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offline WOM. Today, online WOM plays an important role in crisis communication which organizations should not ignore when considering crisis response strategies.
2.9 Extant Studies on Online WOM
Publics increasingly use social media during crises. Consequently, it is an important lesson for crisis communication professionals to understand how to strategically optimize these tools. As Coombs (2008) noted, the rapid evolution of new media often results in the practice of public relations getting ahead of research. The practice of crisis communication is ahead of research in terms of “social media.” In recent years, there was an emerging literature focusing on the effectiveness of online WOM communications. However, the scope of published studies on the impact of online WOM communication is rather broad. The topic of the WOM studies varies from different academic fields, such as communication, advertising, marketing, and consumer behavior, which make the studies appear relatively fragmented and inconclusive. Especially when it comes to online WOM in a crisis situation, there is scarce theory-grounded research to understand key factors that affect how publics consume crisis information via social media compared to other sources.
Research is still needed to provide evidence-based guidelines, which integrates social media into crisis management practices (Jin et. al., 2014).
Liu, Jin, Briones and Kuch (2012) have worked on the Social-mediated Crisis Communication Model (SMCC) which describes the interaction between a crisis affected organization and three types of public who produce and consume crisis information via social media, traditional media, and offline WOM communication. Three types of public engage in online WOM communication include:
(1) influential social media creators who create crisis information; (2) social media followers who directly consume the crisis information from influential social media creators; and (3) social media
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inactives, who receive information from the social media creators via friends who read the social media, but not directly from the original source.
As conceptualized in the SMCC model (Jin & Liu, 2010; Liu et al., 2012), “information form”
is whether the crisis information is transmitted via traditional media, social media, and offline WOM communication. It has been ignored by dominant crisis communication theories, but recently is gaining attention from crisis communication scholars (e.g., Jin & Liu, 2010; Schultz et al., 2011).
The mainstream crisis communication related theories, such as the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) by Coombs (2012), and Image Restoration Theory (Benoit, 1997), do not address how information form can impact public crisis communication behaviors (Liu et al., 2013).To help the crisis managers more effectively utilize communication tools to deal with positive or negative WOM on crisis affected organizations, it is worth exploring the information form and the flow of WOM during a crisis.
As previously noted, Coombs was looking forward to further research on the topic of the reactions to crisis response strategies. During Taipei Lee-Chi’s tainted oil crisis, we can see that the customers seemed to spontaneously set up a Facebook fan page to support the affected organization.
On the Support Taipei Lee-Chi fan page, customers collected related media coverage and especially news clips about the dispute aroused by the refund policy, and had engaging debate both for and against Taipei Lee-Chi. This act shows that the customers nowadays are able to integrate different media channels when processing crisis information. Additional research is needed to further segment public types by media consumption habits and level of involvement with the organization in crisis (Jin et. al., 2014).
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By examining public reactions on organization’s crisis communication on the social media, this study is aimed at exploring public online WOM behaviors in a crisis situation. The following is the last research question addressing the issue of WOM:
RQ4: How did the online word of mouth develop during the crisis (e.g., public attitude toward the organization, information form of the WOM, interactions between organization and the
commenters)?
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CHAPTER THREE:
METHOD
The purpose of this study is to investigate the crisis communication processes of Taipei Lee-Chi, which was involved in the Taiwan gutter oil incident. Taipei Lee-Chi is a bakery which has been in business for over a century. It is widely known amongst the Taiwanese population. But Taipei Lee-Chi did not limit itself as a traditional bakery. It not only set up branch stores in Lee-China, but also moved the original Taipei store to a bigger place. Taipei Lee-Chi also runs an official website and a Facebook Fan Page. Compare to other traditional bakeries such as Hu in Keelung, Taipei Lee-Chi’s business management strategies are relatively modernized. The Taiwan gutter oil incident provided a good opportunity to examine a traditional organization’s crisis communication strategies on different media channels.
The case study method is widely used in crisis management and crisis communication research.
Not just gathering related data, case study adopts a more comprehensive research strategy. For instance, case study may employ both qualitative and quantitative methods in the research, such like using in-depth interview, textual analysis with survey or experiment. According to the research conducted by An and Cheng (2010), it was found that case study was the dominant research method in crisis studies. According to the data in the their research, it showed that the form of case study was applied to conduct a very wide range of research topics, such as “evaluating crisis incidents, public relations managers' perceptions, generating definitions of crisis, and suggestions for strategies”
(p.17). From these results, An and Cheng suggested that case study method is a useful way to explore these topics, particularly when related literature was not yet so well established. An earlier study by Broom et al. (1989) and Cutler (2004) also had similar findings. Since crises are unpredictable and
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constitute of different situational factors, case study is particularly useful when researcher wants to explore the relationship between crisis and its contexts.
Although case study provides detailed observation for a crisis event, it still has some research limitations. According to An and Cheng’s findings, most case studies showed a lack of theoretical based research questions or hypotheses, and had less methodological rigor (An & Cheng, 2010).
Ideally, theories should not only be cited in the literature review section, but to be tested from case studies to see if the advices are supportive in different crisis situations or not. Likewise, establishing a more organized methodological framework can help to enhance the quality of evidence generated by research.
Many researchers had proposed advices to make sure that case study is not only a chronicle of real-life event, but a constructive analysis of a crisis and its crisis communication process. For instance, Coombs (2010) suggested detailed case studies that involve interviews and primary documents, not just public statements and comments, can help to provide qualified evidence for a research.
Above all, this study adopted case study method to give a closer look of how Taiwanese local businesses react to the gutter oil crisis and their communication strategies on different media channels. In order to enhance the richness and quality of the research evidence, the case study
included textual analysis of related media coverage, official website, Facebook fan page, and reviews from the customers. A more detailed explanation of the textual analysis method from researcher Sharon Lockyer is provided as follows (Lockyer, 2008):
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“Textual analysis is a method of data analysis that closely examines either the content and meaning of texts or their structure and discourse. Texts, which can range from newspapers, television programs, and blogs to architecture, fashion, and furniture, are deconstructed to examine how they operate, the manner in which they are constructed, the ways in which meanings are produced, and the nature of those meanings. Sociologists, geographers, historians, linguists, communications and media studies researchers, and film researchers use textual analysis to assess texts from a range of cultural settings.”
Briefly, textual analysis is a term used to refer to a variety of primarily qualitative methodologies or models (Lockyer, 2008). This study references the qualitative data analysis
procedures (data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification) proposed by Miles and Huberman's (2014) at the part of textual analysis.