Corporate blogs : new opportunities for the organizational crisis response

Abstract

As the Internet constantly brings about dramatic changes to crisis communication, two-way communication is increasingly believed to be far more effective for crisis response than the traditional top-down, one-way communication. This study aims to explore an effective crisis response strategy in view of the ever growing corporate blogs, in hopes to report as a typical interactive online communication tool, whether blogs can be adopted as a novel effective crisis response tool. A two-by-two factorial experiment was conducted, with four kinds of sites manipulating the types (Website and blog), and the hosts (company and news organization) of online crisis response tools. One hundred and twenty Hong Kong students reported their attitude toward a hypothetic company involved in a product recall crisis after being exposed to the crisis response which was posted on one kind of the sites. Results supported that (a) crisis response posted on the Website or blogs hosted by the company itself would get more positive audience impression, and then lead to more positive attitude toward the company; (b) crisis response posted on the corporate blog would get higher evaluation than the corporate Website on the interactive features, and then lead to more positive attitude toward the company; (c) crisis response posted by online news organization would have higher perceived credibility than that posted by the company itself. Implications for the selection of crisis response tools and formulation of relevant crisis response strategies are also discussed.