ABSTRACT
This chapter synthesizes literature in the domain of publics-oriented approaches to crisis communication, underscoring social media incorporation. It defines baseline terms and contrasts organizational and audience perspectives before categorizing perspectives in the literature. Organization-public relationships and responses approaches to crisis communication seek to uncover how organizations can build relationships with publics to increase understanding of effective crisis messages that minimize potential negative responses. Situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) gives guidance about messaging strategy to organizations experiencing crises. Utz, Schultz, and Glocka's networked crisis communication (NCC) model "challenges classical crisis communication theories by showing that the medium used affects the impact of crisis communication". Situational theory of publics (STP) is a general public relations theory that segments publics to predict their most likely attitudes and behaviors based on their levels of three independent variables: problem recognition, constraint recognition, and level of involvement. The integrated crisis mapping (ICM) model provides an examination of affect from a "publics-based, emotion-driven perspective".
