupposition that the media may be communicating messages that the world order is being threatened. Informed by our findings that 90% of news reports were framed to suggest a dangerous world, we surveyed 453 respondents in the main study, and tested if people's beliefs in a dangerous world (BDW) were linked to their disease preventive behaviors (DPB), and whether such a link was modulated by how effective they perceived the government's pandemic communication. As predicted, results revealed that the perceived effectiveness of the government's pandemic communication trumped the effects of beliefs in a dangerous world such that the link between BDW and DPB was significant only when the perceived effectiveness was low. Further analysis of the effects of specific communication dimensions on disease preventive behaviors suggests that public health communication needs to be strategically calibrated to offer personally relevant messages that are informative and objective. (199 words)

Letting the team down? Examining sport fans reactions to Aaron Smith’s ‘Toilet Tryst’ on social media

ABSTRACT Recent scholarly attention in the field of sports crisis communication has focused on audience reception and participation in crisis communication messages in digital and social media. While studies find that fans launch their own defence of their favourite stars, a comparative analysis of fan enacted crisis communication across multiple social media networks is lacking. This study extends Situational Crisis Communication Theory in the context of athlete reputational crises (ARCs) and examines the use of crisis communication messages in the sporting arena through a study of New Zealand’s All Black Aaron Smith’s 2016 ‘Toilet Tryst’. It builds on previous findings by comparatively analysing 1) the crisis communication messages voiced by Smith and All Blacks management; 2) associated elite opinion in media coverage; and 3) comparative analysis of communication strategies used by fans across a range of social media networks. While Smith and All Blacks employed traditional strategies of apology, we found that fans on social media often defended Smith and the All Blacks, and used newer strategies of expression of disappointment and humour to diminish and curtail reputational impact. However, while there was a little variation in crisis response strategies between the social media networks, there was more within the sub-rhetorical spaces within a social media platform. Implications for and future research in sport fans social media crisis communication strategies are discussed.

Does the medium matter? A meta-analysis on using social media vs. traditional media in crisis communication

There has been a growing body of crisis communication research that treats social media as a critical variable, which might alter how people perceive and react to crisis communication messages. The meta-analysis of 8 studies (k = 22, n = 3209, combined n = 9703) compared the impact of social media vs. traditional media in crisis communication. Five studies (n = 1896) contained 8 relevant effect sizes on crisis responsibility, representing 3294 individuals. Seven studies (n = 3185) contained 14 relevant effect sizes on persuasiveness, representing 6409 individuals. Compared to traditional media, using social media significantly lessened consumers’ perceived crisis responsibility (r = -.134, 95 % CI -.212– -.054, p = .001). There was no significant difference between using traditional media and social media in crisis communication on persuasiveness (r = -.039, 95 % CI -.114– .035, p = .30). The moderator analysis indicated that for both crisis responsibility and persuasiveness, the effect size was more noticeable when an organization communicates with college students vs. non-student publics. The ability of social media in dampening crisis responsibility was more pronounced for fictitious organizations compared to real organizations. Compared to traditional media, social media was significantly more negative for preventable crisis, the influence was weak for accidental crisis. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as well as directions for future research.

The IDEA model for effective instructional risk and crisis communication by emergency managers and other key spokespersons.

Emergency managers are very often the key spokespersons charged with instructing people to take appropriate self-protective actions during natural disasters and other extreme events. Doing so successfully poses unique challenges including, for instance, convincing people to pay attention, translating complex information intelligibly to non-scientific publics, and motivating people to actually take appropriate actions for self-protection. These challenges are complicated further by the uncertainty surrounding many crisis events and the short response time demanded of emergency managers to offer such information and instructions. This manuscript describes the IDEA model for designing efficient and effective instructional risk and crisis communication messages and some of the research that has been conducted to validate its utility. Ultimately, emergency managers can use the IDEA model to design effective instructional messages in short order and educators can use the model in the classroom to teach new professionals to communicate effectively when they face crisis circumstances in the future.

Internal, external, and media stakeholders’ evaluations during transgressions

PurposeAs crises are largely perceptual, the deeper the understanding is of how stakeholders perceive crisis situations, the more effectively corporations can target their crisis communication messages. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different stakeholder groups process information during transgression-based corporate crises.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on 17 qualitative interviews with the internal, external and media stakeholders of an organisation that experienced a major transgression-based crisis. A case study approach is adopted to analyse and understand how these stakeholders process and respond to the same crisis event.FindingsFindings suggest that there are considerable differences in the crisis evaluations of different stakeholder groups. This study identifies several elements specific to internal, external and media stakeholders’ crisis information processing.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the findings are tied to the specific case, the authors extend the existing theory by shedding light on the specific factors that shape the evaluations of different stakeholder groups during a transgression.Practical implicationsThe findings may help managers in building more accurate assumptions and knowledge with respect to crisis effects on an organisation’s stakeholders and thus provide the basis for more effective crisis communication.Originality/valuePrior crisis information-processing models provide fragmented and generic insights into the specifics of different stakeholder groups and thus lead crisis communication to miss opportunities to attenuate the loss of a corporation’s social approval. This study moves towards an integrated framework of how different stakeholders evaluate a transgression-based corporate crisis.

Spokespersons’ Nonverbal Behavior in Times of Crisis: The Relative Importance of Visual and Vocal Cues

When a chief executive officer or spokesperson responds to an organizational crisis, he or she communicates not only with verbal cues but also visual and vocal cues. While most research in the area of crisis communication has focused on verbal cues (e.g., apologies, denial), this paper explores the relative importance of visual and vocal cues by spokespersons of organizations in crisis. Two experimental studies have more specifically examined the impact of a spokesperson’s visual cues of deception (i.e., gaze aversion, posture shifts, adaptors), because sending a credible response is crucial in times of crisis. Each study focused on the interplay of these visual cues with two specific vocal cues that have also been linked to perceptions of deception (speech disturbances in study 1; voice pitch in study 2). Both studies show that visual cues of deception negatively affect both consumers’ attitudes towards the organization (study 1) and their purchase intentions (study 2) after a crisis. In addition, the findings indicate that in crisis communication, the impact of visual cues dominates the outcomes of vocal cues. In both studies, vocal cues only affected consumers’ perceptions when the spokesperson displayed visual cues of deception. More specifically, the findings show that crisis communication messages with speech disturbances (study 1) or a raised voice pitch (study 2) can negatively affect organizational post-crisis perceptions.

Cruise Line Customers’ Responses to Risk and Crisis Communication Messages: An Application of the Risk Perception Attitude Framework

The main purpose of this study was to test cruise line customers’ responses to risk and crisis communication messages addressing health-related incidents on cruise ships. This study used norovirus infections as the context and the Risk Perception Attitude framework as the conceptual foundation. An experiment was conducted to test how communication messages affected cruise line customers’ information search behavior, safety perceptions, and cruise travel intentions. A total of 240 responses were included and analyzed. The results revealed group differences on the three outcome variables. The results also showed that safety perceptions mediated the relationship between participants’ RPAs and cruise travel intentions. Based on the findings, this study provided practical implications on how to develop effective risk and crisis communication messages. This study also highlighted the need for more empirical and theory-driven research in the area of tourism crisis communication.

Organizational crisis communication on Facebook

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore British Petroleum’s (BP) crisis response on Facebook and factors contributing to its stakeholders’ perceptions of its crisis response strategies during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.Design/methodology/approachApplying crisis response strategies, this study content analyzed BP’s crisis communication messages and Facebook users’ comments on BP America’s Facebook page.FindingsThe results revealed that information giving strategies dominated BP’s crisis response, and Facebook users were more likely to comment favorably when BP used information giving strategies and accommodative strategies. Bolstering strategies and third-party endorsement did not achieve anticipated effectiveness.Originality/valueThe findings of this study will contribute to effective application of crisis response strategies.

The Right Message to the Right People: Developing Effective Crisis Response in Cruise Travel

Purpose The purpose of this study was to provide insights into developing effective crisis responses within the cruise industry. Particularly, this study tested the effects of different crisis responses on individuals’ safety perceptions and cruise travel intentions. This study also tested how individual characteristics; such as past cruise experience and demographic characteristics, may affect the communication outcomes. Originality/Value Using an interdisciplinary approach, this study applied crisis communication theories to a cruise travel context. The findings of this study can be directly applied to develop effective crisis responses for hospitality practitioners, which exemplify the essence of translational research. Relevance of the Topic Although cruise travel is considered as one of the safest mode of travel, traveling by sea is associated with multiple types of risks, including health outbreaks and operational incidents. Managing a tourism crisis response becomes important in this context. The current research stream in hospitality and tourism, however, has not yet fully addressed this topic. Based on a comprehensive analysis of current cruise lines’ practices and relevant literature, this study tested individuals’ reactions after being exposed to different crisis responses. This study also tested the effects of individual variables on the communication outcomes and explored how people process crisis communication messages. Design/Methodology or Approach This study was constituted of two phases. Phase I analyzed current cruise lines’ crisis responses and related literature. The findings of Phase I resulted in the development of a template entitled strategic crisis response (SCR), which explicated how to construct effective tourism crisis response. Phase II conducted a between-subjects experiment and compared the SCR with current cruise lines’ crisis responses regarding their effects on audiences’ safety perceptions and purchase intentions. A series of post-hoc analyses were also conducted to test the effects of individual variables on the communication outcomes. Key Findings The findings of this study revealed that current cruise lines’ responses normally don’t include enough public safety information. The findings also showed that the SCR can lead to stronger safety perceptions and purchase intentions than cruise line’s current response. Additionally, the results showed that individual demographic characteristics influenced the communication outcomes, where the SCR can lead to stronger purchase intentions for the target market constituted of individuals that are over 25 years old and have an annual household income of more than $40,000. Implications for Practice and Policy The findings of this study can directly help practitioners understand cruise tourists’ considerations and produce effective and appropriate crisis responses. The findings indicate that when responding to a crisis, cruise lines should include public safety information, which provides instruction on how individuals can protect themselves during a crisis situation and/or against the risks associated with the crisis. This type of information will be especially useful for the cruise industry’s target market, as they will be more likely to accept the message and maintain stronger purchase intentions even during crisis times.

Crisis Communication Strategy on Social Media and the Public’s Cognitive and Affective Responses: A Case of Foster Farms Salmonella Outbreak

This study examined an organization’s crisis communication strategy (i.e., crisis response strategy and technical translation strategy) on social media and the public’s cognitive and affective responses. Twenty crisis communication messages posted by Foster Farms regarding a salmonella outbreak and 349 public responses were analyzed. The results showed that a technical translation strategy generated more public acceptance of the message and more positive emotions than a crisis response strategy. A crisis response strategy generated more public rejections of the message and more negative emotions than a technical translation strategy.

메르스 확산에 따른 정부의 위기 대응 메시지 언어 네트워크 분석

메르스 확산에 따른 정부의 위기 대응 메시지 언어 네트워크 분석