Social Set Analysis of Corporate Social Media Crises on Facebook

Social media crises pose significant challenges for organizations in terms of their rapid propagation and deterioration of brand parameters and can have sustained negative business impacts. This paper reports a multiple case study of four different corporate social media crises. The multiple case study was informed by crisis communication and management theories and employed multiple methods consisting of the novel approach to big social data analytics-social set analysis, nenography, and manual sentiment analysis and topic discovery. Empirical findings show the voluminous but also transient nature of social media crises, reveal the different strategies employed by the organizations to manage the crises and their outcomes, and a diversity of aggregate user behavioural patterns. Based on the findings, we recommend that companies should choose a response strategy that is suitable for the type of crisis they are experiencing as well as the industry sector they belong to. In summary, this paper is the first demonstration of the suitability and effectiveness of Social Set Analysis for conceptualizing, formalizing and analyzing big social data from content-driven social media platforms like Facebook for event studies such as unexpected crises and/or coordinated marketing campaigns.