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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of presidential tweeting about corporations on publics’ perceptions of and behavioral intentions toward those corporations. Specifically, the authors examined publics’ intentions to boycott or buycott (Friedman, 1996) Nordstrom, four months after President Trump’s tweet denouncing the company’s decision to discontinue his daughter’s clothing line.

An online survey was conducted among 517 American citizens using Qualtrics panels in June 2017. Respondents were compensated for their participation.

The authors found strong associations between perceived moral inequity and boycott intentions, and perceived business/economic nature of corporate action and buycott intentions. Furthermore, demographic characteristics associated with both types of perceptions were also examined. Younger, more educated respondents tended to accept Nordstrom’s actions as being routine business decisions, whereas conservative participants saw Nordstrom’s actions as being morally iniquitous.

This study is one of the first to explore the impact of presidential tweeting, albeit indirectly, on publics’ perceptions and intentions toward corporations who form the subjects of said tweets. Practitioners may utilize these findings to provide guidance to corporations who may be at the receiving end of presidential tweeting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how public relations (PR) professionals develop co-narratives with legal counsel when formulating crisis communication strategies. Understanding how PR practitioners work with their legal counterparts may help lead to more advanced and effective PR practice in the area of crisis communication and management. The authors attempt to do so in this study through interviews conducted with PR practitioners in two Asian countries – South Korea and Singapore.

In total, 11 semi-structured interviews with PR consultants, 6 in Korea and 5 in Singapore were conducted between May and August 2016. Data analyses revealed key points of interest for PR practice.

First, PR consultants in both countries reported increased collaboration with legal counsel in times of crisis. Second, PR consultants report that legal professionals have begun to realize the significance of winning in the court of public opinion. However, the process by which PR–legal collaboration takes place to develop co-narratives followed extremely different patterns in the two countries.

This exploratory study is not exempt from limitations. The findings from this study may not be applicable to other countries. As data collection in both countries relied on snowball sampling techniques, the participants in the interviews may not be representative of PR consultants in South Korea and Singapore. E-mail interviews had limitations due to their lack of richness and details compared to other forms of interviews (i.e. face-to-face or Skype interviews). However, computer-mediated interviews including e-mail interviews can still create good level of understandings about the phenomenon in question.

This study was an attempt to understand PR–legal collaboration particularly in times of crisis and contribute to the development of Asia-centric models of PR practice. There has been little research that explores how legal and PR counsels actually collaborate to devise optional crisis communication strategies for their clients (or organizations) in the times of crisis. Given that crisis communicative strategies have been shown to affect publics’ perceptions of an organization’s credibility and trustworthiness, it is important to understand how PR work with legal practitioners to develop co-narratives for optimal crisis management, and understand how their different professional perspectives, practices, and approaches affect the collaboration.

This study seeks to understand Trump supporters’ behaviors on social media in the wake of a political controversy: US President Trump’s continued support for Judge Roy Moore’s candidacy for the US Senate representing the state of Alabama despite several allegations of sexual assault against him.

Few days before the special election was held in Alabama, an online survey was conducted among 325 supporters of President Trump to explore Trump supporters’ social media behaviors, including the unfriending/unfollowing contacts and speaking out about the controversy.

We found a negative presidential image to influence individuals’ loss of face, and such loss of face to impact unfriending/unfollowing behaviors on social media, as well as outspokenness. Furthermore, the differences between strong issue supporters and weak issue supporters’ opinions of climate perceptions and outspokenness were investigated.

Rather than using fear of isolation as the mediator between opinion climate and willingness to speak out, as is generally the case in the spiral of silence model (Moy et al., 2001), this study investigated the role of another affective indicator, loss of face on two social media behaviors, outspokenness, and unfollowing/unfriending contacts on social media.

The purpose of this paper is to qualitatively understand the reactions of online publics to a victim cluster crisis as the crisis unfolds and offer a new way of tracking online hot-issue publics using comments on online news articles.

This research uses a mixed-methods approach, employing both descriptive quantitative techniques and qualitative thematic analysis.

Qualitative analyses of online news comments on BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post revealed that publics’ reaction to the cyber-attack on Sony, the following threats of attack, and Sony’s response to it largely ran counter to the situational crisis communication theory’s (SCCT) assumptions about victim cluster crises. Analyses also revealed a pattern in the volume of comments on the two online news outlets, supporting the conceptualization of hot-issue publics growing and decreasing as news coverage of an issue rises and falls.

The analysis was limited to one incident and two online media.

This paper provides empirical support for the use of online news comments to track hot-issue publics and what is important to them. In addition, tracking the tone and content of the comments allows for an examination of the fit of SCCT assumptions and provides a way for practitioners to understand public opinion and adapt communication plans based on insights gleaned from such data.

This study is one of few to provide empirical support for the conceptualization of hot-issue publics, and to do so using online news comments. In addition, it is one of very few to study the SCCT in real-world settings, examining real publics’ reactions to real issues.

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors influencing an organization’s predisposition to bridging strategy, and tests relationships between those factors and bridging strategy.

Online survey was conducted in South Korea. Hierarchical regression was used.

Identified factors are environmental complexity, top management attitude toward stakeholders, analysis orientation, and authoritarian culture.

By adopting the concept and measures of bridging as an organization’s public-engagement strategy, this study was able to capture an organization’s strategic approach for problem-solving in communication management.

Strong analysis orientation allows organizations to look into problems in their complex environments affecting their performance and their key stakeholders before deciding on strategies; resultantly, they are more likely to reduce problems and to improve their performance. In contrast, authoritarian culture discourages an organization’s adoption of bridging strategy.

This study is the first empirical study investigating the dynamics of factors influencing organizations’ strategic predisposition in communication management.