Corporate crises in cyberspace: Extending public relations media monitoring to the public dialogues on the USENET

Managing unexpected crises is a primary concern of the public relations profession. With the remarkable growth of on-line communication using the Internet, companies can no longer deal exclusively with conventional media such as newspapers, radio, and television. Keeping a crisis situation under control has become an even greater challenge in the age of cyberspace. This dissertation applies basic agenda-setting theory to two crisis cases involving the interaction of conventional media coverage and the USENET dialogues by on-line users. The on-line dialogues were sampled from a search engine on the Internet. The conventional media stories were gathered from the Lexis/Nexis data base. Two corporate crises selected for testing the hypotheses were the Mattel Doll Defect case and the Hudson Foods Meat Contamination case.;The crisis communication model predicted that after a crisis happens, public opinion about the company would be more negative than before its occurrence. As the company adopted interventions to ameliorate the detrimental impact caused by the crisis, the number of negative on-line dialogues would decrease. Unlike the traditional method of examining the public agenda in agenda-setting studies, content analysis of the public dialogues on the USENET, a dependent variable, was employed in comparison to the conventional media agenda, an independent variable. The number of on-line dialogues was assumed to have a corresponding relationship with the media coverage of the crisis.;While the number of negative on-line messages about the company increased after the crisis and were reduced due to intervention strategies adopted by each company, the total number of on-line messages did not decrease after the intervention in the Hudson Foods case.;Results in the Mattel case revealed a significant correlation between the number of media coverage and that of on-line messages. The significant correlation between the tone of media stories and the number of negative on-line messages was also found in the same case. However, this relationship that derived from agenda-setting theory was not detected in the Hudson Foods case.;Despite the specific findings in each case, further examination of the combined data supported the basic components of agenda-setting theory. There were correspondent relationships between the media reports and the public agenda as well as between the tone of media stories and the number of negatively toned on-line messages.