Research On Internet Word-of-Mouth Communication Based On Microblog In Brand Crisis Situation

With the development of internet media, the spread extent becomes wider and influence of brand crisis become stronger. This is a higher challenge to crisis management. As a burgeoning media channel, microblog has many differences from traditional media channel on brand crisis propagation. These differences come from6aspects, such as spread speed, spread channel, spread role, spread form, spread emotion and feedback. Microblog is not only a source of brand crisis but also a way to cause second brand crisis.The objects of this research are explanation microblogs about brand crisis written by brand accounts, and the comments under the microblogs written by consumers. The author had collected40microblogs distributed by6brands and5510comments written by consumers. This research utilized content analysis to explore which response strategy was most often used by brand crisis communication, what attitude of word-of-mouth is and what factors caused such attitude. The main steps were designing coding category, coding the microblogs and comments, and testing reliability and analyzing data.Through the research the author found brand crisis manager preferred taking deny crisis response strategy, and most consumers’attitude of word-of-mouth is negative. We also found the factors that caused such attitude from3aspects:brand, environment and consumer. Then the author divided these factors to3groups: positive factor, negative factor and critical factors based on influence direction. We generalized3situations through the6cases, and investigated how the response strategy influenced the attitude of WOM in different situations.