1. Social Media and Crises Communication Management
Prepared by: Mahmoud Abu Farha
Class: BTST 670, Organizational Communication, Spring 2015 - Ramallah
Instructor: Dr. Kenneth Bohl
Abstract:
Social media as a crisis communication channel has become a very important pillar of crises communication
management, and it should be considered in crises management policies and plans. The purpose of this literature
review is to emphasize the increasing importance of social media in crises cases, and how can it be employed as
an efficient communication tool in crises management. It clarifies how did social media brought down
traditional media barriers, and how it made the stakeholders and the public more informed and empowered,
which also contributed to shift the control of organizations reputation and image from the organization's side to
the social media user's side in environment of democracy. This paper also highlights the challenges and
possibilities associated with communication through social media channels.
This paper highlights that most of the theories that were set in crises communication are based on traditional
media communication and were not updated based on the new media capabilities, forms, shift in power from
formal to informal communication and shift of control from the organizations side to the public side.
This paper also highlights the lack of researches in this field of communication management; most of the
researches were limited within specific geographic area and covers specific issues, almost all the researches
were conducted in US and Europe, we couldn’t find any study or research on international level. But from
another side we may consider that the role of social media as a crisis communication tool will be the same
regardless the geographic areas.
Based on the reviewed researches and because social media is becoming the main synchronous and
asynchronous channel of communication for organizations stakeholders, and because of the accelerating

2. development in internet services and applications through mobile networks with very cheap prices that made
social media communication available for people all the time. We think social media should be included as an
important part of risk and crises management good practices and standards on the local and international levels.
In addition, we think developing international good practices for using social media in crises management will
help organizations to use it in such an efficient way that helps in protecting reputation and minimizing the social
media related risks.
Introduction:
Crises communication is a channel of communication that allows immediate and efficient communication with
stakeholders and public in order to minimize the bad impacts of the crises as soon as possible. Social media is
an evolving field in crises communication management and it is used by employees, organizations and public
whereby it is growing at an exponential rate. In addition, social media services and technologies are improving
in such an efficient way and they became alternatives for traditional channels of communication. Numbers of
social media companies and platforms are also growing; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and many others
became part of our daily life, at work, at home, in the car, in the restaurants, in planes and almost everywhere.
The intersection between crises communication and social media as an efficient communication channel has got
great interest by communication researchers, crises management organizations and specialists and resiliency
and business continuity specialists as being an important element in communication strategists. The evolution of
social media and related technologies have led to efficient tools for monitoring social media issues in the early
stages; it enables faster response for resolving issues and spreads messages in order to minimize adverse
impacts to organizations. Social media also enabled protecting organization’s reputation and stopping the spread
of harmful rumors. All organizations should have crisis management plans that cover crises communication and
that understand and utilizes social media.

3. The purpose of this literature review is to emphasize the importance of social media and the importance of
setting international good practices in using social media as an efficient communication channel in order to help
organizations to use it in the best way, and this need more researches in this field that cover various geographic
areas and different cultures.
This paper initially defines the concept of crisis, crises communication and social media. Then it clarifies how
social media can be a very efficient tool for crises communication and how it provides new capabilities that are
not available in traditional media. This paper also provides brief description of crisis communication theories
(image repair theory, situational crisis communication theory, chaos theory, networked crisis communication
theory, and the social-mediated crisis communication model), providing critical review for these theories and
revealing how they were not updated to reflect the impact that social media had on crises communication. Then
it investigates the best practices in crises communication management, trying to shed light on the available best
practices and their limitations. At the last section it discusses how social media can be a source of crises.
What is a crisis?
Crisis was defined by many authors over the years, we have chosen to use the definition by Coombs1
which
defines crisis as "crisis is the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of
stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization's performance and generate negative outcomes”(Coombs,
2007) 1
.
From this definition we understand that crises are not always factual events, it can also be caused by natural
disasters, rumors, miscommunication or any other event that may create tangible or intangible losses. All
organizations must be prepared to face crises because “no organization is immune to crisis” (Coombs, 2007) 1
.
“Crisis management seeks to prevent or lessen the negative outcomes of a crisis and thereby protect the
organization, stakeholders and industry from harm” (Coombs, 2007) 1
. The main goal of crises management is
to minimize the crises impacts in the three stages of crises pre-crisis, crisis event and post-crisis. 1

4. Crises communication
Griffin defined communication as “Communication is the relational process of creating and interpreting
messages that elicit a response” (Griffin, 2009) 2
and he mentioned that "words don't mean things; people mean
things” 2
meaning that there is no value for communication if words are not received and interpreted by people.
Crises communication can be described as communication that is used by organizations before, during and after
crises. The inability to communicate the correct messages proficiently during crises can be fatal for
organizations; organizations should always strive to manage their messages, manage and control their
communication and manage and control the crises.
It is very important for organizations to include listening to the public in their crisis communication strategies in
order to nurture trust and reliability. When people trust organizations before crises, they will have more faith in
its ability to resolve issues with no large complications. Crisis communication goal is not simply to calm
concerns of stakeholders. It is to provide information and the decisions made during the crises to the
stakeholders, so they can have more awareness and rational view on organization decisions and efforts to
minimize impacts of crises4
. Keeping information from stakeholders will most likely backfire and destroy trust.
Although understanding and empathy are very important in crises communication, the facts are what make
organizations succeed4
.
In the last few years there has been a very high use of social media and its applications like Facebook, YouTube
and Twitter. The development in web technologies, internet services through mobile networks, and smart
phones technologies enhanced the availability of social media to people all the time with cheap cost, this
allowed very fast travel of news and information. So organizations should consider the capabilities which
Internet provides in a crisis response. Organizations that use social media proactively in the three stages of
crises (before, during and after crises) moved an important step from one way communication to two way

5. interactions between the stakeholders and the organization5
. Gonzales-Herrero and Pratt (1996) suggested that
organizations crises communication should be cooperative and opened with the stakeholders and public before
crises6
. Organizations can minimize the risks of being perceived as guilty, if they engage their public in two
way communication6
. In addition to the very important role that crises communication play in damage control
during crises, it have prevention role by updating organizations knowledge base after crises.
What is Social Media?
Social media is defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web2, and that allow creation and exchange of Users Generated Content” (Kaplan
and Haenlein, 2010)7
. Social media is a channel of communication that differs from traditional media in its
capability to provide symmetrical and asymmetrical two way interactions. Social media allows organizations
communication with their stakeholders and public in low cost and high efficiency. As a result social media has
become an important part for millions of people all over the world and has changed the way they establish
relations, transfer information, interact and do business. 7
Social media allows groups and individuals to gather and form networks within very short time, either to
support your organization or against it, so it is very important to monitor social media and react quickly.
Birgfeld (2010) mentioned that social media has become an important weapon for angry people; from another
hand it is an efficient tool for crisis management. 8
Social media as a channel of communication have most, if not all, of the following characteristics:
1. Participation: Social media encourages interested people to participate with their contributions and
feedback. It blurs the line between traditional media and the audiences.
2. Openness: Since most social media services are available for people to participate and provide feedback.
They encourage sharing of information, comments and voting.
3. Conversation: social media is a two-way conversation channel. Whereas traditional media is about
transmitting or distributing content to audiences “broadcast”.

6. 4. Community: Social media allows forming communities and communicate effectively.
5. Connectedness: social media sites make use of links to other people, sites and resources to enlarge its
society.
Social media as an efficient tool for crisis communication
Quick response is the most important factor when discussing crises and social media. As Coombs demonstrated
(2007); “The terms quick and quickly are synonymous with crisis response.”1
With the continues development
in communication technologies the information travel in very high speed, crises response teams have less time
to respond effectively in order to appear to control the situation. The worst case scenario is to let stakeholders
and may be the public know about crises from other sources rather than the involved organizations, which is
becoming more frequent these days. Although quick response and providing information is very important in
crises, the most crucial point is the message and how organizations should manage the dialog through social
media which needs much of training and preparedness because dealing with social media is different from
dealing with traditional media which organizations used to. If the response through social media is not well
managed it may cause additional crises and dissolve trust between the organization and its stakeholders.
Crises can create ‘information void’ (Coombs, 2007). It may disrupt normal communication patterns between
organizations and their stakeholders which must be filled by the organization as quickly as possible; else it may
be filled by others with incorrect information.1
Once people start communication about a crisis online, the information will explode through the network of
connected users through social media sites. So organizations shouldn’t wait for the first comments to appear in
social media about their crises. They must begin communication with their stakeholders as soon as possible and
by any possible means.

7. The importance of social media comes from its networking and communication abilities that enable users to
generate contents in different formats, which makes it an efficient tool for crisis communication. Facebook is
the most widely used social networking site of the current moment, it have high level of self-presentation and
average level of media richness and social presence10
. For that reasons, Facebook is an efficient tool for crisis
communication. The high level of self-presentation provide the ability to control others impressions since it
enables visual, aural and psychosomatic interactions with stakeholders, in addition to the provision of a huge
amounts of information.
Twitter is a more open dialogic communication that indicates artlessness for concern and keenness to resolve
issues. Same thing applies for LinkedIn which is a professional networking tool that enables sharing of
confirmatory as well as casual information in crises communication. 11
Although Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media sites that are being used by business and
people. Many other sites are available and mostly provide the same capabilities of Facebook and Twitter like
Flickr , Google Plus, YouTube, Instagram, Vine and many others.12
The large number of social media sites and the huge amounts of information that may be shared about
organizations crises makes it a challenge for those organizations to monitor, analyze and respond to that burst of
information, especially with exponential increase of social media sites populations.
Shift in power: Power of formal and informal communication
Effective crises communication management depends on both the formal and informal communication. Social
media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter increase the informal communication of the community by
expanding the geographic region of the participants in crises communication and by providing extensive sharing
of information and requests. In addition to providing efficient tools for formal communication.13

8. Markets, issues, events and society globalization through internet are leading to the reconstitution of many
publics (Moore and Seymour, 2005). Forming virtual group's online and constructing trusted societies is an
explosion in consumer-to-consumer communication that should not be ignored by organizations. Organizations
need to know what is being said about them online through monitoring social media, and they should be aware
how to use social media as two-way dialog channel. Organizations should monitor social media to detect any
issue before it develops into a crisis and being out of control.9
Awareness
Social media provides awareness capabilities that no other communication channels and technologies can
provide. The numerous and different types stakeholders such as employees, medical entities, customers and the
community require new capabilities that traditional media cannot provide and it is available with social media.
The damage of communication infra-structure is another challenge that face crises awareness and for which
social media provide a solution that may not be provided by traditional communication channels, this is because
social media depends on internet sites that can be accessed through different types of infrastructure from
anywhere like internet through smartphones and mobile networks or through landlines or other types of wireless
networks.
Using different terminologies by different stakeholders or parties in the community is another challenge that
faces crises communication awareness. In addition to formal communication the informal communication
through social media that comes from different parties help in resolving this issue through sharing of
information, requests and explanations. Allowing informal participation of the different stakeholders and the
community may increase awareness about the crises on the ground, and support the formal communication in
decentralizing response which may be necessary for efficient and flexible response.13

9. Crisis communication and social media crisis communication theories
Most of the crises communication theories focus on how organizations can repair their smudged reputation
(Avery, Lariscy, Kim, & Hocke, 2010)14
. But most of those theories and their related researches were conducted
before the huge development in social media, so it is not expected from those theories to address all concerns
related to social media. An important study prepared by (Brooke Fisher Liu, Julia Daisy Fraustino, 2014) from
department of communication in university of Maryland recommended that crisis communication theories need
to be improved to account for the wide spread of social media. The main current theories in Crises
communication and social media crises communication are: 15
1. Image repair theory:
This theory was developed by Benoit (1997) to help understand how individuals and organizations respond to
crises. The theory assumes that individual or organization accused to be responsible and that action is offensive.
It provides set of strategies for image repair.16
Social media has not investigated by most of image repair researches, although there are some exceptions,
researchers did not modify those theories. Many researchers have found that the usage of social media during
crises can generate new issues in image management.17
also they found that social media use expected to be less
effective in image repairing if the same strategies used in traditional media were replicated in social media.
Although image repair theory is an important and useful theory in general, it is agreed that it may be too linear
for social media, so the theory may need some adaptation and expansion when it is applied to social media.15
2. Situational crisis communication theory (SCCT):
The theory dictates that stakeholders must be protected first by their organizations by providing information for
physical and psychological coping. After that an organization may turn to amending its reputation. SCCT
focuses on organization-based actions, concerns and outcomes. More researching is required to explore whether
and how the SCCT can be transferred to social media and the extent to which social media can be used by
publics in order to counter organizations messages.15

10. 3. Chaos theory:
Chaos theory pursues to advance the understanding of complex, nonlinear, and unpredictable systems,
recognizing that small differences in initial conditions of an event may cause wide different in outcomes. In
crisis communication, chaos theory see communication as a facilitating point of system, from another hand it
see it as a strange attractor that respond to and recover from crises. It is found that little researches has begun
investigating the chaos theory in social media.15
4. Networked crisis communication theory (NCC):
NCC model challenges the classical crisis communication theories by showing that the medium used for
communication affects the impact of crisis communication. NCC considers the impacts of media type used in
crises communication on crises messages effectiveness, it indicates that the crises messages that are distributed
via social media sites may result in different responses by public than do the same messages distributed via
traditional media. But the researches in this area still focusing on how the media can be used by organizations to
mitigate potential negative outcomes, rather than generating positive outcomes.15
5. The social-mediated crisis communication model (SMCC):
This model aims to predict and explain how publics transmit information, and also how best communication can
be done by organizations with publics during crises. There are three main types of publics who transmit crisis
information (social media inactives, social media followers, influential social media creators) and there are five
factors that affect how organizations should engage with these publics (crisis origin, crisis type, organizational
infrastructure, crisis message form, and crisis message source). SMCC combines rumor psychology theory and
SCCT 1
in order to provide a model of how organizations may respond to public's crisis communication using
social media. The SMCC model is being criticized by scholars for focus on reputation-management and not
being a comprehensive model as the NCC.15

11. Best practices in risk and crises communication
The goal of creating best practices in general is the improvement and streamlining of the processes in an
organization or industry. It is usually based on assessing and analyzing of those processes that are being used by
leaders and experts in the field. Through studying and reviewing many research papers and searching through
electronic libraries and internet while writing this paper, we couldn’t find international and comprehensive good
practices guideline that cover social media as crisis communication channel, it is very important to set and
develop such international good practices because of the huge and accelerating shift from using traditional
media toward social media, and because the most important issue is not just to understand the importance of
social media and include it in policies and plans, but also to use it in efficient and effective way that is based on
leaders and experts experiences in this field, in order to be able to control situations in crises response.18
The most comprehensive related good practices we could find is a set of practices in risk and crisis
communication that was outlined by group of researchers with the National Center for Food Protection and
Defense (NCFPD), a US Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. These practices are
applicable to social media, but they need to be reviewed and adjusted in order to make use of the new
capabilities of social media that is not available for traditional media.18
The main points of NCFPD guidelines include: 18
1. Risk management and crisis management policies need to be established.
2. The required logistics for crisis communication should be planned before the crises.
3. Organizations should build partnership with the stakeholders and the public.
4. Organizations should listen to the stakeholders and public’s concerns and understand the audience.
5. Organizations should communicate with honesty, candor, and openness before, during, and after crises.
6. Organizations should collaborate and coordinate with credible media sources.
7. Organizations should meet the needs of the media and remains accessible.
8. Organizations should communicate with empathy, concern, and compassion.

12. 9. Organizations should accept uncertainty and ambiguity.
10. Organizations should provide messages of self-efficacy. By allowing the stakeholders in crises situations
to gain sense of control through meaningful actions that promote sense of self-efficacy.
Social media as source of crises
Social media is becoming the main source of information and communication; this is expected to continue with
the cheap and highly available internet services through mobile networks and smartphones, and with the
additional services and improved performance that is being provided by social media sites. From one hand
social media provides an opportunity for efficient, cheap and fast crises communication, but from another hand
it adds additional risks that companies and organizations should deal with and plan to face.
Reputation risk is the main risk that is amplified because of social media; losing reputation presents many
threats to organizations because it may affect their competitiveness, stakeholders trust and loyalty, local
positioning, relations with media, legitimacy of business operations and even their existence.
In social media, huge amounts of communicated information is unverified, users post both true and false
information about organizations that can vary significantly from what organizations share on the public sites.9
For example customers are turning to use social media to vent their frustrations if they are unhappy with the
services or products they got or after being insulted or ignored by a company. This may impact image of the
company and may cause public crises that should be carefully managed. Social media provides a powerful tool
for consumers to complain online. This is a very important issue because customers now have the ability to
value companies' reactions through social media. If negative word-of-mouth is spread through social media,
social media users build on each other’s comments and share it with their links, and the involved entity may
lose control over the conversations and interactions among users.

13. Rumors are another risk that may impact companies, organizations and people severely if not detected and
treated fast in such an efficient way. So the social media should be always monitored to detect any issue and
resolve it before its development into a crisis.19
Recommendations
The current crises communication theories didn’t take in account social media impact on crises communication
management, social media shifted the power from formal communication to informal communication and it
shifted the control from organizations side to the public side. In addition, social media added new types of risks
on organizations as well as new opportunities. These theories should be reviewed in a way that reflects the new
opportunities and the new risks of social media to make use of the power that social media provide and
minimize its risks.
The current crises communication management good practices are limited within specific industries,
organizations, or regions. Since the world is shifting to use social media as the main source of information and
the main tool of communication regardless of geographic boarders and cultural differences, comprehensive and
international good practices should be developed to help organizations in using social media in efficient way in
crises.
Conclusion
This paper has reviewed social media in crises communication management based on some researches in this
area, it tried to provide a critical review of crisis communication theories and how all social media issues and
impacts were not covered by those theories, because the theories were set before the huge development in social
media and related technologies. In addition, this paper focused on the need for good practices in using social
media as an effective tool for crises communication, the current good practices cover crises communication in
general, developed by specific industries in limited geographic areas, and based on traditional media
communication; while social media is becoming the main source of information and main tool of
communication all over the world.

14. Based on the review it is found that the current crises communication theories need to be updated and need to
take in account the new capabilities that social media provide. Organizations should focus on considering social
media in crises communication policies and plans, but it should focus more on how to use social media in
efficient way; which means good practices should be developed in social media as a crisis communication tool;
to help organizations in adopting good and tested practices on how to use social media for crises response.
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