Social Media Storms

Empowering Leadership Beyond Crisis Management

Pernille Rydén, Muhammad Ismail Hossain, Efthymia Kottika, Vatroslav Škare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

This fascinating new book explores the benefits and dynamics of social media storms and identifies the possible opportunities that they present for further engagement with customers. It provides actionable managerial advice on planning for, measuring, and innovatively navigating social media storms. Based on a sound theoretical background and illustrated by vivid real-life examples and case studies throughout every chapter, this book combines thorough explanations of the elements of business decision-making, market interaction, consumer psychology, branding, and business communication. In comparison to the existing literature, the book departs from the classical, but insufficient crisis communication management approaches to suggest novel frameworks and tools for empowering businesses, consumers, and broader societies in the digital age. Social Media Storms: Empowering Leadership Beyond Crisis Management provides advanced undergraduate and postgraduate digital marketing, marketing communications, strategy, and crisis management students with a comprehensive understanding of the social media storm phenomenon and helps marketing and communications professionals to leverage the opportunities that social media storms are bringing.

1

Introduction

The concept of social media storms

Social media have revolutionized the way businesses and customers interact. They have emerged as a game-changer by empowering consumers to collectively approve or oppose various organizational behaviors, including wrongdoings, in the public space. A growing number of professionals have realized that a recent central managerial challenge is to understand and meet stakeholder expectations on social media (Aral et al., 2013), and, in particular, be inclusive when expectations are not met, the customers get angry and share their thoughts and emotions at an uncontrollable pace via social media.

Managers recognize the strategic value of social media as nearly 3.8 billion people use social media (We are social, 2020). But they also fear organizational stigma (Carberry & King, 2012) that can be caused by critical customer masses that protest, boycott, and attack companies on social media (Grégoire et al., 2015). These manifestations of negative word-of-mouth (nWOM) may lead to customer flight (Kim et al., 2016) and boycotts (Lindenmeier et al., 2012). For example, notorious are the cases of airline companies that had to navigate through extreme reputation turbulence. In more detail, the removal of a passenger for speaking Arabic by Delta Airlines in 2016¹ and the violent re-allocation of a passenger by United Airlines in 2017² led to global negative reactions on social media. In such cases, when consumers rise together and rally against organizations, this might result in the creation of social media storms (SMS) (Rydén et al., 2020). But what exactly is this phenomenon and how is it defined?

Various terms emerged for labeling this type of storms that companies, organizations, and even individuals might face on social media. German blogger Sascha Lobo in 2010 initially used the term “shitstorm” to describe the potentially devastating effects of the rapid dissemination of negative sentiment of people on social media platforms. Also, scholars introduced various terms that are somehow overlapping in their scope, such as firestorms, storms, social media storms, collaborative brand attacks, etc.

Researchers have defined the collaborative brand attacks as “…joint, event-induced, dynamic, and public offenses from a large number of Internet users via social media platforms on a brand that are aimed to harm it and/or to force it to change its behavior” (Rauschnabel et al., 2016, p. 381). While Pfeffer et al. (2014, p. 118) define online firestorms, referred to in this book as social media storms, as “the sudden discharge of large quantities of messages containing nWOM (negative word-of-mouth) and complaint behavior against a person, company, or group in social media networks”, i.e., an external force of rapid social media dissemination of negative consumer sentiment that can seriously endanger a company.

In this book, to refer to this phenomenon, we adopt the term social media storms. It reflects where the storms are usually generated “social media”, and the metaphor of “storm” accurately reflects the dynamic nature of this phenomenon. The use of this term is also in accordance with recent trends in bibliography (e.g., Phippen & Bond, 2020; Rydén et al., 2020). But the people’s need to openly express their opinion regardless of whether it is positive or negative and join forces to bring some change is not something new. As we will see, although social media storms are considered a contemporary and growing phenomenon that now companies have to start dealing with, their roots actually lie deep in the past.

A historical outline

Without freedom of press, social media storms would not be able to live and thrive, which makes social media storms an expression of a democratic right. For centuries, people have fought for their right to speak out and use their voice in the public debate. The first historical accounts of this phenomenon date back to 1770, where the Danish King Christian VII decided to abolish censorship, and as the first state in the world, Denmark-Norway introduced unrestricted freedom of the press, including the discharge for utterances (Horstbøl et al., 2020).

In the past, the public media of this region were dominated by a group of scholars – especially theologians – who wrote on specific topics, and they wrote mostly to each other and thus knew exactly who their audience was. But with this freedom, a market for new writers and readers rapidly emerged, leading to diversity and radicalization of writings that constantly fed the new public. What was significant was that many of the new writings were small and short, like we see with social media today. This means that they could be printed very quickly (at that time “real time” meant in a few days), and the printing plants adapted to the fast production with cheap, low-quality prints.

Another important thing to mention is that the majority of the pamphlets were published anonymously, which ensured a discharge used to make insulting and defamatory allegations. The subjects were rarely named in person but were portrayed in such detail that no one could doubt who they were. In concert, this led to debate threads that spread at lightning speed. Despite a high illiteracy rate, reading was at that time to a large extent also a social event as these new writings would arrive at pubs and public places and be read aloud or sung if there were shows, after which people then commented on them in a physical oral public which responded to the written one.

The obvious parallel to social media storms today is that we find ordinary people who have access to express themselves completely without editorial intervention. With their new voice, they could share their opinion, and the freedom of press and new media empowered them to question and challenge the practices of formal institutions and powerful organizations. Like on social media today, a lot of uneducated writers entered the arena, and they could get very quick responses from a vast – and in some cases – random audience.

This historical glimpse also reflects the collapse of the gatekeeping system with the emergence of the Internet, a new medium that could not be controlled by the old media powers, namely newspapers, television, and radio. The freedom of the press 2.0 seems to trigger certain behaviors. In Denmark and Norway, the era of freedom of press ended when censorship was reintroduced in October 1773. Today, the “kings” are replaced by the big tech companies. Their platform algorithms control Internet traffic and crack down harder on unwanted communication, hate speech, extremism, conspiracy theories, and fake news.

The rise of eWord of mouth

Before the 1970s, very few researchers focused on the issue of customer satisfaction, and little was published about this topic that today is so central in the marketing literature (Richins, 1983). However, after a few years, due to the consumer movement and the advocation of consumer rights, the interest in this area increased with some of the first studies focusing on the measurement of satisfaction levels (Andreasen, 1977, cited in Richins, 1983) and the most common causes of customer dissatisfaction (Diamond et al., 1976, cited in Richins, 1983).

Today, consumer empowerment is realized by openly sharing opinions, attitudes, and emotions towards products, services, brands, and companies (Grappi et al., 2013). As more consumers have started to share their positive or negative experiences with other consumers, more research took place to shed light on the dynamics and consequences of those behaviors. However, the findings regarding whether people are more attentive to negative or positive information are contradictory. Some studies suggest that people focus more on negative information (Ito et al., 1998; Yang & Mai, 2010, cited in Martin, 2017) as they are more concerned about potential losses compared to potential gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984, cited in Martin, 2017). Whereas, other researchers have found that very positive information has a greater impact on consumers’ product evaluations than very negative ones (Gershoff et al., 2003, cited in Martin, 2017).

Besides the contradictory research outcomes, it is a fact that when buying products or services, most consumers often look for information given by other consumers online. This can significantly influence their purchasing decision and the success of those products and services on the market (Chu et al., 2020). Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) refers to informal communication accessible online about businesses, services, and products (Litvin et al., 2008). It refers to information generated by consumers and entails opinions about products and services that are shared online (Chiosa & Anastasiei, 2017). The two significant differences from regular word-of-mouth (WOM) are user anonymity and online accessibility. It is evident that eWOM is a far more powerful form of WOM due to its immediacy, higher reach, and easy accessibility through networks (Jansen et al., 2009) and presents a major corporate challenge.

For many consumers, eWOM has become the main source of product information even though it can have varying credibility levels on different platforms. For example, research has demonstrated that the most influential source of negative word of mouth (nWOM) is the negative testimonials on review sites and their impact increased with the increase of their number (Bachleda & Berrada-Fathi, 2016, cited in Chiosa & Anastasiei, 2017). Despite those variations, eWOM can considerably influence consumers’ purchasing behavior, which has led the majority of companies to allocate several resources to manage it (Tsao, 2014; Utz et al., 2012). In fact, the negative impact of nWOM on purchasing intention and brand equity seems to be more significant for high-involvement products (Beneke et al., 2015 cited in Chiosa & Anastasiei, 2017).

Indeed, research has provided alarming results for companies as it has shown how nWOM dissemination can lead to customer flight (De Matos & Rossi, 2008; Kim et al., 2016) or even boycotts (Lindenmeier et al., 2012). Also, it has revealed that particularly attribute-based nWOM can have an aggravating effect on dissatisfied customers (Chan & Cui, 2011). Therefore, scholars tried to provide some guidance on how organizations could try to manage communication crises and nWOM (Herhausen et al., 2019; Ranaweera & Menon, 2013), for example, by using advertising to restore tr...