Samsung and Volkswagen Crisis Communication in Facebook and Twitter - A Comparative Study

Boyang Zhang, Jari Veijalainen, Denis Kotkov

2017

Abstract

Since September 2015 at least two major crises have emerged where major industrial companies producing consumer products have been involved. In September 2015 diesel cars manufactured by Volkswagen turned out to be equipped with cheating software that caused NO2 and other emission values to be reduced to acceptable levels while tested from the real, unacceptable values in normal use. In August 2016 reports began to appear that the battery of a new smart phone produced by Samsung, Galaxy Note7, could begin to burn, or even explode, while the device was on. In Nov. 2016 also 34 washing machine models were reported to have caused damages due to disintegration. In all cases, the companies have experienced substantial financial losses, their shares have lost value, and their reputation has suffered among consumers and other stakeholders. In this paper, we study the commonalities and differences in the crisis management strategies of the companies, mostly concentrating on the crisis communication aspects. We draw on Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). The communication behaviour of the companies and various stakeholders during crisis is performed by investigating the official web sites of the companies and communication in Twitter and Facebook on their own accounts. We also collected streaming data from Twitter where Samsung and the troubled smart phone or washing machines were mentioned. For VW we also collected streaming data where the emission scandal or its ramifications were mentioned and performed several analyses, including sentiment analysis.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Zhang B., Veijalainen J. and Kotkov D. (2017). Samsung and Volkswagen Crisis Communication in Facebook and Twitter - A Comparative Study . In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-246-2, pages 312-323. DOI: 10.5220/0006301403120323

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist17,
author={Boyang Zhang and Jari Veijalainen and Denis Kotkov},
title={Samsung and Volkswagen Crisis Communication in Facebook and Twitter - A Comparative Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2017},
pages={312-323},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006301403120323},
isbn={978-989-758-246-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - Samsung and Volkswagen Crisis Communication in Facebook and Twitter - A Comparative Study
SN - 978-989-758-246-2
AU - Zhang B.
AU - Veijalainen J.
AU - Kotkov D.
PY - 2017
SP - 312
EP - 323
DO - 10.5220/0006301403120323