An investigation of social media data during a product recall scandal

Abstract

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.

Unpacking the impact of social media analytics on customer satisfaction: do external stakeholder characteristics matter?

“…For example, United Airlines failed to respond adequately or in a timely manner to harsh comments regarding the dragging incident, posted on online social media platforms. As a result, United Airlines lost 800 million USD in market value within one day, and was eventually forced to introduce costly policies to avoid further reputational loss and a decrease in bookings (Tse et al, 2018).…”

Examining customer perception and behaviour through social media research – An empirical study of the United Airlines overbooking crisis

“…The contents of the information are also become less manageable and controllable (Aula, 2010). The large amount of fragmented, user generated (He et al, 2013) second-hand (word-of-mouth) contents (Coombs and Holladay, 2007) can easily spread false rumour (Oh et al, 2013;Tse et al, 2018), anger and aversion emotions to disrupt social orders and affect the interactions of stakeholders (Schultz et al, 2011), hence, further worsen the crisis (Jin et al, 2014). Many organisations have found it challenging to develop responses during crisis events (Freberg et al, 2013;Schultz et al, 2011).…”

“…Recent literature in big data analytics has focused on managing crisis communication (Houston et al, 2015;Tse et al, 2018;Veil et al, 2011). In particular, this growing body of literature has focused on the role of big data in spreading disaster information (Palen, 2008), with a particular focus on stakeholder-centred response dynamics.…”

Data Visualisasi Sebagai Pendukung Investigasi Media Sosial

“…Sehingga tidak memungkinkan untuk mendapatkan informasi untuk keperluan investigasi. Pendekatan metode data analysis dan text mining, dalam hal ini dengan metode multidimensional scalling untuk mengklasifikasi, dapat memahami persepsi pengguna yang ada di media sosial [10]. Namun penelitian ini hanya menggunakan satu media sosial yakni Facebook.…”