International Journal of Crisis Communication

Reputation Management of Organisations in the Public Sector: Social Listening as a Method for Analysing Big Data

Jörg Forthmann — 2023-10-22

Reputation management in the public sector has scientifically been rather neglected in the past. Nevertheless, the literature suggests that the strategic management of reputation has become more important for public organisations in recent years. Therefore, big data analysis with the help of social listening, i.e. retrieving relevant communication from online sources via web-crawling and analysing the results using artificial intelligence, is applied here to three public sector organisations. The results show that social listening is at least in principle suitable for measuring reputation in the public sector. Also, the reputation of public companies and private companies is different. As a consequence, public companies should aim to improve their reputation and at least an awareness of the weaknesses of public company reputation should be built.

Crisis Detection in the Age of Digital Communication: The Power of Social Listening as a Method to Identify Corporate Events in Time Series Data

Reimund Homann — 2023-10-22

The increased usage of digital media to exchange information has increased the speed in which corporate crises become known. This has increased the necessity to react to a crisis as quickly as possible. As a result, social listening – i.e. listening to and analysing digital communication – is establishing itself as an instrument for companies to control their own representation in the media. Against this background, different methodological approaches in crisis detection (e.g. outlier detection, t-test and Chow test) were tested regarding their quality. For that, we used a data set created by an AI crawling online sources and analysing the results using a neural network. The findings of this study suggest that crises can be identified quite reliably using existing econometric methods. A simple outlier detection in a time series of the total number of fragments that uses a time frame of one month on each side of a crisis seems to be the best method so far with the method by Chen and Liu being a close second. The results of this study provide a foundational contribution to this field of research and can help companies detect crises as early as possible allowing the management to react appropriately.

Challenging the Status Quo in Higher Education

Igor Rižnar — 2023-10-22

This article acknowledges the intricate nature of higher education, recognizing its complexities and the multiple interactions among various stakeholders such as teachers, students, policymakers, parents, professional associations, politicians, the economy, and society. While briefly touching upon the Bologna reforms, the article primarily focuses on several crucial aspects of education. First, it delves into the realm of brain science to explore learning and teaching. Second, it addresses prevailing myths and misconceptions about learning and thinking that continue to be widely believed by teachers. Third, it examines biases present among both teachers and education policy makers. Fourth, it discusses the working conditions experienced by academics, and fifth, it outlines a project and a teaching method that could ignite transformation of HEIs.