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and Google plus. Readers can also comment the article via their accounts on social networking sites.
Among the four publications, Apple Daily received the most shares and comments from the social networking sites users. People can get the crisis information from the News Feed on Facebook if their friends have shared, commented, or liked the articles from Apple Daily. In addition, Apple Daily also manages a Facebook fan page with more than 2.2 million likes, which is indeed a very large number. Apple Daily’s crisis related reports can also be shared, commented, and liked from their Facebook fan page. This means the posts of Apple Daily could be seen not only by its fan page followers, but also these followers’ friends who noticed the shared/ liked/ commented posts on their News Feed on Facebook. The high reach rate of Apple Daily’s fan page would increase the
transmission of crisis in formation, and also expand the audience. Organizations and public relations practitioners should not only pay extra attention on Apple Daily’s reports in order to make relative crisis response, but also try their best to maintain good relationship with Apple Daily.
5.3 Limitations and Directions for Future Research
Despite these findings, future research in this area is still needed and should seek to overcome the limitations of this study by incorporating the analysis of more expansive networks as well as additional research tools and methods. This study focused on Taipei Lee-Chi, a local business in Taiwan. It provided a different perspective on business in Asian culture, which is a valuable reference for the western culture-based theories. From Taipei Lee-Chi’s case, it was found that apology from the organization is not only essential, but a “must” for the crisis response. This is different from what the crisis communication theories have suggested us that the mortification strategy should be used when the crisis responsibility is strong. This phenomenon shows what Taiwanese people care about is the attitude of being repent. Even the organization did not directly cause the crisis, it should still apologize for disturbing the peace of the society. However, a more
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ideal study should compare more cases that are similar business or involve in the same crisis. More research should be done in this area to provide a detailed analysis of what kind of post content would work best in calming down the furious public. For instance, should the show owner record a video to explain and apologize for the crisis on its Facebook fan page? This data would be very complicated and more difficult to collect but it would be more persuasive, and has the potential to reveal
important differences.
Besides, this study did not have the chance to interview the stakeholders of Taipei Lee-Chi due to the limitation of textual analysis. The results of the analysis may be more subjective. Future research should consider a combination of textual analysis and in-depth interviews of customers or public relations managers, which could provide more insightful perspective for the case study. For instance, how do the stakeholders perceive organization’s act of deleting related crisis information from the website and fan page? Other than these qualitative methods, quantitative research such as experiments may help to offer more conclusive advice to practitioners in this field.
The textual analysis in this study collected media coverage from the four main publications in Taiwan, the official website, the Facebook fan page, and the “Support Taipei Lee-Chi” fan page.
These textual materials are, at the same time, too much and too little. For instance, this study had analyzed Taipei Lee-Chi’s Facebook fan page and the Support Taipei Lee-Chi fan page, but had not examined the fan pages from the four publications. As mentioned, Apple Daily has more than 2.2 million page likes. The Liberty Times’ fan page has 708 thousand likes, The China Times’ fan page has 554 thousand likes, and The United Daily News has 182 thousand page likes. These media owned fan page are the new communication channels where the Facebook users can receive the latest news in addition to the media’s webpages, and even the printed version. Future research is suggested
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to include media’s Facebook fan page. The inclusion might enrich the understanding of the information form of WOM on this communication channel.
This study tried to explore the influence of online WOM on social media in crisis communication. The results call for attention on utilizing social media as one of the crisis
communication tools for the organizations and public relations practitioners. However, there was no specific literature supporting these findings. The base literature in this study is SCCT by Coombs and Image Restoration Theory by Benoit. These two theories are both popular and often cited in crisis communications studies. But these two mainstream crisis communication theories lack supporting evidence from practical public relations cases on online WOM. In other words, future research is still needed in order to verify and revise the crisis communication recommendations from past studies.
In the era of the World Wide Web, the instantaneity of the Internet, the transmission of
information is faster than ever and more widely distributed. A single crisis event may become more complicated and serious in a short period because of the converged communication channels.
Organizations no longer have a choice about whether to integrate social media into crisis
management; the only choice is how to do so. This exploratory study aimed to observe the roles traditional and new media play in a crisis situation on the perspective of local brick and mortar businesses. This kind of business has rather limited resources and tech experiences comparing with large corporations. It might suffer relatively serious financial impact when confronting a crisis.
Therefore, it is even more important for these local brick and mortar businesses to utilize new media in crisis communication. By having intermediate communication with its stakeholders, organizations can directly know about people’s attitude toward the crisis and related issues, and hence make corresponding crisis response to solve the problem. These advantages enable local businesses to
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effectively and directly communicate with stakeholders at a relative low cost during a crisis. It is hoped that Taipei Lee-Chi’s crisis communication strategies and its effectiveness can be the reference for other local businesses in Taiwan.
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