Are All Crises Opportunities? A Comparison of How Corporate and Government Organizations Responded to the 2009 Flu Pandemic

Through a quantitative content analysis, this study applies situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) to investigate how 13 corporate and government organizations responded to the first phase of the 2009 flu pandemic. The results indicate that government organizations emphasized providing instructing information to their primary publics such as guidelines about how to respond to the crisis. On the other hand, organizations representing corporate interests emphasized reputation management in their crisis responses, frequently adopting denial, diminish, and reinforce response strategies. In addition, both government and corporate organizations used social media more often than traditional media in responding to the crisis. Finally, the study expands SCCT's response options.

[1]  Matthew W. Seeger,et al.  Crisis Communication And The Public Health , 2008 .

[2]  M. Lombard,et al.  Content Analysis in Mass Communication: Assessment and Reporting of Intercoder Reliability , 2002 .

[3]  W. T. Coombs,et al.  Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding , 1999 .

[4]  González-Herrero Alfonso,et al.  Crisis Communications Management on the Web: How Internet-Based Technologies are Changing the Way Public Relations Professionals Handle Business Crises , 2008 .

[5]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  RUOK? Blogging Communication Technologies During Crises , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[6]  W. Timothy Coombs,et al.  An Exploratory Study of Stakeholder Emotions: Affect and Crises , 2005 .

[7]  Mohan J. Dutta-Bergman.  Community Participation and Internet Use after September 11: Complementarity in Channel Consumption , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[8]  J. Penrose.  The role of perception in crisis planning , 2000 .

[9]  Michael L. Kent,et al.  Taxonomy of mediated crisis responses , 2007 .

[10]  W. Timothy Coombs,et al.  Today′s Public Relations: An Introduction , 2005 .

[11]  Emily T. Metzgar,et al.  Communicating during crisis: Use of blogs as a relationship management tool , 2007 .

[12]  William L. Benoit.  Image repair discourse and crisis communication , 1997 .

[13]  Keri K. Stephens,et al.  If the Organizations Won't Give Us Information…: The Use of Multiple New Media for Crisis Technical Translation and Dialogue , 2009 .

[14]  N. Petersen.  Designing a Rigorous Small Sample Study , 2008 .

[15]  Linda Laskowski-Jones,et al.  To blog or not to blog–that is the question , 2011 .

[16]  Anne Marie DiNardo.  The Internet as a crisis management tool: a critique of banking sites during Y2K , 2002 .

[17]  Alison Henderson,et al.  BOOK REVIEW: Heath, R. L., & Coombs, W. T. (2006). Today's public relations: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. , 2006 .

[18]  Brooke Fisher Liu,et al.  The Government Communication Decision Wheel: Toward a Public Relations Model for the Public Sector , 2007 .

[19]  Alexander Kouzmin,et al.  Crises and Crisis Management: Toward Comprehensive Government Decision Making , 1997 .

[20]  Hans-Jürgen Bucher,et al.  Crisis Communication and the Internet: Risk and Trust in a Global Media , 2002, First Monday.

[21]  William L. Benoit,et al.  Queen Elizabeth's image repair discourse: Insensitive royal or compassionate queen? , 1999 .

[22]  Michael L. Kent,et al.  Building Dialogic Relationships through the World Wide Web. , 1998 .

[23]  Marya L. Doerfel,et al.  Internet-Based Communication in Crisis Management , 2003 .

[24]  Adam Crowe.  The Elephant in the JIC: The Fundamental Flaw of Emergency Public Information within the NIMS Framework , 2010 .

[25]  Sora Kim,et al.  Are crisis communicators practicing what we preach?: An evaluation of crisis response strategy analyzed in public relations research from 1991 to 2009 , 2009 .

[26]  Kaman Lee,et al.  How the Hong Kong government lost the public trust in SARS: Insights for government communication in a health crisis , 2008, Public Relations Review.

[27]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Answering the Call for a Standard Reliability Measure for Coding Data , 2007 .

[28]  Keith Michael Hearit,et al.  Crisis Management By Apology: Corporate Response to Allegations of Wrongdoing , 2005 .

[29]  Maureen Taylor,et al.  Diffusion of traditional and new media tactics in crisis communication , 2005 .

[30]  Claire H. Procopio,et al.  Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Internet Communication, Geographic Community, and Social Capital in Crisis , 2007 .

[31]  Yoonhyeung Choi,et al.  Consumer Responses to Mattel Product Recalls Posted on Online Bulletin Boards: Exploring Two Types of Emotion , 2009 .

[32]  Changing Uses of Technology , 2008 .