Enterprise reputation threats on social media: A case of data breach framing

Study on effect of collaborative governance participation willingness of online food delivery platform restaurants and consumers from perspective of control theory: Based on moderating effects of perceived risks

The popularization of the Internet and the convenience of e-commerce are driving the online restaurant industry’s rapid development of worldwide. However, serious information asymmetries in online food delivery (OFD) transactions not only aggravate food safety risks, resulting in simultaneous government and market failures, but also intensify consumers’ perceived risks. This paper innovatively constructs a research framework for the governance participation willingness of OFD platform restaurants and consumers under the moderating effects of perceived risks from the perspective of control theory and then develops scales for analyzing the governance willingness of both restaurants and consumers. Using data collected through a survey, this paper explores the effect of control elements on governance participation by restaurants and consumers and analyzes the moderating effects of perceived food safety risks. Results showed that both government regulations and restaurant reputation (formal control elements) and online complaints and restaurant management response (informal control elements) can increase governance participation willingness among both platform restaurants and consumers. The moderating effects of perceived risks are partially significant. When the risks perceived by restaurants and consumers are strong, government regulation and online complaints can more effectively boost the governance participation willingness of restaurants and consumers, respectively. At this moment, consumers’ willingness to pursue problem solving through online complaints is evidently enhanced. Accordingly, the perceived risks and the online complaints jointly motivate restaurants and consumers to participate in governance activities.

Victim crisis communication strategy on digital media: A study of the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown bore a devastating impact on organizations across the globe. In this crisis, organizations belonged to the victim cluster, with a low crisis responsibility. Nevertheless, organizations needed to strategize their crisis responses and communicate with stakeholders to reduce the threat to reputational capital and manage stakeholder reactions in the pandemic. In this paper, we studied organizational Twitter communication during the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). We analyzed 325,627 tweets collected from the Twitter pages of 464 organizations belonging to the Fortune 500 list. The Twitter data reflected organizational COVID-19 crisis response strategies and demonstrated organizational use of Twitter for crisis communication. We applied lexicon-based emotion mining to identify and measure emotions, and topic mining to measure crisis response topic scores from this large multi-organization dataset. We performed path analysis to test our research model derived from the SCCT. The analysis showed that instructing and adjusting information can minimize threats to organizational reputation in a victim crisis and manage stakeholder reactions. Positive emotions showed a stronger association with behavioral outcomes. Emotion neutral tweets generated more favorable stakeholder reactions. The paper contributes to the literature on situational crisis communication for a victim crisis. The multi-organization data addresses the sensitive inter-organization dependencies and improves the understanding of crisis communication. It provides practitioners an insight into the effect of the COVID-19 crisis response strategies on stakeholder emotions and behavior.

Public health events emergency management supervision strategy considering citizens’ and new media’s different ways of participation

Public health events have done great harm. Emergency management requires the joint participation of multiple parties including government department, pharmaceutical enterprises, citizens and new media. Then, what are the effects of different strategy choices in participation of citizens and new media on emergency management? To answer the question, we construct a four-party evolutionary game model, considering the citizens' two participation ways consisted of true evaluation and false evaluation, and the new media's two participation ways consisted of report after verification and report without verification. This is of more practical significance than simply studying whether citizens and new media participate in emergency management or not because citizen and new media participation does not represent the completely positive behavior. Then, we conduct the evolutionary stability analysis, solve the stable equilibrium points using the Lyapunov first method and conduct the simulation analysis with MATLAB 2020b. The results show that, firstly, the greater the probability of citizens making true evaluation, the more inclined the government department is to strictly implement the emergency management system; secondly, when the probability of citizens making true evaluation decreases, new media are more inclined to report after verification, and when new media lose more pageview value or should be punished more for reporting without verification, the probability that they report without verification is smaller; thirdly, the greater the probability of citizens making false evaluation, the less enthusiasm of pharmaceutical enterprises to participate in emergency management, which indicates that false evaluation is detrimental to prompt pharmaceutical enterprises to participate; what's more, the greater the probability of new media reporting after verification, the greater the probability of pharmaceutical enterprises actively participating, which shows that new media's verification to citizens' evaluation is beneficial to emergency management.

Consumers’ Change in Trust and Security after a Personal Data Breach in Online Shopping

This research is dedicated to one of the significant problems connected with purchasing online: consumers’ personal data security. The purpose of the paper is to present the results of a study of an incident of a personal data breach from the Morele.net online store that occurred in Poland. The current gap in the literature is the lack of research done among consumers who suffered from a data breach. Data from 826 people affected by this incident were collected and used for drawing conclusions regarding the changes that took place after the incident. The data obtained are both qualitative and quantitative. The data set was analyzed using the IBM SPSS software package. The evolution in consumers’ trust towards the store was studied and results reveal that it has strongly decreased, although this did not influence consumers’ attitudes towards online shopping in general. The main finding of the research is that one out of three affected consumers will discontinue online shopping on Morele.net; however, they will not tend to change their online shopping behavior in general—they will just purchase in other online stores. Moreover, even though consumers were disappointed, and many were considering no longer purchasing from this site, the store still had significant opportunities to regain consumers’ trust and save its competitiveness in the market. The results suggest several improvements that should help online stores stay secure and trustworthy for their consumers. It was revealed that consumers had not previously been greatly concerned about their data being protected by the store; this incident, however, had changed this fact, and now consumers had become much more conscious about providing any of their data to any website.

Consumers' willingness to share digital footprints on social media: the role of affective trust

Purpose

Despite consumers' widespread use of social media platforms, there is scant research on the underlying factors that influence their willingness to share digital footprints on social media. The purpose of this study is to address this research gap by examining consumers' cognitive and affective attitudes simultaneously.

Design/methodology/approach

This research used quantitative method by using online survey administered to a sample of 733 social media users.

Findings

The findings indicate both cognitive and affective attitudes jointly influence consumers' behavioural intentions with trust as a key construct mediating the relationship between attitudinal antecedents and consumers' willingness to share digital footprints on social media.

Research limitations/implications

This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by offering a comprehensive framework constituting the joint attitudinal components as antecedents to consumers' behavioural intention for sharing digital footprints while trust works as a mediator.

Practical implications

This paper has important managerial implications. It helps marketers and IS managers in profiling consumers, understanding consumption patterns, sharing of digital footprints, which are useful for effective market segmentation, product development and future design of social media platforms. It informs social media providers of the importance of not only focussing on functional aspects but also underscores the essence of paying attention to consumers' affect towards social media platforms, especially trust.

Originality/value

The paper presents an original framework that explains the influence of joint attitudinal components on behavioural intention, with trust as a mediator.

How social media crisis response and social interaction is helping people recover from Covid-19: an empirical investigation

Community resilience following a crisis has become essential to avoid panic. In contrast, social media usage has been practical to improve public resilience. However, the impacts of social media crisis response and social interaction have not been fully addressed. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of social media crisis communication on public resilience. The study data were collected through an online medium, and the final responses consist of 393 observations, mainly of Malaysians who have experienced Covid-19 isolation, quarantine, or lockdown. The assessments of the reflective measurement models based on path analysis in PLS-SEM are reliable and valid. The Cronbach's alpha, rho_A, composite reliability, and discriminant validity revealed acceptable values. PLS prediction algorithm was run to assess the model's predictive power, and the findings show that the predictive relevance is satisfactory. Furthermore, the IPMA was applied to evaluate the model's usefulness, which compares the level of the variables from the performance scale mean value against the importance level. The result shows that all the variables are useful and reveal good performance. Thus, crisis management and communication activities should pay more attention to these variables for effective social media crisis communication. Thus, the study offers theoretical and practical implications in the field of social media-based crisis communication and crisis informatics.

The Influence of Heuristic judgments in Social Media on Corporate Reputation: A Study in Spanish Leader Companies

From a corporate-side perspective, the communication of reputational actions and news of companies becomes critical for success. However, in communication, business, and management studies, heuristics can be understood as simple cognitive processes that allow assessments, predictions, and decisions to be made quickly and efficiently by consumers and economic agents. This aspect can sometimes lead to cognitive biases, especially when little information is available or in situations of high uncertainty. The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of heuristic judgments in social media on corporate reputation ratings obtained in Spanish leader companies. Using data collected in Spain, this paper analyzes the influence of heuristics concerning news items on corporate reputation, measured by the Monitor Empresarial de Reputación Corporativa (MERCO) Index. The main finding of this paper is that the total number of news items has a positive effect on corporate reputation, particularly in the categories of culture-values, results/image, expansion, and sponsorship/donations. Additionally, this work serves as a repository of knowledge applicable to similar situations considering the specificities of each particular case. The importance to intervene on certain variables at different levels of managerial performance is described and implications for companies are discussed in these pages.