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Public Relations Review 39 (2013) 229– 231

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Public Relations Review

esearch in Brief

ublic framing organizational crisis situations: Social media versusews media

oni G.L.A. van der Meer ∗, Piet Verhoevenmsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

r t i c l e i n f o

rticle history:eceived 3 July 2012eceived in revised form7 December 2012ccepted 31 December 2012

eywords:risis framingocial mediautomated content analysisrisis communicationwitter

a b s t r a c t

This study examines framing of organizational crises by news media and the public. Dueto the rapidly evolving and escalating character of crises, this study emphasizes the initialphase of a crisis, in which public social media manifestations (tweets) play a crucial role.Moreover, this study uses automated content analysis to obtain latent frames embedded intext. Through analyzing the Dutch Moerdijk crisis, this study reveals the dynamic character-istics of public crisis framing and the media framing potential to prevent crisis escalation.

© 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

. Introduction

Organizational crises frequently disrupt and negatively affect societies. Crises are characterized by rapid succession ofvents. Incremental organizational changes may escalate into uncontrollable crises with harmful consequences. Framinglays a significant role in crisis evolution (Schultz, Kleinnijenhuis, Oegema, Utz, & Van Atteveldt, 2012) and the attribution ofeaning to a crisis. With the advent of social media, the public has gained the power to collaborate in crisis frame building,

specially as a means of rapid mass self-communication. Currently, a gap remains in the field of Public Relations (PR) andrisis research regarding crisis framing by prominent actors. By applying a recipient-focused approach, the key objectives to examine public crisis framing in social media in response to media frames. Public social media manifestations mayhallenge media frames by introducing different attributes (Liu, 2010), especially during the initial phase of a crisis, whenublic demands transcend the available information. Because social media are mainly used as crisis information-sharingesources (Liu, Asutin, & Jin, 2011), the public and media frames may align after the media provides detailed information. Inhe end, when sufficient information is available, the public may personalize the crisis framing (Xenos, 2008). This resultsn the following research questions:

RQ1. Does the public frame an organizational crisis based on personal speculations prior to extended news mediaoverage?

RQ2. Does the public frame an organizational crisis in accordance with the media frame when news media coverage

ncludes extended information?

RQ3. Does the public personalize the framing of an organizational crisis after extended news media coverage?

∗ Corresponding author at: University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 (0)20 525 3680.E-mail addresses: tonivandermeer@hotmail.com, G.L.A.vandermeer@uva.nl (T.G.L.A. van der Meer).

363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2012.12.001

230 T.G.L.A. van der Meer, P. Verhoeven / Public Relations Review 39 (2013) 229– 231

2. Methodology

To answer the research questions, the explosion of the Dutch Chemie-Pack plant in Moerdijk is selected as an examplebecause this event set in motion a chain of social media messages. On January 5, 2011, the highest alert phase was declareddue to smoke emission from an explosion at the Chemie-Pack chemical plant. The explosion resulted in environmental harmand 170 people were treated in the hospital.

This study analyzed the public and media frames by applying automated content analysis of 38,074 Twitter messages(tweets) and 73 news articles. Twitter was selected to cover the rapid public reactions. For the public framing prior to mediacoverage, tweets (N = 26,496) were selected on the day of the explosion (January 5, period 1) when no news articles wereavailable. Notably, ANP (Dutch press agency) digitally disseminated brief, general information, which only addressed theoccurrence of the explosion and road blockings. Because the news media did not provide substantive information on thefirst two days, tweets (N = 6241) and news articles (N = 56) from January 7 (period 2) were selected to cover the momentof extended news coverage. To obtain the frames after extended information was provided, tweets (N = 5337) and newsarticles (N = 17) from January 8 (period 3) were collected. All evaluated tweets were downloaded from the open sourcewebsite Twetrics, (www.twetrics.com). The news articles were obtained from LexisNexis Academic by applying the searchstring “Moerdijk” selecting all Dutch newspapers.

Meaning is given to a crisis by words and by the relative position these words get in word networks. To determinethe meaning of this crisis, automated content analyses were applied that reveals latent crisis frames as word networks. Theframes were compared using co-word analysis a content analysis technique to map the strength of associations between keywords in texts. Words can co-occur between sentences and paragraphs in one text and between texts. These co-occurrencescan be mapped as a semantic field of related words, which specify the meaning constructed about the issue. It shows thehigher order structure of the texts (Leydesdorff & Hellsten, 2006). Following Hellsten, Dawson, and Leydesdorff (2010)concept of implicit frames, latent patterns of words that co-occur throughout the media texts and the tweets are analyzed.

Factor analyses are used to obtain the implicit frames. First, a list of the 75 most frequently used words in the tweets andmedia texts for each period of time are compiled using the software program FrequencyList. Second, word/occurrence matri-ces were generated with FullText (articles) and Ti (tweets), containing words as variables and the news articles and tweetsas cases. Third, the factor analyses were performed to identify statistical correlation between words within components:the implicit frames. The number of factors was set to six. The components with the highest portion of explained variance(R2) are the dominant frames in the texts, the other five frames are considered sub-frames.1

3. Findings

To answer RQ1, the public framing prior to (period 1) and during (period 2) extended media coverage must be compared.A fundamental difference can be observed in the dominant frames. In period 1, the public framed the crisis as a terroristact (R2 = 11.4), using words like ‘terrorist’, ‘attack’, and ‘panic’, indicating public fear and rising demands for clarification.This reaction may explain the observed peak in tweets on the first day (N = 26,496). Moreover, in this phase, the publicused Twitter in terms of an alarming frame (second sub-frame, R2 = 5.62). In period 2, the dominant public frame was aboutgeneral crisis information (R2 = 10.8), indicating that the public no longer falsely considered the crisis related to terrorism.Also the panic/terrorism frame had become the least dominant sub-frame (sixth sub-frame, R2 = 4.58). Furthermore, the otherimplicit sub-frames in period 2 were more informative in terms of environmental damage limitation (R2 = 5.75), affectedcities (R2 = 5.52), and crisis impact (R2 = 5.1). These findings answer RQ1 affirmatively.

To address RQ2, the similarities in the public and news media frames in period 2 were analyzed. No clear fundamentaldissimilarities were found between the dominant frames. Both actors predominantly emphasized informative crisis attribu-tions. The media applied an information frame (R2 = 18.1), using words like ‘people’, ‘smoke’, and ‘mayor’. Comparably, thepublic used an information frame (R2 = 10.8), words like ‘resident’, ‘crisis’, and ‘mayor’ were prominent. Moreover, both actorshighlighted the impact of the crisis (public: fourth sub-frame, R2 = 5.1, media: third sub-frame, R2 = 6.96). These findings,and the observation that the public frames in periods 1 and 2 fundamentally differed, answer RQ2 affirmatively.

To answer RQ3, the difference in frames in period 3 was analyzed. The dominant frames between both actors clearlydiffered. With the use of words such as ‘surveillance’, ‘inspection’, ‘safety’, and ‘substance’, the news media professionallyframed the crisis in terms of safety (R2 = 18.8). The implicit frames of the media were comparable to the frames used inthe previous period. In contrast, the public framed the crisis personally by predominantly focusing on criticism towardgovernmental crisis-related action (R2 = 8.72). The Dutch government was framed as incapable of handling the crisis in termsof the initial storage licensing and communication concerning the cause and (health) impact of the explosion. Furthermore,the public expressed feelings of suspicion (second sub-frame, R2 = 4.72) as a result of health problems. These observations

provide a corresponding answer for RQ3.

1 The generated word networks can be visualized using the software program Pajek showing the frame density and the words that form the frames. Thecomplete study, including these visualizations, can be requested from the authors.

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T.G.L.A. van der Meer, P. Verhoeven / Public Relations Review 39 (2013) 229– 231 231

. Conclusion and discussion

The objective of this study was to analyze the framing of organizational crises by the public and the news media. First,he study documented the dynamic nature of public framing in the Moerdijk crisis case. The public based its crisis frames onersonal speculations (terrorist attack) prior to extended news media coverage (RQ1). The rapid mass self-communicationade possible by Twitter resulted in instant public crisis framing based on assumptions. On the day of extended media

overage, public fear declined, and the public crisis frame aligned with the media frame (RQ2). At that point, the public usedwitter mainly as an information-sharing resource. These findings offer opportunities for actors to influence the (public)raming of crises and prevent escalation. They show the important role of the news media for crisis communication. Thendings show that the news media have a soothing effect on public panic and speculation and therefore have potentialo prevent crisis escalation. After extended news media coverage, the public personalized its framing in terms of criticismf governmental responses (RQ3). This criticism may also indicate that in the initial phase an adoptable frame shoulde provided to limit subjective and deviating public frames. In this sense, Twitter provides opportunities for rapid crisisommunication in response to the escalating character of crises and for frame negotiation and alignment.

This study is among the first to apply automated content analysis to examine implicit frames in the field of PR and crisisesearch. Thus, this study offers new quantitative tools for inductively analyzing latent frames in discourse. Because thisethod allows for large amounts of text to be processed, it offers opportunities for future research to analyze numerous

rames from different actors.

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