ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on social media response to crises. It explores the concepts of cross-cultural crisis response in one of the world's dominant industries—the sports industry. Though crisis communication scholarship has addressed crisis type as an important variable for consideration, research analyzing organizational events—a category that includes economic downturns—show mixed findings regarding the types of responses that organizations are likely to employ. The chapter evaluates social media engagement in order to focus on direct efforts at fan engagement about the organizations' financial crises. The Portsmouth strategy was a nuanced approach to responding to the crisis with both dominant strategies, as well as different themes communicated. The chapter also suggests the findings comparing the US and the UK responses to financial crises to be characteristic of American versus British responses to crises in general. The Women's National Basketball Association's (WNBA) focuses on an image-oriented approach to crisis recovery whereas Portsmouth FC focused on an engagement-oriented approach to crisis recovery.
