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information, and low cost. A report by Pew Research Center in 2014 showed that Facebook remained by far the most popular social networking site, and followed by other platforms like Twitter,
Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. According to Dan Neary, the vice president of Facebook at Asia Pacific region, its largest market was in Asian region, with a total of 340 million users. In Taiwan, the ranking of popular social networking sites is slightly different as the result of the survey done by Pew Research Center in the United States. For instance, Twitter and LinkedIn are not as prevalent among Taiwanese netizens. But Facebook also claimed the top social networking site in Taiwan with more than 60% of penetration rate, which was the highest number within the Asian Pacific region (Business Next, 2013). In 2007, Facebook introduced a new feature called “Pages,” which are user profiles for brands (companies, organizations, and celebrities). Facebook pages can be customized by publishing stories, hosting events, adding apps and more depend on the brands. If a person likes a page, his/her friends can also get updates from the brand in their News Feed on Facebook. More and more brands set up Facebook page to publish the latest news and communicate with its stakeholders online. Thus, this study would analyze Taipei Lee-Chi’s Facebook fan page in order to explore the roles of social media in crisis. It is interesting to discuss how the organization perceived the
differences between the roles of traditional and new media during crisis. Following research question is aimed to understand Taipei Lee-Chi’s social media use in the crisis:
RQ3: How online and social media was employed by the organization during the crisis (e.g., frequency and purposes of use at different phases of crisis)?
2.8 Word of Mouth on Social Media
Word of mouth (WOM) is a message about an organization’s products, services, or about the organization itself. Usually WOM involves comments about product performance, service quality, trustworthiness, and method of operation, passed on from one person to another. “Senders” who have
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personal experience with products or services from a particular organization are regarded as fairly objective sources of information by “receivers.” The information communicated by senders can be positive, negative, or a mixture of both (Charlett, Garland & Marr, 1995).
According to Coombs, increased anger results in a greater likelihood of negative word of mouth, which can threaten valuable reputational assets of the affected organization. Reputation represents people's awareness of an organization, favorable attitudes toward it, and positive attributes associated with the organization. Reputation is built by all the past contacts an organization has had with its various publics, as do advertising and other communication campaigns (Lerbinger, 1997; Coombs, 2014). An organization with a favorable reputation can experience stakeholders ignoring either bad news or bad comments about the organization because they are unlikely to believe that a good organization did anything bad. A favorable pre-crisis reputation means that an organization has more reputational assets to spend comparing to those who are unknown or disliked. While most people are quick to believe the worst about the organization, a favorable reputation can make stakeholders to believe the best. In turn, this means the stakeholders would not jump to negative conclusions when attributing crisis responsibility.
Another great explanation of reputation given by Coombs and Holladay (2006) noted that an organization's prior reputation can be linked to a bank account. A favorable reputation builds up the account, while a crisis subtracts from the account. In most cases, a crisis will cause reputational damage, the loss of reputational capital. But a favorable reputation can be as a shield to protect an organization from harm in certain circumstances (Coombs, 2012).
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To shape favorable reputations, it is important to create positive impressions of contact with an organization, including favorable shopping experiences, positive publicity, advertisements that feature “the good points” about an organization, and also through favorable word of mouth (Coombs, 2012). Managers nowadays recognize that their customers are more powerful and skeptical than ever before. Consumer-to-consumer influence is almost taking precedence over the efforts of business-to-consumer marketing tools, such as advertising, public relations, and promotion (Kimmel & Kitchen, 2013). This phenomenon indicates that WOM management is not only an effective marketing strategy, but also a determined crisis communication toll for all the businesses.
WOM can be distinguished to two different forms, the online WOM and offline WOM. Publics typically engage in offline WOM communication with people whom they have stronger prior
relationships with in real life, compared to the people they engage with in online WOM
communication. These looser online relationships lead to less social pressure for accuracy, which increases the possibility for inaccurate information to be shared rapidly through online WOM. Public may be forced to prioritize crisis information from online WOM communication despite this
increased likelihood of inaccuracy online, since the latest information may not be available through offline WOM communication or traditional media in a crisis context (Liu et al., 2013; Johnson &
Kaye, 2010; Procopio & Procopio, 2007).
The participatory nature of social media has led to 37% of Internet users contributing to the creation of news, commenting about news, and disseminating news via social networking sites (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel & Olmstead, 2010). With the characteristics of immediate response and interactivity, online WOM on social media can be distributed to more people, even includes users from different region. This implies that online WOM is even more influential than
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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.