ABSTRACT
This chapter provides insight into how social media have influenced recent efforts to revise situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). The development of SCCT began in 1995 with publication of a decision tree for crisis communication in Management Communication Quarterly. SCCT recommends that crisis communicators examine the crisis type and the intensifying factors to assess the probable crisis responsibility stakeholders will attribute to the organization in crisis. Pre-crisis activities include preparation and prevention or mitigation efforts. The chapter attempts to elaborate on the challenges that trigger paracrises and reveals the complexity of challenges. Both contingency theory and Internet contagion theory (ICT) inform the analysis of challenges and stakeholder salience. Challenged organizations are bound by at least four constraints: strategy, cost, feasibility, and prior corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Channel selection is a common topic in corporate communication that is relevant to public relations, advertising, and marketing communication. SCCT did not explicitly examine channel selection.
