"Negative Headlines - How do Companies react to Bad News?"- An Empirical Analysis based on Twitter Responses

Abstract

This thesis examines the communication behavior of companies during the occurrence of a crisis and the success of their measures on Twitter.

First, we present the current theoretical and empirical work on situational crisis management theory and its main guidelines in the literature. Then, we select three crisis situations faced by three different companies. To examine the companies' tweets, press releases, and statements, we use the Twitter Application Programming Interface and identify the stages of communication within the crisis. We then analyze the companies' responses according to the guidelines outlined earlier. These responses are also assigned a feedback score based on sentiment analysis of the responsive, referenced, and linked tweets, which allows us to evaluate the company's communication efforts.

Finally, the results of this research allow us to draw new conclusions for the practice of situational crisis management.