Rock the Boat: How Corporate and Organizational Mismanagement of Social Media Can Sink Ships

By R. Nicholas Gerlich, Emily S. Kinsky, Kristina Drumheller, Meagan Brock & Marc Sollosy, West Texas A&M University

Editor’s Note: This is a summary of a study presented at the 2013 International Public Relations Research Conference in March. The authors’ paper won the Arthur W. Page Center Benchmarking Award at the event.

Corporations and non-profit organizations alike are finding out that social media waters can be treacherous. Like the forces of nature, customers and other social media users can wreak havoc on the course charted by management. The worst part is that, like the weather, most of it is beyond the control of the organization.

For example, let’s look at the cases of Lowe’s Home Improvement and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

In December 2011, Lowe’s made what proved to be a very unpopular decision to pull its advertising support of TLC’s All-American Muslim. A firestorm erupted on social media. The Twitterverse created the hashtag #loweshatesmuslims. Lowe’s posted a statement on its Facebook page, but negative comments by the thousands piled up, and rather than manage it, Lowe’s simply deleted everything. This created a second storm, so Lowe’s posted a second statement, which generated a nearly equal outpouring of sentiments.

Scarcely a month later, Susan G. Komen announced it was withdrawing financial support of Planned Parenthood, producing a similar negative response. Komen then reversed its decision, making angry people happy, and once-happy people irate. All of this, naturally, exploded on social media.

The Theory of Planned Behavior was applied to both a for-profit corporation and a non-profit organization facing a communication crisis in the paper, “The Effect of Socially Mediated PR Crises on Planned Behavior: How TPB Can Help Both Corporations and Non-Profits.” With one billion Facebook users, and another 500 million on Twitter, these are forces no one can afford to ignore.

The Theory of Planned Behavior is a complex model consisting of six sub-scales: Attitude, Subjective Norms, Perceived Behavioral Control, Desire, Behavioral Intentions, and Planned Behavior. Separate online surveys were launched to measure participants’ plans to either avoid shopping at Lowe’s or avoid donating to SGK. Participants were recruited through author-moderated social media accounts and panel data. Samples ranged from 379 in the Lowe’s study to 270 in the SGK study.

Separate confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation models were conducted. In both cases, Attitudes and Subjective Norms, or what you think others might think of what you do, were the strongest predictors of desired, intended and planned avoidance of shopping or donating. Though the power of attitude toward an organization was not surprising, the strength of peer influence above someone’s own attitude was quite unexpected, which we found with Lowe’s. This suggests social media, where we hear many opinions and are sometimes judged for our own, may have a dramatic effect on planned behavior.

While there are fundamental differences between shopping for consumables at a do-it-yourself store and making volitional donations to a non-profit, we found the TPB model to be well-suited for the task of measuring planned behaviors. Although the studies were snapshots rather than longitudinal, the findings illustrate the importance of proper social media management as well as the need to have a response plan for PR crises. In both instances, respondents’ planned behavior toward Lowe’s and SGK would negatively affect both organizations. Because long-term effects were not measured, we cannot say with certainty what the effect may be in a year or two; still, long-run sales and donations are a function of many short-run results. Companies and organizations can ill afford to ignore the forces that social media bring to the quarterly bottom line, because the waves felt today may ripple well into the future.