Social media users perception during crisis event: the effect on company reputation

A motorway bridge, the Morandi Bridge, built in the 1960s has collapsed during heavy rainfall in Genoa on August 14th 2018. Due to this tragedy, Autostrade per l’Italia undergoes a crisis that not only has caused an interruption in the company’s daily activities but also has generated negative social media conversations that have affected stakeholders’ perception of the company and put Autostrade’s reputation at risk. Reputation represents one of the most valuable intangible assets that companies can exploit to improve their performance, both financial and relational. Facilitating interactive communication and content exchange, social media play a crucial role in fostering companies’ reputation. However, in crisis context, such as the Morandi Bridge collapse, social media hold many challenges for reputation management, mainly because users’ interactions contribute to enhance crisis echo. In this perspective, the study uses a two-step analysis in order to analyze if and how social media conversations surrounding a crisis event effectively affect the users’ perception of a company’s reputation. In order to address this research aim, a total of 664 Facebook comments published on August 14th 2018 from users in reply to Autostrade 2 posts about Genoa’s Morandi Bridge collapse were analyzed through both content and sentiment analyses. Findings highlight that social media conversations can effectively affect companies’ reputation in a crisis management context, suggesting that online conversations in the era of socially mediated crisis communication are complex and tend to revolve around some peculiar topics that are not always strictly connected with the crisis event.