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CCI Conference on Corporate Communication 2012
Edited by Dr Michael Goodman
Introduction
The advent of new media technology and prevalent usage of social media platforms have transformed how organizations communicate with stakeholders ([12] Christ, 2007). The World Wide Web is arguably the first mass medium which allows uninterrupted flow of information from source to receiver without any gatekeeping or filtering ([89] White and Raman, 1999). For crisis management, [74] Siah et al. (2010, p. 143) noted the rise of social media platforms as a "double-edged sword". While it can be an effective crisis management tool ([20] DiNardo, 2002; [36] Greer and Moreland, 2003; [37] Hagar and Haythornthwaite, 2005; [44] Hughes et al. , 2008; [65] Palen et al. , 2009), social media can also serve as platforms where crises can be triggered.
Indeed, social media platforms are increasingly becoming breeding grounds for organizational crises. In the last ten years, incidents of online crises reaching mainstream media have seen a ten-fold increase ([64] Owyang et al. , 2011). [61] McGrath (1997) equates one year on the Internet to seven years in any other medium. The rapid evolution of new media technology has seen crisis researchers calling for more research into this burgeoning sphere (see [14] Coombs, 2008).
The pervasiveness of social media has also changed the way mainstream media operates and prioritizes news content. Increasingly, it is becoming more difficult for mainstream media to ignore content originating from social media. The role the social media played during the Boston bombings breaking news - much of which unsubstantiated - had pressured the mainstream media in backpedal mode ([23] Dowd, 2013; [26] Eyal, 2013). Iran's Twitter Revolution is another example where dissidents of the government were able to communicate to the rest of the world through social media even though the mainstream media were barred from reporting on the protests ([85] Valentini and Kruckerberg, 2011). The web-savvy population used Twitter, blogs, mobile phones and other social network tools to spread news of the crisis.
Additionally, as stakeholders have the ability to petition organizations and share their concerns publicly, social media tools have also generated another form of crisis called the paracrisis ([13] Coombs and Holladay, 2012). Paracrisis is defined as "a publicly visible crisis threat that charges an...