React Or Not React: How Should The Firms And Official Institutions Respond To The Negative Outbreaks?

Micro-blogging services such as Weibo are said to be a new battlefield for the corporations to improve their brand impression to the consumers. At the same time, just as a popular saying goes, "every coin has two sides". Negative outbreaks are more likely to be rapidly spread out in Weibo. In this paper, we seek to solve the question that when an negative event outbreaks, how should the corporations and official institutions react to it. Is it better to intervene promptly or take no reactions until the public opinion calm down. Regression model could help to find the influential variables about the top 37 negative events in 2012. Based on the data set of these forty events, we find that both the intervention time of firms and official institutions have a linear correlation with the negative outbreaks and they also influence the death time of the negative events. What’s more, we explore the information diffusion process of the verified users in Weibo and provide some construction advices to the corporations and official institutions.