The process of communication in airline business's management of crisis in social media

Abstract

The objectives of this research include studying 1) the roles of leaders during a crisis, 2) crisis management of airlines prior to a crisis, during the crisis, and after the crisis, 3) the strategies used in crisis communication management of airlines, and 4) the crisis communication management process of social media by airlines. This is a mixed-methods research combining both quantitative and qualitative methods. The study consisted of four parts. Part one focused on the PR value of the airlines during 2010-2014. Part two consisted of in-depth interviews with airlines’ executives and staff, including the crisis communication management experts in social media. Part three analyzed the content on airline complaint posts from the web board on Pantip website between 2010-2014. Finally, part four created a model of the communication process for airline business’ management of crisis in social media. The results of part one showed that the top 3 highest numbers of airline PR releases were from Thai Airways, AirAsia, and Bangkok Airways. The in-depth interviews in part 2 shows that role of leaders in crisis in airline business’ management of crisis in social media consist of role in giving suggestion to other departments about crises, role in creating communication connection, role in determining crisis communication management policy, role in budgeting, role in controlling or evaluating the operation and role in utilizing digital transformation to the operation and organization. Besides, in part two illustrated the crisis communication management activities of airlines in different time periods. Before the crisis to prepare a crisis plan, train employee, form a committee, and practice safety drills. During the crisis where actions consisted of using crisis analysis and management, data collecting, forming a PR operation center, arranging meetings to give updates, scheduling targeted audiences, choosing content designs and communication tools, providing any updates to medias, and controlling news sources. Finally, after the crisis is over, the procedures consisted of crisis summary, healing the situation, and crisis management evaluation. Moreover, the results of the study were divided into 3 stages including strategies that were used during the pre-crisis, which were creating the connection, preparing for the crisis, and providing knowledge to the public from not panic during the crisis. The strategies used during the crisis event were excuse, correctiveness, plan stimulation, target group outreach, close media monitoring, and dividing individually responsibility and working as a team. The strategies used at the post crisis were recovery, finding opportunities, learning lessons and adapting for the next crisis, rebuilding trust, and reimaging. Part three showed that the communication process of the airlines in response to customer complaints on the web board on the Pantip website. This process included identifying the sender, which was executives or staff of the airlines, creating the message, which was an apology and clarification, understanding the channel, which is online medias and offline medias, and finally, the receiver, which is the original poster and social media followers. Part four showed that the model consisted of three parts leadership roles, management and crisis strategies, the communication process which include the sender, message, channel and receivers by communicating back and forward between them and caused the feedback. Part four also identified important factors in communication which were point of view controlling online media, spread crisis control, and time and data accuracy control.