Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the session of the course Organizing in Times of Crisis, the Case of COVID-19. My name is Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich and I'm an assistant professor for business administration, particularly business ethics at Leuphana University Lüneburg. In my research, I'm interested in the role of responsible and sustainable business practices with a special focus on communication. In the following video, I will talk about organizational crisis communication in social media. The guiding question of the session is, what role and function does communication play in and for organizational crisis and which role does social media play? The learning aims are the following. First, you should understand why organizations engage in crisis communication and recognize communicative crisis response strategies. You should also be able to reflect on the emergent socially constructed nature of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. You should also recognize the role of the media and particularly of social media and the social co-production of crisis. And you should understand the challenges that organizations face when communicating via social media in times of crisis and beyond. From an organizational perspective, communication is crucial in situations of crisis. Internal and external stakeholders demand information how a crisis will affect them, including their well-being and what an organization does to resolve the situation. The organization response to these demands will then determine how stakeholders evaluate the organization. For example, when a product is malfunctioning, consumers are looking for information of what this means for them, how they can return this product, whether and how they get a reimbursement and what the organization does to resolve the issue in the future. Crises, particularly natural disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic, are situations of communicative complexities. In the case of the current pandemic, people seek information about the buyers, what the pandemic means to their daily lives. From business firms, they expect information of how this will impact their ability to deliver goods and services or how this will affect employment after all. From governmental organizations, information is expected of how governments prepare for crisis relief, how governmental agencies help communities to cope and what operational actions are taken to fight the pandemic. The issues emerging from the stakeholders' needs and demands for information in times of crisis and the organizational responses to these stakeholder demands are a key concern of crisis communication research. The situational crisis communication theory developed by Timothy Coombs suggests that the type of crisis determines the response strategies that are required to safeguard a firm's reputation. The reputation of an organization can be generally defined as the prominence of an organization in the public's mind and collective perceptions about its quality and performance characteristics as well as its goals, preferences and organizational values. Organizational crises can take on many different shapes. The COVID-19 pandemic can be defined as a natural disaster. Disasters differ from other organizational crises such as product failure or corporate misconduct. A natural disaster falls into the victim cluster of crisis types. In this type of crisis, stakeholders perceive the organization as a victim of a crisis. Therefore also, they attribute only weak responsibility to the firm, meaning that the disaster initially is only a mild reputational threat. Consequently, according to situational crisis communication theory, corporations should engage in a response strategy called victimage. That is, crisis managers should remind stakeholders that the organization is also a crisis victim as well as alongside the stakeholders. Moreover, communicatively, disasters should be managed by using instructive information or telling people what to do to protect themselves from the crisis. A good example of this strategy is the current corporate communication of the car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz that uses its corporate communication channels to spread information on how to avoid catching the COVID-19 virus but also shares information from health institutions like the WHO. However, other organizational crises can be embedded within disasters and poor disaster management can create crises for the agencies tasked with handling disasters or other organizations. In this sense, disasters can turn into further organizational crises both for public organizations but also private firms. A recent example of how the disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic turned into an organizational crisis is the corporation Adidas who announced that they would hold payment for rent until June via their social media channels. While the decision was legal, the message caused much public outrage. Particularly within social media but also several German politicians publicly shamed the corporation for its perceived selfish move. Importantly, Adidas was not the only corporation to make use of the German COVID-19 economic relief pact but given its prominent name, it became the target of the public outrage. Because of the public backlash and the aligned reputational threat, the corporation was forced into revising its decision. It apologized and vowed to do better. Given that the firm is highly experienced with social media communication, the depicted lack of sensitivity for stakeholder expectations in this pandemic, however, seems somewhat surprising. However, this only underlines that disasters are situations that entail many challenges for organizations. In disaster situations, public organizations face different challenges than private organizations. The general public usually copes physically and psychologically with very stressful events and demands information and communication. Moreover, a disaster is a large-scale event of social importance and requires inter-organizational coordination between organizational agencies, civil society, and corporations. Disaster management then centers on relief and restoration efforts and the communicative demands they create. Extent, disaster, and risk communication has focused in the past on the study of how information on a disaster influences individuals' risk perceptions, behavior, and knowledge and how organizations may restore confidence in operational response through communication, as well as how organizations, particularly governments, can improve individual and community disaster preparedness. Extending crisis communication research to the case of public organizations also identifies four crisis communication types. Operational communication aims to provide information to people to cope with the current situation. In contrast, strategic crisis communication, which includes communication that is well planned in advance and follows long-term goals. You could also apply these kinds of types of communication, of course, to corporations. Further, crisis communication of public organizations can be resilience or rather reputation-oriented. Much communication of public organizations aims at the creation of resilience amongst the recipients of their communication, that is, the communities affected by the crisis or the disaster. But some communication may also focus on the management of the reputation of the public organization itself. Put simply, public and private organizations share a need to help stakeholders cope with stress-free events during a crisis. However, given that stakeholders or better citizens expect that governments competently respond to disasters and work towards community resilience, both types of organizations face different expectations regarding their communication and thus have different communication strategies available to them. Research generally recognizes the benefits for organizations using new information and communication technologies in situations of crisis. Many studies focus on the implementation, use and effectiveness of various crisis communication tools, including social media. Importantly, social media turn one-to-many communication into a many-to-many communication. These tools and services make stakeholders part of the actual crisis communication. For example, during the wildfires in California in 2007 and 2008, researchers showed that residents took pictures of the fires and reported their location to Twitter, reporting the fires movement before journalists could get to the scene. This was very important for relief efforts. Also, through information communication technologies, organizations can actively engage stakeholders in fighting a pandemic. For example, the COVID-19 app by the Robert Koch Institute enables users to trace their health and therefore offers researchers important insight into where the virus emerges and which symptoms the body develops and how the pandemic progresses. Additionally, new media tools have much potential for encouraging preparedness, knowledge and involvement in crisis response by making the topic visual and interactive. This is in particular important for public organizations who are often left with budget restraints. Social media enables them to engage online communities who are able to self-correct misinformation before organizational representatives have the chance to respond. Consequently, drawing on a literature review of X10 risk and crisis communication research, Leal and her colleagues, for example, suggest several best practices for organizations for the use of social media. These include communicating with honesty, candor and openness, listening to public concerns and understand the audiences, as well as collaborating and coordinating with credible sources. Many of these practices we also find in the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, when the German government holds press conferences together with medical experts and virologists. Most crisis communication literature approaches communication with a rather organization-centric view. While this research is useful for organizational practice, also because of its development of best practices, it often overemphasizes the organizational centrality in communication processes. Communication is often approached from a rather instrumental perspective and implicitly depicted as a rather simple process of information transmission. Implicitly, many works build on the classic asymmetric one-to-many model of communication, although the rise and spread of social media has led to the adoption of a corresponding many-to-many model. Social media consequently are often depicted as tools or instruments for the organization to engage with stakeholders. Aligned crises are depicted as something that organizations experience, something that is out there and that happens to them. Importantly, building on organizational communication theory, some organization scholars have moved beyond the transmission model of communication by considering the performative or constitutive nature of communication for social reality. From a performative perspective, communication is not only something that organizations do. Instead, communication is the vehicle through which reality comes into existence. From this perspective, organizations are not just responding to situations of crisis, but actually co-constructed together with their stakeholders. Organizations are embedded in networks of communication in which the reality of the organizational crisis is negotiated between the organization and its stakeholders through complex forms and new dynamics of interactions between media, publics, and the organization. Central for this view is the idea that communication is not simply a transmission of meaning or interpretations, but a process through which organizational reality is constituted and in which meaning is organized. Drawing on such understanding of communication offers the opportunity to study how organizations, but also various other actors, co-construct organizational crises and negotiate the role and responsibility of organizations in crises. However, the media landscape has considerably changed in recent years, and the media has partially lost its dominant agenda-setting position in society. Because of social media, the media landscape is today highly fragmented, and stakeholders have often only elective exposure to preferred sources. This segments the public sphere into multiple only loosely interconnected venues, which create a new challenge for organizations in the crisis communication. The co-production of a crisis today takes place through various interaction arenas, involving an unprecedented number of actors, including public and private organizations, but also politicians, scientists, journalists, or even individuals like science blogger Mighty Nguyen Kim, with a large network of followers. In this sense, social media led to an increasing polyphony of voices in the organizational context. At the same time, these technologies lead to an increasing polarization of the public debate, as algorithms and the selection of preferential sources exposes users only to limited information, while reinforcing partial views and local frames. Moreover, because of social media, emotionally charged and often biased content can therefore rapidly diffuse. This content then becomes part of online threads and hypertextual webs, as other users comment on, forward, alter, or add to the original content. Under these conditions, crisis communication of organizations faces serious challenges. First of all, due to selective exposure and audience fragmentation, it is unclear whether organizations are actually able to reach their targeted audiences. Second, it is unclear whether they are able to convince their audiences of their sincerity in their crisis relief efforts. For example, research has shown that even if factually inaccurate or incomplete, evaluations or judgments that appeal to emotions can prove more persuasive and influential on people's attitudes and judgments than analytical evaluations that appeal to reason. This is a problem for organizations like the Robert Koch Institute, that rely on operational fact-based communication strategies to mobilize communities to take actions against the pandemic, for example, to engage in social distancing. In contrast, the large numbers of likes and shares of videos of individual so-called influencers like Rezo or Mighty Ninggui & Kim demonstrate how a creative style of expression may offer venues to facilitate interaction among supportive audiences, which then may nurture the diffusion of content that resonates with local frames, rather than imposing preferred corporate messages. These examples, therefore, demonstrate the fruitfulness of or the potential for further research on the social media impact on crisis communication, in particular in the COVID-19 case. I now come to the conclusion of this session. First of all, crisis communication theory suggests various strategies how organizations can respond to crisis. While crisis communication of business firms aims to restore organizational reputation, crisis communication of public organizations largely aims at community resilience and crisis relief. Natural disasters cast a particular challenge for organizations and can turn into other organizational crises. A variety of actors is involved in the communicative co-construction of crisis, a process that is facilitated now through social media. Social media created dynamization, polarization, but also polarization of communication in the public sphere, and also underline the role of emotions for stakeholder communication. This is the literature that I used in the preparation of this course. If you have further questions or are interested in further literature, just get in touch with me. Finally, I would like to say thank you for your attention and I hope you enjoy the session.