Paper Number
1257
Abstract
Contemporary corporate crises demand conscientious communication efforts to save stakeholders and firms from preventable loss. Social media, in this regard, have proven to create a climate of high emotional volatility. Consequentially, firms travail to leverage social media in a way that reliably moderates negative emotions towards the firm and its actions. Underpinned by the assumptions of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), this study presents a social media analytics approach that is applied to a case study of the US-based airplane manufacturer Boeing, which suffers from a corporate crisis due to repeated fatal crashes of their 737 MAX 8 model. Based on a dataset of 417,583 Twitter postings, preliminary results suggest that prevalent negative emotions amend in distinct crisis phases that differ in responsibility attribution. This study informs theory and practice by exposing emotional climates on social media that might serve as a decision aid for corporate crisis response.
Recommended Citation
Marx, Julian; Mirbabaie, Milad; Czonstke, Christopher; and Stieglitz, Stefan, "SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS AND CORPORATE CRISES - A CASE STUDY OF BOEING’S 737 MAX CRASHES" (2021). ECIS 2021 Research-in-Progress Papers. 13.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2021_rip/13
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