Informing crisis communication preparation and response through network analysis

Informing crisis communication preparation and response through network analysis

Abstract: To test and elaborate as necessary the Social-Mediated Crisis Communication (SMCC) model’s key publics classifications (Liu et al., 2012) and to provide practical insight to public identification for crisis communication planning and response, this study uses network analysis to first identify clustered publics in airline Twitter networks –direct social media followers that are centered around the organization and indirect social media followers that cannot be reached directly by the organization. Next, social mediators (Himelboim et al., 2014) that bridge organizations with their indirect publics and the type of content that tend to cross publics lines are identified and examined. In our analysis, social mediators and network clusters are classified according to the publics taxonomy of the SMCC model. Our findings suggest further elaborations and more in-depth identification of key publics in social-mediated crisis communication.

Yan Jin Itai Himelboim

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