A growing body of research in the area of information systems for crisis management is based on data from social media. After almost every larger disaster studies emerge with the focus on the specific use of social media. Much of this research is based on Twitter data, due to the ease of access of this (mainly public) data, compared to (more closed) data, such as Facebook or Google+. Based on t...

This paper reviews the actual and potential use of social media in emergency, disaster and crisis situations. This is a field that has generated intense interest. It is characterised by a burgeoning but small and very recent literature. In the emergencies field, social media (blogs, messaging, sites such as Facebook, wikis and so on) are used in seven different ways: listening to public debate,...

During the last decade, public discourse on the “crisis of the health care system” in Quebec and Canada soared to the extent that the crisis has come to be seen by many Quebeckers and Canadians as an enduring feature of their health care sector. Based on analysis of articles from the Quebec written media, the article shows that the crisis discourse contributes to promote a market-like governanc...

Social networks provide the opportunity to gather and share knowledge about a situation of relevance. User-generated content is getting increasingly important during crisis management. It facilitates the collaboration with citizens or involved parties from the very beginning of the crisis. The information captured in the form of images, text or videos is a valuable source of identifying sub-eve...

The concept of country branding – and its core guiding principle of positioning – triggers interest among politicians, policy-makers, businesses, and consumers. Increasing understanding of the most effective country positioning (or repositioning) practices can be especially valuable for countries with long-lasting suboptimal images. This article contributes to the country branding literature in...

As growing emphasis is placed on engaging with big ‘crisis’ data, including data from social media, GPS, and satellite, adequate policies and measures must be in place in order to use this data in an ethically and legally responsible manner. The current working paper introduces the BYTE study, which is working towards identifying and understanding the various positive and negative externalities...

Studies examining the role of social media (SM) use in a crisis often examine the use of SM following a largescale crisis requiring an immediate response. In contrast, this working paper examines the usefulness of SM during an extended crisis, in the form of a heat wave. Authors use the 2013 UK heat wave as a case study to examine how SM was used by different stakeholders during the event, what...

In this paper, the authors give an overview of the current trends of media literacy in Europe. The study titled “Current trends and approaches to media literacy in Europe”, commissioned in the second half of 2007 by the European Commission to the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, maps current practices in implementing media literacy in Europe and recommends measures to increase the level of me...

On September 2013 an attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya led to a four day siege, resulting in 67 fatalities and 175 wounded. During the crisis, Twitter became a crucial channel of communication between the government, emergency responders and the public, facilitating the emergency management of the event. The objectives of this paper are to present the main activities, use patterns and lesson...

In this study, we explore how customers’ WOMs in firms’ crisis events spread across organizational boundaries to affect their supply chain partners. Based on guilt-by-association theory, we propose that both the external WOM effect and internal demand-supply effect have a mediator influence on the relationship between news report of crisis and firm performance of its supply chain partners. In o...