The purpose of this study is to compare social media's role in the proactive crisis communication planning in two administrations, two companies and two non-profit organizations. A qualitative comparative study method has been used and people familiar with social media and crisis communications work from each business has been interviewed. The interviews have been transcribed and analyzed to discover the opinions and reasoning about how businesses work with proactive crisis communication and the role they give social media. The interviews were analyzed based on selected theories and previous research in strategic crisis communications, where issues management and crisis communication plans have a significant role. Also research on the pros and cons of social media and crisis communications channels have been used. The results showed that all areas of crisis communication plans are designed in a reactive way for how to act when a crisis has already occurred. However all operations conducts external environment monitoring intelligence and say that they are trying to be proactive in crisis situations by building relationships and addressing the highlighted problems. All activities except LKAB stated that they work a lot with social media to build relationships and address problems. Businesses also see social medias speed and ability to reach many people as a great advantage. However, they also point out that the speed can be a risk when rumors and misinformation can spread quickly. It appears that businesses are seeing more benefits of social media than disadvantages. They also indicate that there is an advantage to using traditional media as a crisis communications channel when they have an immense impact that social media can´t match. All but LKAB are positive about the use of social media and intend to use them in combination with other channels in crisis situations, which means that social media is given a major role in relation to other channels. Their work with external environment monitoring and addressing the issues they highlighted suggests that they try to be proactive. However, it is worth pointing out that all defined crises as external events and their reactive crisis communications plans nonetheless suggests that they did not put a clear emphasis on actively work to proactively prevent crises to arise.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-67918 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Johansson, Frida |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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