ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes extensive examples and commentary from a crisis communication practitioner, to explore the evolution of organizational crisis communication strategies and decision-making in a digital information age stimulated by advanced smartphones and social media. It focuses on the experiences, reflections, knowledge, and predictions of this organizational and crisis communication specialist to visualize the newer, sharper, more erratic boundaries of organizational crisis response. The chapter illustrates how social media use increases human agency and equivocality in crisis communication, using K. E. Weick’s Model of Organizing, thus demanding that practitioners focus on the process of organizing—rather than the static organization—to effectively communicate during a crisis. It describes how crisis storytelling in the age of social media poses several affordances, but also constraints, for effective organizational crisis communication. Distributed authorship, digital recombination, and reviewability represent three examples of how crisis story creation and evaluation has shifted.
