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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of applying appreciative intelligence and appreciative inquiry concepts to design a possibly new model of ice‐breaking, which is strengths‐based and very often used in any training in general and team building training in particular.

The design has evolved from the authors' study and practice of appreciative intelligence and appreciative inquiry in their consulting and facilitation work.

A new ice‐breaking design is proposed which is built on a strengths‐based generative model of appreciative intelligence and appreciative inquiry. The new design infuses creativity and positive envisioning into the context of team‐building intervention. The appreciatively intelligent ice‐breaking design engages the team energy in an inspiring manner, channeling the team deliberations and working with a focused positive agenda founded in generative capabilities. Arguments are offered in terms of how the proposed new design is different and advantageous over the traditional ice‐breaking model.

This paper presents a value‐seeking and value‐adding design of an ice‐breaking exercise in the context of a team building intervention. Practical implications of this new design for both OD practitioners/trainers and academic educators are discussed.

The overnight introduction of tens of thousands of dockless bike-share bicycles in Singapore with its indiscriminate parking drew the attention of the media, which generated extensive news reports on the activities carried out by bike-sharing operators. Given the meteoric rise and fall of the industry, this study examines the influence of agenda-setting of news reporting on the public’s perception of the industry and the impact on the firms’ corporate reputation.

Utilizing the Reputation Quotient Index, the study content analyzed 147 textual data of online reports which were crawled over two years between 2017 and 2018 from six mainstream news organizations.

Our findings showed that the news reports carried more negative frames in the headlines and body content. It also found that only five out of six dimensions of the Index were emphasized with varying degrees of importance, indicating that the corporate reputation as determined by the media reports did not collectively represent the operators’ past actions and results with valued outcomes.

Practical implications discussed included the need to integrate corporate strategies into public relations programs and the importance of engaging the media to demonstrate congruence between business objectives and positive social impact on society.

Although the study limited its data collection only to online media reports, it is one of the few research to provide empirical evidence concerning the media’s influence on the public’s perceptions and reputation of the nascent bike-sharing industry.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concepts of key messages and key message integrity, and examines their viability for communication management scholars and practitioners in evaluating media relations activities. Key message integrity addresses not only what messages transfer, but also how well.

The authors analyzed 18 nonprofit organizations’ key messages and the messages’ integrity levels using content analysis on one month of their news coverage. In-depth interviews with eight of their media relations practitioners helped validate the concepts and the results.

The authors found five unique categories and functions of key messages: information concerned with dissemination, raison d’être concerned with purpose, categories concerned with positioning, resource management concerned with accounting for resources, and social relevance concerned with legitimacy. Findings also revealed varying levels of transmission and message integrity across the categories. Interviews revealed insights into challenges for communicating organizational key messages to the news media.

This study lays the foundation for additional research on key messages and key message integrity as useful metrics for communication management scholars and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the German and Hungarian Governments’ mediated public diplomacy (mpd) efforts during the European migrant crisis and their reflection in the international news media.

The study relies on a quantitative content analysis of English press releases and interviews distributed by the governments and their reflection in CNN and Al-Jazeera English. Overall, a sample of 483 texts was coded. Herein, the main actors, topics, frames, and information subsidies were analyzed. A comparison of the public diplomacy efforts and their reflection in the news then allows for assumptions about their potential impact on the news.

The data shows that the Hungarian Government uses more information subsidies in their communication than their German counterpart. Hence, the news agenda shows more similarities to the main topics put forward in the Hungarian sub-sample. The news framing, however, is more favorable toward the perspectives put forward in the German public diplomacy.

The results indicate that well planned and designed messaging does not guarantee successful communication. It also shows that critical journalism still plays an important role in the international news production.

The paper’s main contribution is that it goes beyond the war-based case studies on mpd and investigates one of the most relevant transnational issues in the last decades. In addition, it sheds light on why the media reflect some sponsored frames while they mostly discredit others.

It is crucial for corporate communication to know how different public sources frame a crisis and how these sources influence each other. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of Facebook by examining – if the public represented on Facebook contributes distinct frames to the discursive negotiation of a crisis at all, and whether the public represented on Facebook is able to influence the crisis framing of news media.

The authors compared how four different public sources framed the Nestlé Kit Kat crisis: news media, corporate communication, NGOs, and Facebook users. The authors therefore, coded 5,185 sentences from the four sources and conducted a frame-analysis through the detection of co-occurrence between actors and attributions. A cross-correlation with a seven-day lag in each direction was applied to detect the frame-setting effects between the public represented on Facebook and news media.

While the public represented on Facebook is found to apply distinct crisis frames in comparison to conventional sources, its frame-setting power is limited. In contrast to findings from political communication, it is rather the news media that influences the crisis framing in social media. The role of the public represented on Facebook, hence, appears marginal in comparison to news media that remain a major force in the discursive negotiation of a corporate crisis.

As a first study, crisis framing in social media is compared with that of news media, NGOs, and corporate communication. Second, so far there have been no studies in the corporate communication field investigating the frame-setting effects between social media and news media. Contrary to social media’s promising frame-setting power ascribed by some scholars, the authors do not find such effects with Facebook, the most popular social media tool to date.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the channels companies use to communicate their corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages and to test the effectiveness of those channels – specifically, press releases, corporate websites, CSR reports, corporate Facebook pages, and TV advertising – on forming companies’ CSR reputations.

The two primary methods used in this study were secondary analysis of existing data and content analysis. The study sample was the 101 companies in the Reputation Institute’s 2014 CSR ranking of the 100 most highly regarded companies (two companies were tied) across 15 countries.

Corporate websites and CSR reports were the most common channels for CSR communications, but press releases – through their impact on news articles – and general corporate Facebook pages were the only effective channels in forming CSR reputation.

This study provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness of various CSR communication channels; it not only focuses on CSR reputation, a specific aspect of corporate reputation which has not been studied in this context before, but also examines several different channels simultaneously, in contrast to previous studies which have only investigated one or two channels at a time.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the need to theorize firms’ involvement in social issues and propose the social issues management model as a framework for analyzing the communication processes underlying social issues management. An application of the new approach is illustrated through a brief case analysis.

The paper is conceptual and emphasizes theory building for firm’s involvement in social issues management.

The paper describes modifications to the general issues management model that can be adopted to reflect the social issues management process and contemporary digital media environments.

The paper can benefit theory and practice of social issues management by describing how specific communication strategies and digital media use may affect social issues management.

Because firms increasingly are motivated or urged by stakeholders to take stands on social issues, understanding how they can perform the role of social issue manager can enhance their potential for contributing to positive social change.

The paper provides a much needed update to the models of issues management used in strategic communication. The new model accounts for the increasing pressure on firms to address social issues and the role of digital communication channels in that process.

Visibility in the media is considered important for organizations, as it is alleged to affect their reputation, public legitimacy, and stakeholder relations. Strategies for media relations often discern corporations, public organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The media attention for those organizations is, however, often studied in isolation. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of media positioning to compare media coverage for corporations, public organizations, and NGOs.

A quantitative content analysis of the media coverage of 61 Dutch organizations was conducted. The comparison focused on three aspects of media positioning: prominence, context, and evaluation.

Public organizations and corporations were most similar, whereas corporations and NGOs differed most strongly in their media positioning. Corporations appeared most prominently in the media. While corporations and public organizations were more often related to organizational issues, NGOs were more often linked to substantial issues and received more positive coverage.

Insight into the content, amount, and tone of organizational media coverage is crucial for the formulation of public relations strategies by corporate communication professionals. The analysis shows whether and how the prominence, context, and evaluation differs among corporations, public organizations, and NGOs. The findings shed light on institutional factors that affect the visibility of different types of organizations, thus enabling future scholars in the field of visibility analyses in corporate communication to refine theories on drivers and characteristics of media coverage regarding different types of organizations.

This chapter theorises the Internet in Greece by placing it at the centre of Greek media offering a political economy which recasts it in a culturalist fashion. To achieve this, it critically addresses the country's alleged lag in cyberspace and asks why the Internet's hegemonic role in the advance of neoliberal policies and technoliberalism worldwide was never performed in Greece. It places the countrywide disdain for the technoliberal subject at the core of understanding of why the web mediations where so neatly denied over three decades across industry, policy and research. It centres around Internet remediations to argue that the Internet in Greece has been conceptualised as a nonmedia through the idea of lagging behind, essentially a construct veiling neoliberalism at work. It situates the advent of the web in Greece's media boom to argue that media power, as articulated in Greece, necessarily excluded the web, fetishising terrestrial broadcasting on the way to the neoliberal dismantling of culture, the media and everyday life, way before the Troika.

Actual product-harm crises pose significant challenges to firms, but so can defaming product-harm crises, which are defined as crises caused by false or malicious rumors made by consumers or competing firms. Unlike typical product-harm crises, in defaming product-harm crises, the truth often emerges only after substantial damage has been done to the victim firm. Thus, crisis management strategies in these two cases may be different. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using a defaming product-harm crisis that involved two competing firms, this paper examines how the firms changed their advertising strategies and how the changes affected consumers’ online search behavior regarding the two firms.

The analyses show that after the crisis, the offending firm sensitively reacted to its own and the victim firm’s advertising levels, but the victim firm did not react to the offending firm’s advertising as it had previously. The effectiveness of advertising on consumers’ online search weakened for both firms after the crisis.

The paper provides a new insight about marketing strategies and their effectiveness in the product-harm crisis literature.