مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

“I am ordinary. I just look like ET” (Liu, 2014). “I flunked math. Got only 1 point in my first attempt at the National College Entrance Exam; got a 19 the second time, and got an 89 the third time. I never gave up.”(Famous Quotes, 2014“Famous Quotes”, ۲۰۱۴)—Jack Ma, Founder and Chairman of Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company.

TMall is an online retail site operating under the aegis of Alibaba Group—China’s largest e-commerce company. In November 2013, after being accused of false advertising, TMall came under public scrutiny on Weibo, China’s most popular social media site. Less than an hour after the accusation was made, TMall was the subject of more than 1500 negative comments posted to Weibo and of 10,000 reposts.1 The company was suddenly embroiled in an online reputation paracrisis, as the online public ridiculed the company for using in their ads exaggerated and false data. The public demanded that the government should regulate companies’ advertising. The paracrisis, however, was quickly resolved and in fact turned into a positive public relations opportunity for the company through effective social media crisis communication.

What has become, for public relations professionals, an increasingly important but difficult task is the managing of reputation crises on social media (Aula, 2010; Ott & Theunissen, 2015). Paracrises emerge more often on social media as threats and accusations against organizations are easily visible to the public (Coombs & Holladay, 2012b). Although a paracrisis is not considered a crisis that requires the full activation of a crisis management team, it may, if improperly handled, escalate into a crisis (Veil, Petrun, & Roberts, 2012). Negative public sentiments may go viral in seconds and are less likely to dissipate in the short term (Ott & Theunissen, 2015; Veil et al., 2012). Researchers have recommended some response options (Coombs & Holladay, 2012b) to resolve such reputation paracrises on social media (Aula, 2010). Yet studies have shown that corporations tend to respond by relying more on traditional crisis communication strategies (Coombs & Holladay, 2012a; Ott & Theunissen, 2015). Relatively little research exists on how a corporation should respond to a paracrisis on social media to successfully avert a full-blown reputation crisis (Veil et al., 2012).