What Facilitates and Hinders the Use of Social Media in Crisis Communication in Vietnamese Organizations

Abstract

In Vietnam, social media has become one of the most popular communication platforms. With the growing importance of social media for the Vietnamese people, in the past five years, Vietnam has seen a number of organizational or brand crises that started on social media. A single post online could be shared virally and attract enough attention to become a full crisis. However, while social media has been widely used in marketing and promotional activities, Vietnamese organizations have often ignored or underutilized these channels in their crisis communication efforts. Organizations focus their crisis communication through traditional media outlets and paid little to no attention to social media outlets, even if the crisis had started on social media channels.Little research has dedicated to exploring this topic, on the use of social media in PR or in crisis communication in a Vietnamese setting. To address this gap, this research aims to identify what facilitates and hinders the use of social media in crisis communication in Vietnamese organizations.

Keywords: social media adoption, crisis communication, crisis response, Vietnam

JEL Classification: M10, M30, M31, M39