The purpose of the essay is to find out how crisis communication takes shape on different social media. The essay deals with both organizations' risk and crisis management on Facebook and Instagram. A risk is defined in the essay as anything that could possibly lead to a crisis that could adversely affect an organization. A crisis is defined here as an unpredictable event that threatens key expectations of stakeholders. To answer the purpose, the essay authors have used the following main and sub-questions; How does the selected organizations' management of Facebook and Instagram look from a crisis communication perspective? What are the differences or similarities in risk and crisis management on Facebook and Instagram? How do organizations use Coombs different crisis management strategies on Facebook and Instagram? In what way, if so, does the tonality differ on the different platforms? The theoretical framework begins with a chapter that summarizes previous research and leads to the research gap. One theory that has been used in the study is Situational Crisis CommunicationTheory, where Timothy Coomb's seven strategies on crisis management are used throughout the essay. Other theories that have also been used are Social Mediated Crisis Communication, medialization and media logic. The method that has been used is quantitative content analysis where ten different organizations' feeds on both Facebook and Instagram have been analyzed. The units that were examined were classified as risk or crisis messages that were published during the period 2017-01-01 until 2018-11-20. The result shows that the organizations' management of Facebook and Instagram before, during and after a crisis looks different depending on the platform. There are similarities but also many interesting differences. One thing that differentiates the platforms is that it is more forgiving on Facebook and it is more common for the organizations to try to blame someone else on Instagram. The organizations also tend to be less personal on Instagram than on Facebook. The result also shows that Coomb's crisis management strategies are used in all found units and that the tone on Facebook tends to be more positive than it is on Instagram. An interesting discovery was that despite Instagram's visual logic, the platform was not used for that purpose when an organization goes through a crisis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-70794 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Sundström, Emma, Lönnkvist, Victoria |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013), Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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