Media Selection

The choice of the media to use as the source of data collection is obtained from both the traditional and social media outlets as combining these two medium is not new to crisis communication research, for example, Stephen et al, (2005) in their attempt to integrate the crisis communication strategy with stakeholder’s theory obtained their data using both the traditional media and the internet. Social media channels have also been found to provide more data without having direct contact or interaction with the respondents as it would have been with other qualitative data collection method (Branthwaite & Petterson, 2011).

However, for the social media platforms, Facebook is used for data sourcing reason being that Facebook is one of the top social media platforms used by organisation for their strategic, corporate and organisation communication policy and public relations (Macnamara et al., 2012).

3.8.1 Corporate website

Once there was a reported organisational crisis on the online version of the newspaper website, I followed up my data collection process by checking the corporate website of Malaysia Airlines after the breaking news of the crisis to observe if there is any information about the reported crisis i.e. details about the crisis, response and actions that they are taking on their webpage. I observed if there was any news about the crisis on their home page and captured

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the information and extended the observation by looking out for the link, if any, on the homepage directing visitors to other pages in relation to the news taking note to see if the link is a text, button, or redirection to the social media channels.

3.8.2 Social media Channel - Facebook

Before I proceed in discussing the MAS Facebook page and its identification process for this research, I feel it is pertinent to explain the reason behind the selection of Facebook as the preferred social media channel for this research which leads to the next section that answers the question.

Why Facebook?

Facebook was chosen as my source of data gathering for this thesis as it is a social media channel is the most investigated social networking site by scholars with a platform that is built on the ethos of people’s interaction and one that constitutes a robust data gathering avenue due to its huge global usage and technological capability that it affords the researcher (Ellison et al, 2007; Zhang & Leung, 2014).

A social networking site that was created in 2004 and considered a rich site for researches on social media because of its huge usage and fusion of both online and offline connections which provides a tool to connect people with common interest like business, brand, organisations or celebrity (Ellison et al., 2007; Facebook, 2014).

For organisational study, it is regarded as the most widely adopted social media medium by organisations because of its ability to provide a platform for sharing, conversing, engagement, reputation and relationship building using texts, pictures, video, blogging to connect with diverse people (Habibi et al., 2014; Kietzmann et al., 2011; Macnamara & Zerfass, 2012). It allows asynchronous communication between a post that is made and the opportunity for the audience to comment, like or share the post thereby providing a freer communication platform for its users as opposed to other social media channel like Twitter which has a word limit of 140 words per tweet, a limit that some users find restrictive as it does not allow them to fully express themselves as they would have want to due to the number of words control. It also allows users of their platform to preserve previous posts, comments, likes and shares on the organisations timeline in a sequential manner, as long as the owner of the post did not delete it.

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In addition to these factors, Facebook supports a higher level of network diversity like the trend in the adoption of older communication technology (e.g. telephone) as it provides a platform for meeting users who might have lower levels of their local neighbourhood social participation but possess a relationship that is sustained, diverse and spatially distributed (Hampton, Lee & Her, 2011) thereby providing an opportunity to study those that might not be conventionally encountered as participants of for this type of analysis.

Facebook provides a platform that supports interaction and engagement for its users because of its ability to accommodate both posting (which represents the passage of information to the public) and on the other hand provides an avenue for the public to engage, interact and reply to such posting through their comments, shares and likes with the organisation and between themselves (which represents their reaction and interpretation of the information passed to them). This features provided by Facebook pages affords me with the opportunity of gathering the data that I needed for my audience-oriented analysis as I was able to collect information (though the postings) on how the public reacted to this crisis news in its ‘pure’ form and how they interpreted this news based on the information available to them as at that very time when the data were captured. This is an added advantage as it is known in the field of crisis that getting such data from the public later on after their crisis experience can be subjected to misremembering of events and change in reaction to the breaking of the crisis news.

Having discussed the rationale behind the Facebook choice, I will then proceed to focus on the case study official Facebook page.

MAS Facebook official page

As earlier said, the Malaysia Airlines official Facebook page is used as my source of data gathering and the process of verifying that I am using the official Facebook page of Malaysia Airlines was done by going through the Malaysia Airline’s corporate website, clicked on the Facebook icon on their webpage which then took me to their official Facebook page.

MAS in their quest to provide a more personalised travel experience for their customers developed a Facebook page that caters for 18 main markets and 16 time zones whereby customers can select the most suitable content to them in terms of services, request and travel expectations. The universal Facebook page has dedicated contents for customers with bespoke interest in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, UK, France, Netherlands and Germany

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with the last market, Global page, representing all other countries that does not fall into the remaining market (“Malaysia Airlines begins social media”, 2013). This robustness makes their page even more interesting as it might help to shed light to know if the contents are different and see how the public respond.