Operationalizing crisis communication from within: Toward the Crisis Organizational Communication framework in the social mediated environment

• Main Authors: TAN, Kevin Kok-Yew, PANG, A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Business and Corporate Communications; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6618
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The pervasive social media use during crises reinforces the necessity to re-examine organisational engagements, particularly to internal stakeholders who can step forward as organisational representatives in times of crises. Existing crisis research on social media use have mostly targeted external audiences. The gap remains on how organisations could build a strong team to complement external communication (Frandsen & Johansen, 2011; Ruck & Welch, 2012). In the current social media landscape, it is thus critical to examine how organisations can leverage social media's influence (Romero et al., 2011) to communicate internally and nurture these advocates (Sellnow & Ulmer, 1995). Employees are corporate ambassadors and brand advocates as they are seen as organisational representatives by external stakeholders (Men, 2014). To build emotional goodwill among employees, organisations need to understand the evolved communication landscape and what employees are looking for. Examined through the theoretical lens of organisational listening (Macnamara, 2016), this paper explores how organisations can build that corps of advocates who identify strongly with their organisations and can serve as ready corporate spokespersons whether called upon or not (Crable & Vibbert, 1985). Using Coombs' (2015) three-staged approach, this paper suggests that crisis social media organisational communication should be prominent during the pre-crisis and crisis phases due to the focus by organisations to regain their reputation post-crisis through intensified engagement of external stakeholders. This paper is arguably the first of its kind to explore enhancing crisis communication through organisational listening on social media, conceptually developing the Crisis Social Media Organisational Communication (CSMOC) model.