When
Where
Lu (Lucy) Yan, Associate Professor of Operations & Decision Technologies, John & Esther Reese Professor, Kelly School of Business, Indiana University.
Title: Research on Social Media for Disaster Management and Beyond
Abstract: Disaster relief organizations (DROs) utilize social media to provide information rapidly and broadly. Many DROs post content via multiple social media accounts within a single platform, where each account represents a distinct entity (e.g., national headquarters, local branch). However, DROs do not have a clear policy for coordinating content production across their accounts. According to crisis communication theory, coordination can be facilitated by DROs producing content in unison across their accounts through the convergence, or match, of their content creation decisions (e.g., targeted audience). Using Twitter data collected in partnership with the Canadian Red Cross, we show that content creation decisions by accounts within the same DRO are intertwined, unveiling an implicit level of coordination. Our results also indicate that engagement improves from a match only when uncertainty and urgency are at their highest (i.e., the response phase). Strikingly, a divergence of content creation decisions, or mismatch, is more effective for engagement when uncertainty subsidies (i.e., the recovery phase). We, thus, reveal that the recommended coordination strategy from crisis communication does not uniformly hold when viewing disasters as dynamic events with multiple phases. Moreover, we demonstrate that the effects of a match vs. a mismatch on engagement are asymmetric between accounts representing national-level and local-level entities. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for DROs’ internal coordination of social media content generation and, ultimately, help DROs meet the needs of those affected by disasters.
Bio: Professor Lu (Lucy) Yan is John & Esther Reese Professor and Associate Professor in the Operations and Decision Technologies department at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Her research interests include social media in healthcare, social and economic networks, patient-centric healthcare models, and social media in humanitarian operations. Prof. Yan is an accomplished empirical researcher. Her recent focus is on the IT artifact design for healthcare interventions and deliveries and IT implementation strategies for disaster relief operations. Currently, she serves as Associate Editor at the Journal of Information Systems Research and Senior Editor at the Journal of Production and Operations Management. Her work has appeared in top-tier academic journals, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management, and INFORMS Journal on Computing.