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Social media has emerged as a vital tool to advance two-way communication between companies and customers. This paper uses 29,764 tweets to investigate a sustainability fraud crisis, the Volkswagen emissions scandal. We provide a Tweet Analytic Framework comprising three approaches: cluster analysis, sentiment analysis, and time series analysis. This paper explores public opinions regarding the Volkswagen emissions scandal in two stages and reveals the typical crisis development trend, the strong condemnation and negative sentiment, and significant public concerns. This paper can yield important insights for understanding how customers' opinions change, thereby improving the effectiveness of managing sustainability fraud crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how corporate responses to service failure, caused by the coronavirus (COVID‐19) crisis, influence electronic‐word‐of‐mouth (E‐WoM) and trust recovery around lockdown, using multiple data sources. A dataset of 398 valid COVID‐19 announcements from 50 UK food retailers posted on the social media platform Twitter, and 21,960 consumer comments associated with these announcements, are analysed using content analysis and social media analytics, respectively. In Study 1, we test the effects of corporate crisis response strategy (defensive vs. offensive) and response framing (emotional vs. rational) on consumer E‐WoM (measured as 'consumer sentiment'). The results reveal that using a defensive corporate response strategy with emotionally framed announcements leads to more positive consumer E‐WoM. In Study 2, we advance the findings of Study 1 using a vignette‐based experimental design to examine how social media announcements made by food retailing brands influence consumers' trust recovery. We find that consumer trust recovers significantly when corporate COVID‐19 responses are framed in an emotional manner. By drawing upon signalling theory, this study makes an important contribution to public health crisis communication and service failure literature by demystifying consumers' reactions towards corporate crisis responses amid a pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate how Twitter has been used during an international product recall. Based on the SMCC model and the Crisis Response framework, the study proposes a new crisis communication model (SBCC) to analyse the 2016 Mars product recall tweet dataset. The study finds that the platform has mainly been used to ask questions and spread negative information from the news media. It also finds that the information diffusion (retweeting) has positive associations with the number of followers and the use of Hashtags. These findings suggest how organisations should supervise crisis communication and hence can protect reputational assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Underpinned by the lens of Contingency Theory (CT), the purpose of this paper is to empirically evaluate whether the impact of social media analytics (SMA) on customer satisfaction (CS) is contingent on the characteristics of different external stakeholders, including business partners (i.e. partner diversity), competitors (i.e. localised competition) and customers (i.e. customer engagement). Design/methodology/approach: Using both subjective and objective measures from multiple sources, we collected primary data from 141 hotels operating in Greece and their archival data from TripAdvisor and the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels (HCH) database to test the hypothesised relationships. Data were analysed through structural equation modelling. Findings: This study confirms the positive association between SMA and CS, but it remains subject to the varied characteristics of external stakeholders. We find that an increase in CS due to the implementation of SMA is more pronounced for firms that (1) adopt a selective distribution strategy where a limited number of business partners are chosen for collaboration or (2) operate in a highly competitive local environment. The results further indicate that high level of customer engagement amplifies the moderating effect of partner diversity (when it is low) and localised competition (when it is high) on the SMA–CS relationship. Originality/value: The study provides novel insights for managers on the need to consider external stakeholder characteristics when implementing SMA to enhance firms' CS, and for researchers on the value of studying SMA implementation from the CT perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As social media has become an important part of modern daily life, users often share product opinions online and these tend to spike when large companies undergo crises. This paper investigates customer online responses to a large company crisis by uncovering hidden insights in social media comments and presents a framework for handling social media data and crisis management. Analysis of textual Facebook data from users responding to the 2013 horsemeat scandal is presented. In this study, we used a novel comprehensive data analysis framework alongside a text-mining framework to objectively classify and understand customer perceptions during this horsemeat scandal. This framework provides an effective approach for investigating customer perception during a company crisis and measures the effectiveness of crisis management practices which the company has adopted. Our analyses show that social media can provide important insights into customer behaviour during crisis communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Social media has become an important part of daily interpersonal communication in contemporary society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of UK consumers by identifying the hidden information in tweets, and provide a framework which can assist industry practitioners in managing social media data. Design/methodology/approach – Using a large-scale dataset of tweets relating to the Horsemeat scandal of 2013, a comprehensive data analysis framework, which comprises multidimensional scaling and sentiment analysis, alongside other methods, was applied to explore customers’ opinions. Findings – Making jokes in social media was a main trend in the tweets relating to Tesco during the Horsemeat scandal. Consumer sentiments were overall negative and burgers were the most mentioned product in the week-long period after the story broke. The posting of tweets was correlated with the timing of news coverage, which indicates that the traditional media is still crucial to public opinion formation. Practical implications – This paper presents a progressive tweet-mining framework that can serve as a tool for academia and practitioners in crisis management. The proposed framework indicates the significant importance of timely categorising the topics, identifying the sentiment of tweets and understanding the changes of consumer opinions over time in a crisis. Originality/value – The research presented in this paper is one of the limited social media research to focus on a UK food fraud issue and adds to the limited body of literature investigating consumer social media use from the side of industry practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social media analytics has been extensively adopted by the hotel industry, how hotels leverage social media analytics capability (SMAC) to create business value remains unclear. Underpinned by real options theory (ROT), this study presents a framework to examine the mechanisms by which organisational agility indirectly influences hotel performance through the mediating role of SMAC. We tested the framework by drawing on a dataset of matched data from hotel practitioners and the customer reviews attached to each surveyed hotel on TripAdvisor. Our empirical results confirm that the appropriate deployment of SMAC has the potential to develop positive word-of-mouth and improve customers' perception of hotel quality. More importantly, our findings highlight the important role of SMAC in mediating the effect of sensing agility on hotel performance. However, SMAC cannot mediate the impact of responding agility on hotel performance. This study contributes to hotel management research by emphasising the importance of SMAC and enriches the extant literature on organisational agility in the tourism context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Reviews the literature on yield management, social media crisis and image repair. • 55,083 Tweets over the 24-h were captured to analyse the 2017 UA Overbooking Crisis. • The two-phase insincere rhetorical apology was a main contributor to the crisis. • Hard to identify stakeholders hence to alter their perceptions and repair image. • Demands for a more effective orchestration of yield management to avoid crisis. Airlines have been adopting yield management to optimise the perishable seat control problem and overbooking is a common strategy. This study outlines the connections between yield management, crises, and crisis communication. Using big data captured on a social media platform, this study aims to combine traditional yield management with emerging social big data analytics. As part of this, we use the twitter data on the 2017 United Airline (UA) to analyse the overbooking crisis. Our findings shed light on the importance of a more effective orchestration of yield management to avoid the escalation of crises during crisis communication phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]