ABSTRACT
This chapter examines publics' evaluation of organizational reputation, negative word-of-mouth intention, and negative online crisis-reaction intention in response to different social media crisis communication strategies and compared similarities and differences between responses in the United States and China. With a focus on reputation management, the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) proposes that the appropriate crisis-response strategy should be selected based on multiple variables, such as crisis type, evidence, damage, victim status, and performance history. Results indicated the participants from the Chinese university tend to have higher negative online crisis-reaction intentions than participants from the US university across all crisis-response strategy conditions. Negative online crisis reaction is usually associated with the level of anger. Social media in China have encouraged the public's self-expression online in a society where people are not used to expressing their personal opinions offline. Weibo is considered the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, there are still distinctive differences in their features.
