How a corporate social media character affects crisis communication: exploring humorous, emotional and rational crisis response in a paracrisis

Purpose From the author’s point of view, paracrisis is a unique type and closely associated with social media. The paracrisis response would be different from other crises which are less related to social media. Since social media is prone to breed paracrisis, corporate social media character, which shapes publics’ perception of the organization on social media, tends to influence publics’ response to a paracrisis. This study aims to examine if the congruity between corporate character and crisis response framing will be more effective in a paracrisis communication than incongruency effect. Design/methodology/approach A 3 (Corporate character: Enterprise vs Agreeableness vs Competence) X 3 (Crisis response framing: humorous vs emotional vs rational) online experiment was conducted. Findings The results showed different types of corporate social media character exert distinct impact on organizational evaluation, the underlying mechanisms between the interplay of corporate social media character and response framing regarding organizational evaluation, and under what circumstance humorous response is superior to other types of response framing. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed in the article. Originality/value This study is among the first to empirically examine how a corporate social media character influences paracrisis response.