Browsing by Author "Berlin, Ann-Mari"

This Master’s thesis aims to study what crisis communication strategies an organisation can use to prevent or mitigate reputational crisis in social media. The study discusses current social media crisis strategies and proposes to find new ones. The intention is to create a communication model for reputational crisis in social media. With the model it is possible to assess the likelihood of a paracrisis turning into a crisis and consequently choose an appropriate strategy. The model is hence a tool when assessing signals from environmental scanning. The study is theoretic. The theoretic framework of the study consists of crisis communication, reputation and social media theory. The study discusses crisis communication and social media crisis theory. Reputation is brought into the discussion as reputational crisis is a subcategory of crisis. Reputation is also affected by crisis communication. In order to assess strategies for reputational crisis in social media, the features and logic of social media are discussed. Finally conventional crisis communication strategies are evaluated to see if they can be applied to reputational crisis in social media. Previous research shows that the refuse, refute and reform strategies can be used in social media crisis. Based on this study a fourth strategy may be added to the refuse, refute and reform –strategies, the positive strategy. In this strategy the organisation turns negative publicity into positive but a precondition is often a previously good reputation. The different strategies are illustrated in this study with case examples of social media crisis. The strategies which are found suitable for social media have been included in the model. Having gone through key crisis communication strategies, the conclusion is that the same crisis communication strategies which work in legacy media do not automatically work in social media. Crisis communication theory does however provide a good ground to start from when assessing crisis communication strategies for social media. The most important sources used in this study have been Coombs’ and Holladay’s studies on crisis communication and particularly paracrisis in social media, Åberg’s work on communication theory, Aula’s, Gonzalez-Herrero’s and Hoffman’s work on social media reputation and Korpiola’s studies on crisis communication in digital publicity.