RESEARCH PROPOSAL

O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E

Social media crisis management: Aligning corporate response strategies with stakeholders’ emotions online

Cl�emence Vignal Lambret | Edgard Barki

Escola de Administrac�~ao da Fundac�~ao Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP) & Sciences Po

(Paris, France), Paris, France

Correspondence

Cl�emence Vignal Lambret, Escola de

Administrac�~ao da Fundac�~ao Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP) & Sciences Po (Paris, France),

Paris, France.

Email: [email protected]

The article focuses on how the analysis of stakeholders’ emotions online can help

companies facing a social media crisis determine the response strategy that will best

minimize the reputational threat. The article indeed questions the relevance of clas-

sical crisis management theory to an online environment. Results show that social

media have increased the unpredictability of corporate crises. Consequently, on

social media, crises cannot be addressed with the methods that have prevailed so

far. Rather, incorporating emotion-based analysis in six case studies showed how

crisis analysis, and the subsequent response strategy, could be fine-tuned. The arti-

cle builds on recent literature to develop a new analytical framework for response

strategies and a model for crisis resolution—the social media crisis management

matrix.

1 | INTRODUCTION

On 18 September 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency

revealed that Volkswagen had been superficially hiding the gas per-

formance of its cars to circumvent gas emissions tests. A total of

53,000 tweets about the revelation were posted that same day.

These were followed by 1.3 million more tweets over the following

week, averaging 8,000 tweets per hr compared to the usual 10,000

Volkswagen-related tweets per day. Within 1 week, Volkswagen had

lost its CEO, Martin Winterkorn, 35% of its market value, and its

reputation. In early November 2015, a “Diesel emissions violation”

subchapter was added to the “Environmental Record” chapter of the

Wikipedia page of Volkswagen, and a whole new page entitled

“Volkswagen emissions scandal” was created. By the end of Decem-

ber, the new CEO, Matthias M€uller, threw their famous 2007 slogan

“Das Auto” (“The Car”) on the scrap heap in favour of a more sober

“Volkswagen” (“the people’s car”), an embodiment of the now

required low profile.

The ability to freely and instantly add one’s voice to the Internet

conversation is a new power to influence held by social media users

who are continuously reacting (rather than reasoning) to anything

occurring online and offline. The “Facebook and Twitter revolutions”

that appeared in Eastern Europe and Maghreb through 2009–2011

showed how social media could be used by online communities to

affect offline governments. What, then, should we expect the impact

to be on companies? The case of Volkswagen is but a recent

example of the tangible consequences (such as the destruction of a

company’s reputation which may eventually impact its business per-

formance) that can emerge from troubled interactions between the

offline and online worlds.

The emergence of social media has created fertile ground for

corporate crises because by “disseminating information to as many

people as possible” (Veil, Buehner, & Palenchar, 2011: 115), they

help make crises “an excellent opportunity of audience” (Libaert,

2015: 28–32). In 2013, Deloitte published a global survey that

revealed that new technologies, and in particular social media, were

currently at the core of organizations’ fears. The inherently public

nature of online content can automatically impact the reputation of

organizations as other people’s voices add to the “organisation’s

voice to communicate” (Coombs & Holladay, 2014: 42). Moreover,

these new “voices” come charged with emotions that might impact

the amplitude and seriousness of an online crisis, and there is a need

to better understand how organizations should react to their stake-

holders’ emotions.

Several past researches have begun to study these interactions,

and analysed how a crisis poses both a financial and a reputational

threat (Coombs, 2007; Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2012). Among other

conclusions, they posited that the bigger the media attention the

greater the threat to the reputation of organizations, and that “as

the strength of a reputational threat increases, so should the likeli-

hood that the threatened organization will be compelled to respond

defensively” (McDonnell & King, 2013: 391). The question of

DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12198

J Contingencies and Crisis Management. 2018;26:295–305. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jccm © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd | 295

whether defensiveness is relevant and strategic has however seldom

been studied.

The link between social media and corporate crises is a topic of

growing popularity among researchers. In 2008, Gonzales-Herrero &

Smith explained how the Internet could both trigger and facilitate

crises, with significant implications for crisis management. Going fur-

ther, various studies have explored the relationship between social

media and corporate reputation (Aula, 2010; Pfeffer, Zorbach, & Car-

ley, 2014); these paved the way for new studies centred on how to

integrate social media into crisis planning (Brummette & Sisco, 2015;

Libaert, 2015; Ott & Theunissen, 2014; Veil et al., 2011). Meanwhile,

other studies have focused on online crisis communication and have

initially suggested the relevance of conducting cognitive and emo-

tional analyses of stakeholders’ online behaviours (Schultz, Utz, &

G€oritz, 2011; Sweetser & Metzgar, 2007). Eventually, a few authors

attempted to propose new analytical frameworks and response

strategies to social media crises (Coombs, 2007; Jin, Liu, & Austin,

2014; Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2007, 2009; Jin et al., 2012). The litera-

ture offered various approaches to the study of social media and

companies’ interactions and how these have impacted the ways in

which organizations address crisis management.

These studies were either organization-centric or stakeholder-cen-

tric. On the one hand, the work of authors such as Aula (2010), Pfeffer

et al. (2014) or Veil et al. (2011), although a priori interested in the

relationship between organizations and their stakeholders through

social media, centred their analysis on the companies themselves and

only partially approached the stakeholders, regarding them as one

exogenous factor in reputational crises. On the other hand, authors

such as Sweetser and Metzgar (2007) or Jin et al. (2007–2014) inte-

grated social media stakeholders more comprehensively into their

analyses and have begun drafting innovative strategies centred on

stakeholders to manage and respond to social media-induced corpo-

rate crises. However, these studies are still in their early stages, and

none has brought together the different findings of either category in

an integrated way to propose an up-to-date and encompassing work

on how social media corporate crises can be managed.

Consequently, the objectives of this article are three-fold: (i) to

enrich the current literature by providing an analysis of crisis man-

agement in a social media context that balances the organization-

centric and stakeholder-centric approaches, (ii) in particular, to fur-

ther deepen findings on cognitive analyses by examining the role of

emotions conveyed by online stakeholders on the definition of a

response strategy, and (iii) to propose a new framework for social

media crisis management that builds on and integrates past studies.

We organize the rest of the article as follows: we first provide a

brief overview of the significant crisis management literature with a

focus on social media to identify the theoretical foundations for our

framework, which we present in the second section. Next, we pre-

sent the chosen methodology. Then, we analyse six cases of corpo-

rate crises from France and Brazil to test our model. Finally, we

suggest ways to adjust our model and further discuss how social

media impact corporate crises, offering insights into the new role of

emotions in the definition of an efficient response strategy.

2 | THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Typologies of crises are transversal and hinge on various defining

components such as nature (crises can be technical, political, acciden-

tal, etc.), origin (internal or external crises) (Coombs, 2007; Jin et al.,

2014; Lagadec, 1993; Libaert, 2015; Westphalen, 1992), and inten-

sity (length and force of impact) (Vanderbiest, 2014). These typolo-

gies successfully encompass the complex character of crises, but

they do not fully factor in the newest component: social media.

2.1 | Traditionally, corporate crisis management is organization-centric

Crisis management benefits from a wide literature. Various authors

such as Fink (1986), Coombs (1999), or Gonzales-Herrero and Smith

(2008) developed “cyclical” analyses of crises with the ambition to

“plan for the inevitable.” According to their models, crises move

through different phases, and crisis management is a process that

allows each phase to be effectively addressed to prevent or lessen

the damage a crisis can cause to the organization and its stakehold-

ers.

Other authors such as Lagadec (1993), Piotet (1991) or West-

phalen (1997) have focused more on the communication component

of crisis management and analysed the different responses given by

companies during crises. The observed and recommended reactions

vary from denying the crisis and responsibility (e.g., “refusal,” “si-

lence,” “attack”) to acknowledging the crisis and responsibility (e.g.,

“transfer,” “conflation,” “acknowledgement,” etc.), depending on the

objective pursued by the organization.

Ultimately, these different models developed between the 1980s

and early 2000s approached crisis management with two main prin-

ciples: prevention and tailored communication. These constitute the

classical theory of crisis management and are based on the belief

that organizations can exercise control over their environment.

However, Gonzales-Herrero and Smith (2008) argued that the

audience has been gradually fragmenting and that online, it is given

the opportunity to voice a multitude of opinions. In this new “many-

to-many” dynamic, social media can accelerate crises (e.g., an offline

crisis is relayed on social media, where it may gain momentum,

which worsens the offline crisis) or create them (e.g., a tweet triggers

an online crisis with potential offline consequences). Social media

have become a sound box by “breaking the boundaries of space and

time characterizing traditional media” (Libaert, 2015: 32).

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010:61) defined social media as “a group

of Internet-based applications that [. . .] allow the creation and

exchange of User Generated Content.” Social media embody many

“public places,” where a wide array of stakeholders can and do add

their voice(s) to the organization’s, especially during crises (Coombs

& Holladay, 2014: 42). As such, social media crises can emerge online

from issues whose nature is often very subjective, uncertain, or hazy

(Bloch, 2012) such as perceptions of corporate behaviours.

Consequently, the development of the Internet (and by exten-

sion, social media) has made the risks faced by companies as well as

296 | VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI

the types of crises they can experience more complex and threaten-

ing: “anyone can instantly have a megaphone and access to millions

of people” (Wigley & Zhang, 2011:3). This unpredictable and world-

wide exposure may result in “negative mainstream media coverage, a

change in business process, or financial loss” (Owyang, 2011).

As such, crisis management in a social media context cannot

merely focus on predicting the development of the crisis, as social

media crises are, by nature, unpredictable (Bloch, 2012). It requires

new tools that add to and go beyond classical prevention plans.

However, the existing literature is mainly composed of general sets

of guidelines such as the need to “Fix objectives and be responsive”

(Libaert & Westphalen 2014:48–52) or principles (“do not delete

negative customer reviews from your Facebook page”) that are not

tied to any particular context.

2.2 | Social media have redefined the way organizations and stakeholders communicate

In 2017, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had a cumulated 3.48

billion users. If Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Tumblr are

included, that number reaches 5.9 billion users. Taking into

account that a social media user has on average five different

accounts, we find that more than 15% of the world population

owns at least one social media account. This suggests that a new

power lies in the connected hands of stakeholders, whether cus-

tomers or potential customers. For example, Bloch (2012) and

Brummette and Sisco (2015) focused on how individuals could

now challenge organizations in visible ways by creating, forwarding

and consuming information online. Wigley and Zhang (2011:3),

Aggergaard (2015:11), and Austin, Liu, and Jin (2012:201) analysed

how people could use social media to shape the “public narrative”

of a crisis and “fulfil [their] informational and emotional needs

related to the crisis.” Last, some have highlighted the growing role

played by social media users in shaping organizational reputations:

Aula (2010:48) suggested that reputation is the aggregation of

stakeholders’ shared interpretations of the organization (“ambient

publicity”), and Pfeffer et al. (2014:118) coined the term “online

firestorms” to define “instant waves of criticism (. . .) [that] appear

without warning” and that are “predominantly opinion (. . .) thus

having a high affective nature” with a “huge impact on a com-

pany’s reputation.”

Therefore, social media change the ways in which organizations

and stakeholders can communicate, and there is an expanding litera-

ture on the incorporation of social media into crisis management and

communication. Several authors (Brummette & Sisco, 2015; Libaert,

2015; Ott & Theunissen, 2014) have implied that social media

should be built into crisis planning. Weiner (2006) called for the

necessity to “satisfy the demands of today’s information and media

dynamic.” Booz Allen Hamilton issued a report (2009) that concluded

that the “new challenges” posed by social media required that they

be “embedded in the corporate communication strategy,” while Veil

et al. (2011) collected best practices to optimize social media inte-

gration into communication strategy.

Social media impact the efficiency of crisis communication, as

shown by the findings of Eriksson (2012), Sweetser and Metzgar

(2007), and Schultz et al. (2011). These studies looked at how and

what organizations were communicating and what effects these

communications produced on stakeholders. In addition to strategies

identified by Lagadec (1993), Piotet (1991), Westphalen (1997),

and Diers and Donohue (2013) have compiled a more recent tax-

onomy of crisis response “tactics” to be used by organizations.

These “message strategies” may be “Future-oriented” (e.g., “self-

enhancement,” “excellence”), “Aggressive” (e.g., “framing the crisis,”

“anti-social”), “Defensive” (mix of defensive and accommodative

responses), or “Affirming Amplification” (positive messages). How-

ever, from the different models that have been developed in an

attempt to draft effective communication strategies in the context

of a social media crisis, three of them, detailed in Table 1, are

more aligned to our research, since they offered analyses grounded

on similar assumptions. In particular, stakeholders were a full-

fledged determinant in these strategies, which also relied on emo-

tion analysis.

TABLE 1 Models of communication strategies

Authors Model Takeaway Findings

Jin et al. (2007,

2009, 2012)

Integrated Crisis

Mapping

Conceptualization of

stakeholders’ emotions

Determining the origin of the crisis (external/

internal and public/internal) allows determining

and anticipating the emotions that stakeholders

are likely to feel when facing the crisis

Three dominant emotions: anger, sadness, and

fright

Differ according to 3-criteria origin of the crisis:

internal–external, personal–public, and unnatural

–natural

Coombs (2007) Situational Crisis

Communication Theory

Evidence-based guidance

for crisis communication

The degree of responsibility for the crisis

attributed by stakeholders to the organization

allows determining the type (“cluster”) of the crisis and is positively correlated to the width of

reputational threat.

Three clusters: victim, accidental and preventable

Maximize reputational protection by identifying

the cluster and reacting accordingly.

Two strategies: defensive (deny, diminish) and

accommodative (rebuild and bolster)

Austin et al.

(2012) and Jin

et al. (2014)

Social-Mediated Crisis

Communication

Determination of best-

suited responses

strategies

The response strategy should be consistent with

the crisis origin and the emotions it triggers

The crisis origin can trigger attribution dependent

or attribution independent emotions to which the

response, its content, form (social media,

traditional media, WOM), and source (third party

or organization) should be adapted

Source: Elaborated by the authors from the work of Jin et al. (2007, 2009, 2012), Coombs (2007), Austin et al. (2012) and Jin et al. (2014).

VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI | 297

Literature developed from the early 2000s onwards reflects a

shift from the static, organization-centric classical paradigm and high-

lights models based on more dynamic and flexible frameworks

adapted to social media crises.

2.3 | This research: linking stakeholders’ emotions and response strategies

Our study addresses the dynamics between stakeholders expressing

emotions on social media and organizations once a corporate crisis

breaks out online, and focuses in particular on response strategies.

Based on the models in Table 1, our theoretical proposition (Fig-

ure 1) is that the definition and choice of the best response strategy

are based on the connection between the origin of the crisis, the

degree of attribution of responsibility for the crisis, and the stake-

holders’ emotions in reaction to the crisis.

We suggest a matrix (Figure 2) articulating these commonalities

to build a comprehensive framework. It is built on two axes of analy-

sis: the degree of attribution of responsibility for the crisis by stake-

holders (abscissa) and the origin of the crisis (ordinate). According to

Coombs (2007), organizations undergoing crises can bring an

accommodative or a defensive response to stakeholders. An

Origin of the crisis

Emotions in reaction to the

crisis

Degree of attribution of responsibility for the crisis

Reputational threat

Type of crisis

Coombs (2007) Three types of « cluster »

Victim Accidental Preventable

Jin, Pang & Cameron (2007, 2009, 2012) Three primary emotions

Anger Fright Sadness

Jin, Pang & Cameron (2007, 2009, 2012) Three criteria of origin

Internal - External Natural - Unnatural Personnal - Public

Type of emotions

Austin, Liu & Jin (2012) and Jin, Liu & Austin (2014) Two types of emotions

Attribution - dependent Attribution - independent

Response strategy

FIGURE 1 Framework: response strategy definition. Source: Elaborated by the authors

Response strategies Defensive

Reputational threat

Emotional affect of stakeholders

Sympathy

Strong attribution of responsibility

External origin

Internal origin

Weak attribution of

responsibility

PREVENTABLE CLUSTER

Accomodative

Sadness Fright Anger

VICTIM CLUSTER

ACCIDENTAL CLUSTER

FIGURE 2 The social media crisis management matrix. Source: Elaborated by the authors from the work of Jin et al. (2007, 2009, 2012), Coombs (2007), Austin et al. (2012) and Jin et al. (2014)

298 | VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI

accommodative strategy aims to generate, improve (rebuild

approach), or develop (bolstering approach) reputational assets by

offering symbolic or material aid to stakeholders. A defensive strat-

egy, however, aims to either detach the organization from the crisis

(deny approach) or to minimize the responsibility of the organization

in the crisis (diminish approach).

We suggest that the optimal response strategy depends on the

width of the reputational threat, which is determined by three inter-

connected forces: the emotional response of stakeholders, the origin

of the crisis, and the degree of attribution of responsibility.

The reputational threat spectrum goes from left, the mildest

threat, to right, the strongest threat. The emotions of stakeholders

identified by Austin et al. (2012) and Jin et al. (2014) are ordered

according to their relation to the reputational threat spectrum: from

less negative emotions (attribution independent: sympathy and sad-

ness) to more negative emotions (attribution dependent: fright and

anger).

The matrix allows the crisis to be analysed from different angles

and should help when determining an efficient response strategy,

that is, one that minimizes the reputational threat. For instance, if

one knows the crisis cluster, one can easily identify the type of emo-

tions likely to be felt by stakeholders and hence the degree of repu-

tational threat, which ultimately indicates what response strategy

should be favoured to balance the threat. Conversely, if one knows

the dominant stakeholder emotion, one obtains an indication of the

degree of responsibility attribution; this, with the crisis origin, allows

the crisis cluster to be determined and hence the response strategy.

We aim to verify whether the matrix we propose is an acceptable

method for determining the appropriate response strategy.

3 | METHOD

Our method was based on a case study approach, with the objective

of testing the framework proposed (Eisenhardt, 1989). The study

was restricted to French and Brazilian organizations although there

may have been more striking cases from other countries.

Brazil and France are countries with similar uncertainty avoid-

ance, but with a different level of individualism. According to Hofst-

ede’s classification, Brazil is a collective society, where the

communication style is context-rich, and France is very individualis-

tic, where Cartesian culture usually excludes the display of strong

emotions.

These similarities and differences present an interesting setting

to understand crisis management across different contexts.

Our methodology was divided into four steps: case selection,

comments selection, comments classification, and analysis.

3.1 | Case selection

The choice of the cases to be analysed was based on two principles.

First, building on Gonzales-Herrero and Smith (2008) and Owyang

(2011), we selected six cases in which crises had either been triggered

or facilitated by social media and that were no older than 3 years old.

Second, we searched for cases that illustrated different types

of crises as characterized by Coombs’ clusters: “victim” (the orga-

nization is also a victim of the crisis), “accidental” (actions leading

to the crisis were unintentional), and “preventable” (the organiza-

tion knowingly took actions that eventually led to the crisis). For

each case, we identified the source of the crisis (e.g., a tweet, a

catastrophe, etc.) to determine whether the origin was internal or

external. The origin of the crisis corresponds to the ordinate of

our matrix, which, in the classical crisis management theory, is

used as the sole determinant of the response strategy (Table 2).

3.2 | Comments selection

After selecting the cases, identifying their origin and the social media

(Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) posts relating to them, we anal-

ysed stakeholders’ emotions as expressed online. To do so, for each

crisis, we retrieved all comments posted by stakeholders in the

12 months following the crisis and copied them to a new file. These

were numbered, and we selected randomly for each case at least 5%

of the total comments, except for one case with a substantial num-

ber of comments and homogenous content (Coca-Cola). In total, 207

comments, whether in French or in Portuguese, were extracted and

analysed. Although this study is not quantitative, the sample of 207

comments offered a satisfactory identification of the emotions of

the stakeholders, as the results of the analysis were quite homoge-

nous across each case’s sample. For harmonization purposes, the

comments were translated into English.

3.3 | Comments classification

We then sent them in the original and translated versions to three

colleagues. We asked them to analyse each comment and to write

TABLE 2 Summary of the cases according to Coombs’ type of crisis

France Brazil

Case Date of break out Coombs type of crisis/ origin of crisis Case Date of break out

Coombs type of crisis/ origin of crisis

RATP April 2015 Preventable/internal Skol February 2015 Preventable/internal

SNCF July 2013 Accidental/external Samarco November 2015 Accidental/external

AirFrance October 2015 Victim/internal Coca-Cola Brasil September 2013 Victim/external

Source: Elaborated by the authors on the basis of Coombs’ (2007) work.

VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI | 299

down which emotion out of the four in the model (sympathy, sad-

ness, fright, and anger) appeared to be the main emotion conveyed

in each comment. Our own analysis was then added to the results.

This proceeding was meant to limit the bias that would have been

introduced if only our perceptions were used. The final results were

aggregated to discover the proportion of each emotion in each sam-

ple of comments and therefore to single out the prevalent emotion

conveyed by stakeholders for each crisis (Table 3).

3.4 | Analysis

The last step of our methodology consisted in a thorough analysis of

each case aimed at comparing the strategy chosen by the company

to the strategy recommended when using the matrix. To analyse the

organizations’ response strategies, we monitored the corporate reac-

tions to the crises on the online press (major newspapers), corporate

blogs, and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube).

4 | CASE ANALYSIS

4.1 | Preventable crises

4.1.1 | France: RATP—Les Prêtres’ ad campaign “to the benefit of the Orient Christians”

Les Prêtres is a popular French music band composed of three

Catholic priests. In early 2015, they released a promotional campaign

for an upcoming concert, where they added a banner noting that the

profits of the show would be “to the benefit of the Orient Chris-

tians,” a religious community suffering from ISIS domination in the

Middle East. The Parisian public transportation company, the RATP,

was violently attacked in early April 2015 after the lead singer from

Les Prêtres (Mgr Di Falco) revealed on Twitter the RATP’s decision

to remove this note on the claim that such a poster was against the

“necessary neutrality of public service in a context of armed conflict

abroad.”

In this case, the primary emotion expressed in the Twitter com-

ments that were analysed was anger (72%), followed by sadness

(20%), signalling a high reputational threat. The vast majority of reac-

tions denounced the decision as “censorship” and intimated that the

RATP should take responsibility. One example comment was “Very

shocked. I’m outraged by this idiotic behaviour. They are just supporting

the massacres in Orient.” The origin of the crisis is internal, as it

stems from RATP’s decision to remove the mention. According to

the matrix, the crisis belongs to the preventable cluster, and RATP

should choose an accommodative response.

However, RATP adopted a fully defensive strategy: they continu-

ously denied responsibility and grounded their position on legal argu-

ments only. They first adopted a deny approach, as they only replied

with formal press releases filled with legal vocabulary (e.g., “principle

of neutrality,” “strict rule,” “general terms and conditions”). They then

moved to a diminish approach through accusatory releases with

politically charged words (e.g., “growing difficulty to apply rules of

neutrality and secularity (“La€ıcit�e”)”). One week later, after public

stakeholders such as the Prime Minister openly positioned them-

selves (on Twitter) against the RATP’s decision, they announced that

they would reinstate the mention at their expense.

Overall, the RATP’s management of the crisis had several flaws.

From the beginning, they adopted a haughty position in which they

rejected responsibility using the law to oppose their stakeholders’

emotions. Their response tone was rational, whereas their stakehold-

ers’ tone was emotional. They also used polemical terms (“la€ıcit�e”) in

a politically tense context in France. Last, there was a gap between

the medium of their answer (press releases) and that of their stake-

holders’ reactions (Twitter), which is the ultimate proof of their

inability to tune in to their stakeholders. Their defensive response

strategy signalled that they considered themselves to be a victim of

the crisis. The fundamental need would have been to contextualize

the stakeholders’ emotions to respond correctly, that is, accomoda-

tively.

4.1.2 | Brazil: Skol—the polemical Carnival ad campaign

Manufactured by AB InBev, Skol is a famous and popular Brazilian

beer brand, whose image is associated with fun and parties. Skol

launched an advertisement campaign during the Carnival 2015 and

was immediately called out on social media by two women, a blog-

ger and a journalist, because the different promotional supports

revolved around the theme of a loss of control, with slogans such as

TABLE 3 Summary of selected samples

Crisis Source(s) of comments Social medium of origin

Number of comments selected

Total number of comments

RATP Di Falco’s first tweet that launched the crisis Twitter 25 133

Skol Pri Ferrari’s post that launched the crisis Facebook 28 567

SNCF SNCF’s post announcing the train accident Facebook 24 171

Samarco Samarco CEO’s post-collapse video Facebook 42 840

AirFrance Video of the two executives fleeing the

strike and AirFrance promotional video

YouTube and

Facebook

37 264

Coca-Cola R7’s video about a customer YouTube 51 8,610

300 | VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI

“say yes before you know the question” or “leave ‘no’ at home.” The

two women claimed the campaign was irresponsible in the Carnival

context as it appeared to be promoting rape through messages that

could be read as incentives to lower vigilance. Their reaction on

Facebook, spoofing Skol’s campaign to denounce it (they added an

“and bring ‘never’” to the “leave ‘no’ at home” poster) instantly went

viral.

The organization’s marketing campaign was heavily denounced

and vilified, as 70% of the comments sample conveyed anger com-

pared to 14.5% conveying sympathy and 15.5% conveying either

sadness or fright. It also fuelled a heated debate on the potential

sexism of Skol’s posters. For example, one woman claimed on Face-

book that In reality, it does not matter what Skol wants to say, the fact

is that is has a double meaning, and if it does, everyone can understand

whatever they want. (. . .) it’s the Carnival period people. . .the world is

sexist (. . .). A man, however, replied that today everything has a dou-

ble meaning or is subject to interpretation. . .There will always be some-

one to take it to the extreme or interpret negatively. Today, the world is

boring. Together, the anger expressed in most of the messages and

the internal origin (Skol’s campaign) places the Skol scandal in the

preventable cluster of the matrix, calling for an accommodative

response.

Skol’s response was partially accommodative. The company

mixed a deny strategy (they identified the director of marketing as a

scapegoat), a diminish strategy (they claimed a lack of intent), and a

rebuild strategy (they immediately withdrew the polemical posters

and apologized). This strategy was successful because they quickly

perceived the viral potential of the post and addressed it adequately:

the crisis was therefore resolved in less than a day. Interestingly, at

the instigation of their new marketing director, Skol partnered with

an association to launch the initiative “#WhistleAgainstAssault” dur-

ing Carnival 2017, where the brand distributed rape whistles to

women and promoted slogans such as “your respect makes me

dance” (bolstering approach).

4.2 | Accidental crises

4.2.1 | France: SNCF—the train accident of Br�etigny-sur-Orge

The SNCF is the French national railway service and manages most

of the train traffic in France. The train system is frequently used and

benefits from a strong reputation for safety. However, in July 2013,

the train joining Paris to Limoges derailed a short time before arrival,

killing seven passengers and injuring more than thirty. The accident

was particularly shocking because it occurred in the middle of sum-

mer (high traffic period) and 2 days before France’s National Day

(14 July). Investigations were immediately conducted to confirm a

suspected technical problem as the cause of the accident, and the

SNCF was placed under formal investigation for involuntary

manslaughter and negligence leading to injury.

Our sample was extracted from comments posted under the

SNCF’s Facebook announcement of the tragedy (on 12 July). A total

of 54% were considered to convey sadness, followed by fright

(19%). According to the matrix, the predominance of sadness and

the supposed external technical cause indicate an accidental crisis,

which calls for a mix of defensive and accommodative responses.

Less than one hour after the accident occurred, SNCF communi-

cated on Twitter and labelled the situation as a “railway accident,”

thereby externalizing the origin of the crisis. On social media, SNCF

focused on a purely accommodative strategy, mixing both a rebuild

response (emotionally charged tweets or posts) and a bolstering

response (reimbursement of all cancelled trips), while maintaining

frequent and transparent points of information about the investiga-

tions throughout the crisis. On 30 July, they tweeted that the situa-

tion was “back to normal” on the railways, thus putting an end to

the crisis.

Such a quick reaction ensured SNCF’s “ownership” of the crisis

before it could even break out. It allowed them to frame the crisis as

they wanted because they appeared to be taking responsibility. This

top-down, proactive communication, mixing both emotional

responses (e.g., condolences) and full transparency (e.g., detail of

every action undertaken by SNCF) prevented stakeholders from

expressing primary emotions (such as anger) “in the heat of the

moment.”

The SNCF appeared to be fully involved in the crisis resolution,

and they laid out a methodical, accomodative communication plan.

By early on treating the crisis as if it was “preventable” (even before

the results of the investigations), SNCF minimized reputational dam-

age although it was proven months later that the accident was

caused by insufficient maintenance.

4.2.2 | Brazil: Samarco/BHP/Vale—the mining dam collapse in Minas Gerais

On 5 November 2015, in Minas Gerais, a state in the southeast of

Brazil, a mining dam retaining approximately 60 million cubic metres

of toxic waste collapsed, resulting in an enormous mudslide. It

engulfed an entire village downstream, resulting in nearly seventy

casualties. The mud reached the Atlantic Ocean at the end of

November, after a 650 km journey through the Rio Doce river, kill-

ing thousands of animals, devastating protected rainforest areas, and

leaving nearly 280,000 people without water. The catastrophe

plunged Samarco, owned by Anglo-Australian BHP Biliton and Brazil-

ian Vale, into an international communication turmoil and environ-

mental crisis.

Given the tragic nature of the collapse, and because dam col-

lapses are categorized as natural disasters in Brazilian law, we chose

to analyse this case within the accidental cluster. Comments were

extracted from a Facebook video released by Samarco on 6 Novem-

ber, one day after the collapse. It portrayed the CEO apologizing for

the “accident” and announcing their intention to “keep necessary

authorities informed of advancement” without providing any detail

about potential casualties or the cause of the accident. A total of

67% of comments were considered to be conveying anger, followed

by sadness (20%), which is consistent with the characteristics of a

VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI | 301

preventable, rather than accidental, crisis and would indicate a

mostly accommodative response.

Samarco reacted on the day of the collapse by publishing the

first of 77 press releases. It stated that there had been “an accident

in the dam” although it “was not possible to confirm the cause nor

the number of victims”; this information was repeated one day later

by the CEO in the video described above. On 8 November, the two

parent companies started tweeting factual messages about the col-

lapse, and both CEOs published a joint press release to “express

their sympathy” on 11 November. Samarco alone produced on aver-

age three releases per day until December 1st; this strategy backfired

as both national and international anger crystallized against the firm.

Individuals created an unofficial Samarco Facebook page that

allowed users to rate and review the company and invented the

hashtag “#N~aoFoiAcidente” (“it was not an accident”). Public person-

alities and entities, such as the Brazilian Minister of the Environment,

President Dilma Rousseff, and the UN publicly blamed the company

for their “civil-criminal responsibility” in the “environmental disaster.”

The companies’ response was mostly defensive. However, the

anger expressed by different stakeholders after the collapse shows

that the crisis was considered to be preventable. Samarco, BHP, and

Vale attempted to frame the crisis as accidental (every press release

mentions the “dam accident”) and responded using both the deny

and the diminish strategies. The companies never acknowledged

responsibility, claimed to not understand what went wrong and

focused only on promoting the actions undertaken to support the

affected communities. The three companies produced a messy, mul-

ti-voice defensive response consisting of the personal involvement

of three CEOs and an overload of press releases either praising

Samarco’s actions or denying public accusations. This response sent

a strong signal of responsibility—although they intended the oppo-

site effect—and prevented Samarco from forming a single clear

response to stakeholders.

4.3 | Victim crises

4.3.1 | France: the AirFrance “shirt scandal”

AirFrance is the main French airline for passengers and airfreight and

employs approximately 65,000 people. It has chronically been in defi-

cit for the past decade and their latest plan, Perform 2020, presented

in late 2014, was meant to significantly increase its operating results

by 2017. However, in late September 2015, negotiations between the

company and the unions came to an end as pilots refused the agree-

ment. As a result, AirFrance announced the launch of a plan B based

on the layoff of 2,900 employees. Unions called for a strike to occur in

October 2015. The crisis broke out when the strike degenerated into

workplace violence when some employees physically attacked two

AirFrance executives. Images of the executives fleeing the strike with

their shirts ripped off were broadcast and went viral worldwide, thus

unsettling the already weakened AirFrance.

The AirFrance case was placed in the victim cluster because

workplace violence is, according to Coombs, a victim cluster

component. However, the overwhelming majority (95%) of com-

ments we selected conveyed anger about the company, which places

AirFrance in the preventable crisis cluster, requiring an accommoda-

tive response. The majority of the commentators considered violence

to be a fair response to AirFrance’s layoff plan. For instance, Jean-

Luc M�elenchon (711,000 followers), leader of the radical left party in

France, published a series of tweets strongly supporting employees:

CEOs came and told 2,900 employees: sign here, you are dead! Is that

social dialogue? or There is violence at AirFrance: 2,900 layoffs.

Four days after the incident and its worldwide broadcast, Air-

France sent out an email to all of their clients and posted a video

entitled “AirFrance is here for you!” shot in French only, on different

social media. The video, which adopted a candid promotional tone,

was poorly received. The video opened with the joyful speech of

one of the two men who, days earlier, had been photographed

escaping AirFrance by climbing a fence, his shirt ripped off. Overall,

the video appeared to diminish the seriousness—or even deny the

existence—of the situation and came off as hastily put up together.

Such a defensive reaction was not in tune with the stakeholders’

anger and worsened the company’s image crisis. Adopting an accom-

modative strategy by providing transparent information, acknowl-

edgement and understanding of the context and a rebuild approach

showing good will (e.g., a commitment to reopen dialogue with

employees) would have likely minimized the damage.

4.3.2 | Brazil: Coca-Cola Brasil and “the rat”

In September 2013, R7Urgente, a YouTube channel of Brazilian con-

tent provider R7, uploaded a video of their report on a customer

claiming to have become heavily handicapped after drinking a glass

of Coca-Cola. The video portrayed him as a formerly healthy and

sporty man whose life had been ruined 13 years before after ingest-

ing contaminated Coca-Cola. The customer claimed that he had

bought six bottles of the soda and retained a bottle, apparently uno-

pened, containing a rat’s head, clearly visible on the YouTube video.

The video was seen more than 4 million times and cast doubt on

Coca-Cola Brasils’ safety check processes.

A total of 69% of the sample comments were considered to con-

vey sympathy for Coca-Cola (followed by sadness, 10.5%). The crisis

origin is external, as it stems from the customer’s claim. These char-

acteristics point to a victim crisis in which defensive strategies are

appropriate. Indeed, many commentators either championed the

brand or pointed to the inconsistencies of the video. For instance,

one user wrote Therefore, the soda burnt his organs but did not

destroy the rat’s head? Seriously?

Coca-Cola’s response was successful. They adopted a defensive

strategy based on denial of responsibility after they realized they

were not being blamed online. They waited for 5 days before a

formal reaction via a press release, which is a long time for a social

media crisis but may indicate that they took the time to analyse

their stakeholders’ reactions and assess the reputational threat.

Furthermore, playing for time prevented them from appearing

guilty and threatened, and they used this opportunity to bolster

302 | VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI

their reputation: they invited influential bloggers to inspect and film

the safety check processes inside their factories, making them

ambassadors of their brand and guarantors of their processes

(Figure 3).

5 | CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

The advent of social media has transformed the economy by

empowering stakeholders as opposed to shareholders. Social media

have “accelerated” time and greatly empowered instant messages

and reactions, which constantly expose organizations’ reputations

and image.

Social media have made corporate crises even more unpre-

dictable because they can be driven by irrationality. As such, they

cannot be addressed with the methods that have prevailed to date

and that rely on the neo-classical approach of an individual assumed

to be rational (“homo eoconomicus”). Rather, the connected individ-

ual is defined by his or her emotional biases (behavioural approach).

Out of the six crises that were analysed, four turned out to be in

the preventable cluster (RATP, Skol, Samarco, and AirFrance), one

was successfully framed as accidental but treated as preventable

(SNCF), and only one was an example of a victim cluster crisis

(Coca-Cola). Such results suggest that the social media crises are

polarized: the preventable cluster and the less prominent victim clus-

ter appear the most relevant online although, as evidenced by the

SNCF case, the accidental cluster exists but might be treated within

the preventable cluster.

In the study, analysing the origin (internal/external) of crises did

not suffice to determine the type of crisis or hence the type of strat-

egy to adopt. Samarco and AirFrance had origins pointing to an acci-

dental and a victim cluster, yet they ultimately experienced a

preventable type of crisis. Therefore, factoring in the emotions of

the stakeholders fine-tuned the crisis analysis (as expected from Fig-

ure 1) and pointed to different response strategies.

Our findings confirm the relevance of the new theory of crisis

management calling for flexible and stakeholder-centric approaches.

It also further demonstrates how stakeholders can weigh in on cri-

sis development and resolution. In the manner of SNCF and Coca-

Cola, companies must be able to better forestall and swiftly navi-

gate the movement of opinions, however irrational, if they wish to

minimize the threats of social media. Social media are governed by

strong emotions (Pfeffer et al., 2014) that are both polarized and

polarizing and that can snowball and spread worldwide instantly.

Classical theory approaches crises in a rational way (i.e., leaving out

emotions), which overlooks the quintessence of social media and

today leads to partial analyses and consequently inappropriate

response strategies. The purpose of the matrix is to help companies

to grasp the seriousness of the crisis to determine an initial neutral-

izing response that can be tailored as the emotion-based analysis

progresses.

Social media in a corporate environment thus changes several

paradigms: in management (control vs. agility), communications (top-

down vs. network, much shorter time horizon), and even KPIs (rea-

son vs. emotion, shareholders vs. stakeholders). Hence, our study

indicates that the companies that offered a response adapted to

their stakeholders’ emotions suffered less reputational damage than

those who adopted a traditional, defensive strategy.

The matrix we proposed is an attempt to rationalize the choice

of response strategy in an irrational environment and proved consis-

tent in all six cases studied (Figure 4).

However, the use of secondary data analysis may have led to

incomplete results, and the choice to analyse only recent Brazilian

and French cases might have limited the number of available and rel-

evant cases from other countries (e.g., the United States of America).

It also may have limited the analytical distance, as some of the crises

Response strategies Defensive

Reputational threat

Emotional affect of stakeholders

Sympathy

Strong attribution of responsibility

External origin

Internal origin

Weak attribution of

responsibility

Accomodative

Sadness Fright Anger

FIGURE 3 The social media crisis management matrix applied to the six cases. Source: Elaborated by the authors from the work of Jin et al. (2007, 2009, 2012), Coombs (2007), Austin et al. (2012) and Jin et al. (2014)

VIGNAL LAMBRET AND BARKI | 303

were not yet resolved at the time of the study. In addition, it is nec-

essary to further test the matrix with a larger number of cases and

data to ensure consistency of findings.

In particular, the results of the emotion-based analysis could be

dramatically sharpened using code and algorithms to systemize and

extend the size of the comment samples. For companies, this would

constitute a valuable database from which to draw patterns and

strengthen their business intelligence tools. A 2015 white paper by

Cognizant (Pachori 2015) showed that such databases could help to

identify “triggers for a particular type of consumer sentiment or online

behaviour.” In that respect, Facebook’s decision to launch “Facebook

Reactions” in February 2016 may not be a mere coincidence.

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How to cite this article: Vignal Lambret C., Barki E. Social

media crisis management: Aligning corporate response

strategies with stakeholders’ emotions online. J Contingencies

and Crisis Management. 2018;26:295–305. https://doi.org/

10.1111/1468-5973.12198

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