Cross-national Ongoing Crisis Communication on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Twitter regarding Asiana Airlines Crash Crisis in South Korea and US
The purpose of this study is to help fill a gap in research that examines sustained cross-national crisis communication using social media. Using the 2013 Asiana Airlines crash crisis, a content analysis was conducted, analyzing the airlines’ 1,685 tweets and 1,386 public’s responses in terms of type of tweets, message strategies and publics’ emotions, communication tools (text, video, photo, hyperlinks, #hashtag, and conversation), and message tones. During the crisis, the organization used the same crisis response, a very passive response, as the US and Korean publics. As a result, the crisis response af ected different emotions of the publics based on culture; the US publics felt anger and presented a more negative tone than the Korea publics did. Further, the US and Korean Twitter were utilized differently over the duration of the crisis according to. Thus, the findings demonstrate the importance of sustained crisis communication before, during, and post-crisis and the inevitable effect of culture on crisis communication. This study therefore aims to offer theoretical and practical implications in social media crisis communication by providing researchers and crisis managers with a more comprehensive and realistic picture that considers the entire crisis cycle as well as cultural differences
