Relationship Cultivation via Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From China and the U.S

Abstract

This study explored the relationship cultivation and social media strategies companies used to cultivate relationships with their publics in two culturally distinct markets of China and the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative content analysis of Weibo (n = 756) and Twitter (n = 645) posts from Fortune 500 companies in China (n = 30) and the U.S. (n = 30) respectively was conducted to examine the effects of their relational efforts on public engagement. Results showed that certain relationship cultivation strategies and use of social media functions effectively increased public engagement in both China and the U.S., although on different levels. Both Chinese and U.S. companies most frequently adopted the strategy of openness. While the openness strategy was most effective at raising engagement levels in the U.S., publics of Chinese companies became more engaged when companies used the access strategy. Also, publics of Chinese companies showed higher levels of engagement and more positive emotions toward companies’ social media messages than their U.S. counterparts. The findings advance our understanding of organization-public relationships in a worldwide disaster setting, with insights informing the global public relations theory and practices.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged organizations around the world to cultivate relationships with their stakeholders as familiar routines were interrupted and business models and operations were modified to cope with the disaster. With organizations struggling to cultivate relationships with various stakeholders, relationship management became a more salient and pressing issue for academic research. Although recent research has begun examining organizational communication and relationship management practices during the pandemic (Huang et al., 2021), few researchers have approached it from a comparative perspective between different countries. That matters because contextual factors might impact how companies communicate with their stakeholders and how stakeholders might react to, or interpret, their messages (Ni et al., 2018; Rim & Ferguson, 2020; Xu & Wu, 2020). Testing the adaptability of theories across different cultural settings during the pandemic could have meaningful implications for both theory and practice. The research gap in business communication and public relations studies, especially during turbulent and uncertain times like a disaster or crisis, further necessitates the need for this study.

The pandemic was best operationalized as a disaster situation for this study, not a crisis, because it was a collectively experienced traumatic event with an acute onset, and it was time-delimited (McFarlane & Norris, 2006). The study of crisis communication is focused primarily on examining strategies for organizations to repair their image during a crisis (Reynolds & Seeger, 2005; Seeger, 2006). As such, the objectives of crisis communication do not address the driving research question that asks how organizations cultivate relationships when every organization faces the same challenge (Huang et al., 2021). The scope of the pandemic, a global phenomenon that impacted most organizations, and exploring how organizations maintained relationships, not repairing their images, lends itself to defining it as a disaster and not a crisis.

COVID-19’s emergence quickly impacted companies globally, including those in China and the U.S., the two largest economies in the world. Recent research found that both the Shanghai stock exchange and the New York Dow Jones were significantly impacted by the spread of COVID-19 in March of 2020 (Sansa, 2020). As a result, a wide range of industries were severely disrupted by the pandemic, of which airlines, casinos and gaming, leisure facilities, auto parts and equipment, and oil and gas drilling industries were among those most affected (Kumar & Haydon, 2020). In addition to the overt economic impacts, the pandemic may have also reshaped public expectations of organizations practices and raised new challenges for businesses. Findings from Edelman’s global survey found that employers were treated as a more credible information source than media and government during the crisis and more than three quarters of consumers had high expectations for businesses to protect employees and local communities (Edelman, 2020). Furthermore, consumers are increasingly adapting to virtual interactions fostered by stay-at-home orders and remote working, pushing companies to innovatively engage with them on digital platforms, especially social media (Drenik, 2021).

We examined how companies in China and the U.S., two culturally distinct superpowers, used social media to cultivate relationships with their stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media was chosen because it has been identified as an ideal channel for communication during a disaster due to its low-cost, easy-to-use, accessible, and adaptable features (Houston et al., 2015). Further, it has been shown in previous research that it has the capacity to foster organization-public relationships in general (Chen et al., 2020; Mills et al., 2009). In both countries in-person contact between organizations and their publics became limited as a result of lockdown measures (eMarketer, 2020) and there were substantial spikes in social media usage as the pandemic progressed (Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020). Those contextual factors indicate that social media may have functioned as a lifeline for organizations to connect with their publics. Despite an increase in corporate communication studies about social media generally (Xu & Wu, 2020), few studies have examined relationship cultivation strategies in cross-national contexts (Huang, 2004; Men & Tsai, 2012), and even fewer have focused on disaster communication like what occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic (Huang et al., 2021).

This study examined the business communication process between organizations and their stakeholders during the pandemic. Also, the researchers compared whether and how Chinese and U.S. companies performed differently by answering the following research questions:

• RQ1: What relationship cultivation strategies did companies in China and the U.S. adopt on social media to cultivate quality relationships with their strategic publics during the COVID-19 pandemic?

• RQ2: What functions of social media did companies in China and the U.S. use for disaster communication with publics during the COVID-19 pandemic?

• RQ3. How did publics cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally engage with Chinese and U.S. companies’ COVID-19-related posts?

• RQ4. How, if at all, did companies’ relationship cultivation strategies and functional use of social media influence public engagement during the pandemic in China and the U.S.?

This study was grounded on relationship management, disaster communication, and public engagement theories. Additionally, two frameworks were used for data collection: relationship cultivation strategies (Huang et al., 2021; Ki & Hon, 2008) and disaster use of social media (Houston et al., 2015). Relationship cultivation strategies have been defined as “organizational behavioral efforts to establish, cultivate, and sustain relationships with strategic publics” (Ki & Hon, 2008, p.5) and they were used to understand how organizations communicated with publics (Hon & Grunig, 1999). Similarly, the disaster use of social media provided a typology for categorizing the disaster social media content produced by entities like organizations (Houston et al., 2015), detailing what organizations communicated. Public responses to the companies’ posts were assessed using a multi-dimensional construct of engagement that included cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions (Chen, 2017, 2018). A full comparative analysis was carried out using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Theoretically, the findings advance the relationship management, social media engagement, disaster communication, and cross-cultural public relations and business communication literature. From a business communication perspective, it provides insights for how companies in China and the U.S. could effectively use social media to cultivate relationships with stakeholders during challenging times.

Literature Review

Relationship Cultivation Strategies

After more than three decades of development (Ferguson, 1984), relationship management has become an important theoretical framework in public relations research (Grunig & Huang, 2000; Ledingham, 2006). By prioritizing relationship initiation, cultivation, and maintenance, organizations can effectively address publics’ diverse expectations and create a win-win situation (Grunig & Huang, 2000; Hon & Grunig, 1999; Kent & Taylor, 2002). This relationship building process is facilitated by an organization’s communication efforts (Ki & Hon, 2009). Previous research has identified six specific relationship cultivation strategies that can guide organizations’ business communication efforts, including access, assurances, openness, positivity, networking, and sharing of tasks (Ki & Hon, 2009). To elaborate, access is a strategy used to make an organization available to its publics, so that their publics can connect with them directly and share opinions and thoughts. Assurance suggests that the involved parties assure the legitimacy of each other’s concerns and their commitment to the relationship (Ki & Hon, 2009). Openness concerns the open and honest disclosure of thoughts and feelings between the parties involved in the relationship (Hon & Grunig, 1999). Positivity refers to the communication efforts that “make the relationship more enjoyable” for publics involved (Ki & Hon, 2009, p.7), which may manifest as cheerfulness, courtesy, and politeness in the messages. Networking is a strategy used by organizations to build coalitions with the same stakeholders that its key publics network with (Ki & Hon, 2009). Sharing of tasks refers to an organization’s efforts to work together with its publics to solve problems of mutual interest (Ki & Hon, 2009). Together, the relationship cultivation strategies provide a framework for assessing how organizations communicate with their publics.

Numerous studies have investigated the cultivation strategies in various organizational contexts, such as nonprofit (Waters et al., 2011), political (Seltzer & Zhang, 2010), corporate (O’Neil, 2014), and employee relationship management (Shen, 2011) settings, and supported their effectiveness in producing positive relational outcomes. Recent research has focused attention on the use of relationship cultivation strategies on social media (Li, 2015; Men & Tsai, 2012; O’Neil, 2014), providing a theoretical understanding of how the strategies work in stable economic conditions. However, organizations in fluid situations are confronted with shifting external stakeholder relationships as environmental factors impact relationships and the relational outcomes (Brown & White, 2010; Ni & Wang, 2011; Xie, 2019). In those situations, it may require different standards and selections of relationship cultivation strategies. Thus, dynamic disaster situations provide a unique and meaningful context to examine relationship cultivation strategies. Further, few of the previous studies examined the strategies beyond a western context, despite that cultural differences can lead to different message designs among publics (Cucchi, 2019; Huang et al., 2021). Detailing the strategies used in two distinct cultures could prove useful for future public relations and business communication theory development. Therefore, we propose the following research question:

• RQ1: What relationship cultivation strategies did companies in China and the U.S. adopt on social media to cultivate quality relationships with their strategic publics during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Functional Use of Social Media in Disasters

In disaster situations, social media is used to mobilize, locate data, verify information, and distribute knowledge (Potts, 2013). It facilitates one-to-many, easy to use, two-way communication with publics at a time when information is in high demand, but not always available (Houston et al., 2015). Houston et al. (2015) explained that disasters can be natural (hurricanes and earthquakes), technological (oil spills), or human caused (terrorism). In those scenarios, social media helps improve general situational awareness and facilitates peer-to-peer communication (Zhang et al., 2019). With so many affordances, social media has positioned itself alongside traditional mass media as a primary mode of communication during disasters (Zhang et al., 2019) and therefore worthy of scholarly research. Companies turn to social media to meet their communication needs because social media are systems that help mediate communication by interacting, structuring, and architecting the flow of information among actors in disasters (Potts, 2013). From the organization’s public communication perspective, a functional framework is needed to systematically detail how companies use social media during disasters.

The current study employed Houston et al.’s (2015) functional framework for social media use in disasters. The framework was based on a uses and gratifications approach to media and grounded on the idea that individuals use media for specific needs they have (Katz et al., 1973). Applied to the present study, companies used social media in specific ways to address perceived needs. The framework provided a method for categorizing which companies used social media, the needs those companies attempted to address, and their publics’ responses. Originally, Houston et al. (2015) found 15 emergent categories based on a review of the literature. For example, during disasters individuals can use social media to receive disaster preparedness information, call for help or action, etc.; news agencies can use social media to document what is happening, deliver, and consume news coverage of the disaster, etc.; and organizations can use social media to provide support, raise public awareness, and express concerns, well-wishes, or memorials, etc. to keep their publics either functionally or emotionally gratified (Houston et al., 2015). The framework was consistent with other case studies in disaster communication. For example, Liu et al. (2018) have constituted multiple social media response strategies that could be adopted by different types of organizations before, during, and immediately after Hurricane Harvey, a natural disaster. Ye and Ki (2017) indicated that information giving and accommodative strategies adopted by BP on social media significantly increased favorable comments by its stakeholders during the oil spill crisis. Zhao and Zhan (2019) suggested that organizations should employ personally relatable messages on social media that accommodate people’s emotional needs during disasters via a case study of the Manchester Terrorist Attack.

Houston et al. (2015) further categorized those 15 functions based on which phase of a disaster they were used in, including preevent, event, and/or postevent. Content functions specific to the pre- and post- event phases were excluded from the current analysis because the data collection period took place during the event phase of the disaster. Thus, the current study proposed the following question:

• RQ2: What functions of social media did companies in China and the U.S. use for disaster communication with publics during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Public Engagement

Social media provides an ideal platform for communication-based public engagement. With its openness, interactive, personal, and low-cost features, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for relationship building and public engagement (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012; Smith & Gallicano, 2015). Although public engagement is recognized as a key concept in public relations, its conceptualization still lacks consistency and is context-dependent (Morehouse & Saffer, 2019). As such, this study used a social-psychology perspective of engagement (Hollebeek et al., 2014) and defined it on social media as a multidimensional construct (Chen, 2018) that included dimensions of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement, which were all considered potential outcomes of relationship management efforts (Huang et al., 2021).

Behavioral engagement was found in the responses to organizational communication endeavors (Guo & Saxton, 2018), in this case the “likes,” shares, and comments given to each post. Behavioral engagement was a fit for social media research given that it was an inherent technological affordance of social media that was observable and measurable to researchers (Saxton & Waters, 2014). Emotionally, engagement suggests affective expression, dedication, and attachment to the message (Kang, 2014). Emotional engagement was expressed through the publics’ emotional reactions in their comments to a companies’ posts and conveyed positive (e.g., happy) or negative feelings (e.g., sadness) (Li et al., 2020). Emotional engagement can be particularly salient during times of crisis and it may resonate with publics then diffuse across social media (Mak & Ao, 2019). Several recent studies have suggested that the COVID-19 evoked emotional responses from consumers, such as fear and hope, which drove purchase decisions (Kim et al., 2021) and served as consumers’ coping strategies to adapt to the uncertainties in the environment (Guthrie et al., 2021). Cognitively, engagement indicates information processing and a psychological motivational state that influences individuals’ interactive tendency (Hollebeek et al., 2014). In our study, cognitive engagement was reflected in the diverse message content that emerged in the public comments to organizational posts. For example, publics may have raised questions or requested help from a company after reading its posts (Ginossar, 2008; Men & Tsai, 2012). During the pandemic, companies faced a number of new challenges, such as emotionally vulnerable consumers (Kim et al., 2021; Milakovic, 2021; Song et al., 2021), online misinformation (Bridgman et al., 2020), and economic and environmental turbulence (Mohsin et al., 2021). Song et al. (2021) studied consumer behaviors during COVID-19 in the restaurant industry and the findings suggested that fear significantly influenced consumers’ hygienic behavior, support for local businesses, and conscious consumption. The spread of COVID-related misinformation on social media posed serious risks for public health (Bridman et al., 2020), which created information disorder and changed consumers’ normal information processing (Guo & Cannella, 2021). Those changes challenged companies to become a credible source, good listeners, and effective communicators (Guo & Cannella, 2021) and posed new challenges to public engagement. The situation raised important questions regarding how publics engaged with organizations’ messages. This leads to our third research question:

• RQ3. How did publics cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally engage with Chinese and U.S. companies’ COVID-19-related posts?

Previous literature has indicated the effectiveness of companies’ relational efforts on public engagement. For instance, organizations’ communication using interpersonal and dialogic approaches, both of which are consistent with relationship cultivation strategies, enhance public engagement on social media (Ao & Huang, 2020; Men & Tsai, 2015). However, the connection between public relation efforts and public engagement has been explored very limitedly during turbulent economic times (Huang et al., 2021). If public relations efforts generate different levels of engagement with distinct strategies during tumultuous economic situations, strategies different than those used during normal economic times, it would be valuable to both scholars and industry to have evidence of a possible shift. Therefore, it is worth examining whether and how those conclusions will hold during a disaster situation like the COVID-19 pandemic and we propose the following research question:

• RQ4. How, if at all, did companies’ relationship cultivation strategies and functional use of social media influence public engagement during the pandemic in China and the U.S.?

The Study Context: China versus U.S

China and the U.S. have been subjects of numerous comparative studies (Tang et al., 2015) because they are the two largest economies in the world (Bajpai, 2020) with very distinctive cultures. Hofstede’s individualist and collectivist (IC) framework has often been applied to comparative studies between China and the U.S. (e.g., Cheong et al., 2010; Chu et al., 2020; Tang et al., 2015 etc.) According to Hofstede et al. (2005), individualism “pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose,” while collectivism “pertains to societies in which people from birth onward are integrated into strong and cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetimes continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty” (p. 76). For individualist cultures (e.g., the U.S.), people are encouraged to share their feelings and personal opinions honestly. In contrast, collectivist cultures (e.g., China) often demonstrate more harmony-seeking appeals, conflict avoidance, and an authority-directed orientation (Hofstede et al., 2005). The differences in the cultures can create meaningful comparisons for the business communication scholarship. Specifically, the corporate-stakeholder relationships in China and the U.S. may be shaped by the individualistic-collectivistic cultural differences (Ngai & Singh, 2018).

Even though the IC framework has become the most influential research paradigm in studies on cultural differences (Huang et al., 2018), the construct has been criticized as being conceptually “fuzzy” (Earley & Gibson, 1998), not valid (Fjneman et al., 1996) and not as universally applicable as it purports to be (McSweeney, 2002). Thus, some scholars have proposed that there be a differentiation between relational and group collectivism (Brewer & Chen, 2007). To elaborate on the differences, a relational collectivist society has a shared understanding that the self is best represented as a node in a tightly connected network of interpersonal relationships, agency can be vested in networks of reciprocal relationships, and relationship maintenance would be given priority when interests conflict. In comparison, a group collectivist society has a shared understanding that the self is best represented as an interchangeable part of a larger social entity, agency can be vested in groups as collective entities, and group interests would be given priority when interests conflict (Brewer & Chen, 2007).

Many scholars have argued that it is critical for researchers to explicitly differentiate between relational collectivism and group collectivism because the two collectivist concepts may be more incompatible overall than what aspects of individualism are with aspects of either form of collectivism (Brewer & Chen, 2007). It is especially helpful to think of China’s case primarily in terms of relational collectivism, because China has shown such a strong orientation toward positive, long-term relationships with other people, even more so than other collectivist cultures (Leung et al., 2014). Guided by both structural and rational relation-centered orientations, Chinese people often rely on relationships to solve problems and they view relationships as a resource for development (Huang et al., 2018).

The politico-social and economic dimensions of a country can also impact how organizations communicate with their publics, including their degree of information transparency (Men et al., 2020; Rim et al., 2019). For example, Rim et al. (2019) compared corporate annual reports and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports among companies in China, South Korea, and the U.S. and found significant differences in their levels of transparency, which was reflected in the amount of information, participation, and accountability. They suggested that the institutionalization of CSR, government regulations, and cultural impacts may explain the differences. Historically, U.S.-based companies have shown greater transparency compared with Chinese-based companies and those differences may have become more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when one considers the different pandemic responses each nation used. To be more specific, a “whole-of-government” approach allowed China to expeditiously deploy manpower, resources and sense-making strategies nationally to address the situation (He et al., 2020) whereas the U.S. response was structured in a decentralized way, with responsibility delegated to individual states and divided along partisan lines (Altman, 2020).

While there seemed to be reasons to look for differences between distinct cultures, Yeo et al. (2020) wondered if different cultures might show similar emotions during stressful situations. They raised the possibility after finding that the public’s emotional responses on Twitter remained consistent across the stages of a prolonged crisis, the disappearance of Malysian Airlines flight 370, that involved a global audience. It is therefore reasonable to question if the different cultural backgrounds and COVID-19 narratives may have created different, or similar, public expectations for organizational behaviors, and if differences, if there were any, influenced the publics’ engagement with the strategies. These questions of differences or similarities provided further justification for the previous research questions inclusion of two countries in the analysis.

Method

A content analysis was conducted on social media posts made by 30 Chinese Fortune 500 companies and 30 U.S. Fortune 500 companies with active social media accounts (see Table 1). Weibo and Twitter were selected as the data collection platforms to ensure the internal validity of the design (Riffe et al., 2019). Both platforms were among the most popular social media sites in China and the U.S., respectively (Statista, 2020), and they shared similar interfaces, functions, and other technological affordances (e.g., word limits and account verification), providing a basis for making comparisons between the two platforms. One notable difference between the platforms was how their word limits functioned. Twitter allowed a maximum of 280 characters in each Tweet, while Weibo allowed up to 2,000 Chinese characters. However, Weibo only displayed 140 characters on a users’ timeline unless the user clicked a link to read the entire post (Vincent, 2016). The initial limitation of 140 Chinese characters on a users’ timeline made Weibo a comparable platform to Twitter for the purposes of this study.

Table 1.

Descriptive Information of Companies’ Posts During COVID-19.

Variable/measure	China	US	t	χ2
Relationship cultivation strategies	N = 756	N = 645
Access	263 (34.8%)	436 (67.6%)	−11.88***	149.86***
Positivity	374 (49.5%)	540 (83.7%)	−14.16***	180.04***
Openness	588 (77.8%)	644 (99.8%)	5.89***	159.78***
Sharing of tasks	13 (1.7%)	32 (5.0%)	−3.44**	11.77**
Networking	284 (37.6%)	237 (36.7%)	−0.81	.10
Assurances	398 (52.6%)	83 (12.9%)	16.84***	244.26***
Disaster social media use	N = 756	N = 645
Signal and detect disease threat	6 (0.8%)	3 (0.5%)		.59
Send information on help or assistance	447 (59.1%)	171 (26.5%)		150.18***
Discuss medical/scientific information/plans	3 (0.4%)	79(12.2%)		88.71***
Raise public awareness	13 (1.7%)	58 (9.0%)		38.27**
Express emotions, respects, wishes and memorial	144 (19.0%)	54 (8.4%)		32.69**
Tell stories and personal experiences	53 (7.0%)	94 (14.6)		21.20***
Discuss socio-political and scientific causes and implications	20 (2.6%)	30 (4.7%)		4.07*
Respond to criticism and questionings	0 (0.0%)	55 (8.5%)		68.37***
Public education about knowledge, tips and measures	41 (5.4%)	100 (15.5%)		39.08***
Other	29 (3.7%)	1 (0.0%)		16.54***
Purpose of public responses	N = 553	N = 279
Help/information seeking	51 (9.2%)	34 (12.2%)		1.33
Informative reply	20 (3.6%)	7 (2.5%)		4.48*
Unsolicited information	32 (5.8%)	21 (7.5%)		.91
Emotional expression	238 (43.0%)	57 (20.4%)		107.36***
Advocacy or request	17 (3.1%)	21 (7.5%)		1.34
Conflict/complaint/criticism	21 (3.8%)	29 (10.4%)		2.99
Not related to the COVID-19 outbreak	112 (20.3%)	16 (5.7%)		63.78***
Other or posted by the company itself	62 (11.2%)	94 (33.7%)		1.18
Emotions in the public responses	N = 553	N = 279
Anger	13 (2.4%)	5(1.8%)		2.45
Fear/Anxiety	8 (1.4%)	2(0.1%)		2.75
Sadness	1 (0.2%)	0(0.0%)		.85
Guilt	1 (0.2%)	1 (0.0%)		.01
Disappointment/dissatisfaction	10 (1.8%)	38 (13.6%)		21.96***
Happiness/Satisfaction	93 (16.8%)	24 (8.6%)		33.48***
Hope	66 (11.9%)	12 (4.3%)		31.24***
Pride	1 (0.2%)	5 (1.8%)		3.37
Love	7 (1.3%)	6 (2.2%)		.00
Gratefulness	9 (1.6%)	16 (5.7%)		3.31
Surprise/Confusion	0 (0.0%)	13 (4.7%)		15.38***
Sarcasm	2 (0.4%)	0 (0%)		1.71
Other emotions	0 (0.0%)	0 (0%)
Cannot be identified or posted by the company itself	342 (61.8%)	157 (56.27%)		128.05

Note. Relationship cultivation strategies were not mutually exclusive and thus aggregated to more than 100%; they were continuous variables when conducting t tests, and were recoded into dummy variables when conducting the Chi-square test with 0 meaning no present and 1 meaning at least one tactic present.

^*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Sampling and Data Collection

Chinese companies were randomly sampled from a list of the largest “Fortune China 500” corporations (Fortune China, 2019). Using an iterative process, companies (n = 12) were removed and replaced if they did not maintain an active Weibo account. Following Gao (2016) and Rybalko and Seltzer (2010), accounts from either country that had not been updated for more than 1 month or had less than 20 Weibo posts (Chinese companies) or tweets (U.S. companies) in total were considered inactive. Inactive accounts were replaced with randomly selected, active accounts until 30 active Weibo accounts had been collected. U. S. companies were sampled from the “Fortune 500” list (Fortune, 2020) and underwent the same iterative process until 30 randomly sampled Fortune 500 companies with active Twitter accounts had been selected.

Weibo data collection

An open-source Weibo Crawler (Dataabc, 2020) was used for data collection of the Chinese companies’ accounts. The time frame for data collection covered each country’s initial pandemic adjustment phase. Weibo posts from Chinese companies were collected from January 20th, 2020, when WHO confirmed human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (World Health Organization Western Pacific, 2020), until April 10th, 2020, which was 3 days after China lifted their initial lockdown in Wuhan (Gan, 2020). In total, 9,671 initial posts were collected from organizations and then screened using a list of COVID-19 related keywords (e.g., “新冠, ¹ ” “疫情, ² ” etc., Huang et al., 2021), generating 5,041 posts. The top user comment under each post (if any), as rated by the Weibo algorithm, ³ was also collected (n = 3,628). A comment would also be included if it was the only comment made to a post.

Twitter data collection

In the U.S. the initial pandemic adjustment phase came later, yet lasted longer than China’s because it lacked a definitive point when COVID-19 measures were lifted nationally. As a result, the data collection period for U.S. companies’ Twitter posts was set from March 19th, 2020, when U.S. COVID-19 cases surpassed 10,000 (Feuer, 2020), to November 7th, 2020, when the data was collected. A Twitter crawling tool (Ajctrl, 2020) was used to retrieve 33,687 tweets from the U.S. companies during the data collection period. Among them, 645 tweets contained COVID-19 related keywords (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus, etc., Lamsal, 2020) and were selected for further analyses, with 279 top user comments included based on the Twitter algorithm. ⁴ There were fewer COVID-19 related tweets than Weibo posts so 15% of the Weibo posts were randomly sampled (n = 756) to obtain comparable datasets. The top user comments of the Weibo posts were also sampled, yielding 553 comments.

Coding procedures

To ensure measurement reliability during the coding process (Riffe et al., 2019), a codebook was developed in both Chinese and English. Independent coders were hired as the first authors’ research assistants and completed the coding tasks. The two data sets (Weibo and Twitter) were not collected at the same time, so we coded the Weibo data first. Two graduate student coders who were both native Chinese were hired and coded the Weibo posts. Two other coders who are proficient in English (both received 7.0 in the IELTS test) coded tweets. Intercoder reliability was tested using 15% subsets of the samples (113 Weibo posts and 97, tweets respectively). Cohen’s Kappa reliability ranged from .74 to 1.0 for Weibo posts, and from .79 to 1.0 for tweets across most variables, ⁵ indicating acceptable agreement between the coders (Perreault & Leigh, 1989). The coders then worked independently to code the remaining posts.

Measures

Measures of the six relationship cultivation strategies were adopted from previous research (Huang et al., 2021; Ki & Hon, 2008). Each strategy was coded as absent (0) or present (1), then aggregated and reported on the post level. For instance, access was identified by a company’s contact information in their message, its response to publics’ comments, and sequentially organized replies to the publics’ questions, requests, and concerns. Positivity included the presence of useful information, communicative conventions, recreational elements, and conversation starters, etc. These indicators were not mutually exclusive categories and a single post may have contained several strategies.

Following Huang et al. (2021), companies’ functional use of social media in disasters was assessed using an adaptation of Houston et al.’s (2015) functional framework for social media use in disaster planning, response, and research. In total, nine social media functions were identified that organizations might use during the disaster phase: sending information about help or assistance, raising public awareness, responding to criticisms and questions, etc. Guided by Houston et al. (2015), functional uses of social media were coded as mutually exclusive categories, with each individual post being assigned to the most relevant category.

Three dimensions of public engagement were measured using naturally occurring matrices, including cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement (Ji et al., 2017). Cognitive engagement was operationalized as seven types of message content found in publics’ comments on companies’ posts (e.g., “Requesting help or information,” Men & Tsai, 2012). Each reply was also assessed for specific emotions as a sign of emotional engagement. In total, 13 emotions were assessed, with five negative (e.g., anger; fear/anxiety; sadness etc.) adapted from Jin et al. (2014), five positive (e.g., happiness/Satisfaction; hope; gratefulness etc.) adapted from Fredrickson (2003), and the three emotions of surprise/confusion, sarcasm, and Other (Wu et al., 2021). Finally, a simple number count of likes, shares and comments was used to indicate the level of behavioral engagement for each post (Chen, 2017).

A series of company- and post-level characteristics were added as control variables. Company-level characteristics included its industry, type of business, and Weibo followers. Post-level characteristics included message vividness and content originality, that is, whether the post was original or forwarded (Men & Tsai, 2012). Table 1 provides the specific variables.

Statistical tests

The objective of the statistical analysis was twofold. First, to answer RQs 1-3 a descriptive analysis was used to map the patterns found in the organizational posts and public responses, including which relationship cultivation strategies were adopted, how social media was used for disaster communication in the organizational posts, and what purposes and emotions were identified in the public responses. Comparative tests were conducted to look for differences between Chinese and U.S. companies, a t test and a Chi-square test were used according to the levels of variables examined.

Second, to answer RQ4, we modeled the relationships between companies’ strategic features and public engagement. Public engagement was measured in three dimensions and each dimension had its own statistical feature. Thus, we adopted three different statistical models to fit the three different dependent variables. For example, behavioral engagement was measured with the three indicators of likes, shares and comment counts. According to the frequency analysis, the three indicators of behavioral engagement were all limited dependent variables with a lower limit of zero, which suggested that any estimates undertaken using a linear regression would be biased (Tobin, 1958). Therefore, a Tobit model, which was designed to estimate linear relationships between variables when there is a limited dependent variable (Tobin, 1958), was applied using StataMP 13.1 software.

Moreover, publics’ emotional engagement was measured by first identifying the 13 specific emotions in the public responses and then grouping those into three categories as positive, negative, and other. Positive and negative emotions were then transformed into two dummy variables, with 0 representing “not present” and 1 representing “present.” Thus, two logistic regressions which were appropriate for categorical outcome variables (Stokes et al., 2012) were conducted with positive and negative emotions as the dependent variables respectively.

Lastly, publics’ cognitive engagement was gauged by identifying the purposes of public responses, generating a multilevel nominal outcome variable. Thus, we also performed a logistic analysis that modeled multiple logits (Stokes et al., 2012) to examine how cognitive engagement was predicted.

Results

RQ1 asked how Chinese and U.S. companies employed relationship cultivation strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic and if there were differences. It is worth noting that Chinese companies posted significantly more COVID-19 related messages than U.S. companies (χ² = 16581.22, p < .001). The descriptive analysis showed that openness was the most frequently used strategy for both Chinese and U.S. companies (nChina = 588, 77.8%; nU.S. = 644, 99.8%), and sharing of tasks was the least frequently used strategy for both (nChina = 13, 1.7%; nU.S. = 32, 5.0%) companies. However, U.S. companies scored higher in their use of access (t = −11.88, p < .001), positivity (t = −14.16, p < .001), and sharing of tasks (t = −3.44, p < .01) to cultivate relationships, while Chinese companies got a higher score in the strategy of assurances (t = 16.84, p < .001). It is worth noting that as for openness, U.S. companies adopted that strategy more frequently than Chinese companies. Specifically, 99.8% of U.S. companies applied the openness strategy with at least one indicator present, whereas the same strategy was adopted by only 77.8% of Chinese companies (χ² = 159.78, p < .001). However, Chinese companies received higher scores than U. S. companies, suggesting that Chinese companies who adopted the openness strategies generally had more indicators present (t = 5.89, p < .001). In comparison, less indicators of openness were present in the U. S. companies’ tweets. Table 1 provides detailed results.

RQ2 explored Chinese and U.S. companies’ use of social media in disasters during the COVID-19 pandemic and their differences. As shown in Table 1, the results found that compared to U.S. companies, Chinese companies were significantly more inclined to send information about help or assistance (χ² = 150.18, p < .001) and express emotions (χ² = 32.69, p < .01). U.S. companies, in comparison, more often tried to raise public awareness (χ² = 38.27, p < .01), tell stories (χ² = 21.20, p < .001 ), discuss socio-political and scientific implications (χ² = 4.07, p < .05), respond to criticisms and questions (χ² = 68.37, p < .001), and educate the public (χ2 = 16.54, p < .001). Both Chinese and U.S. companies rarely signaled and detected disease threats (nChina = 6, 0.8%, nU.S. = 3, 0.5 %). Table 1 details the findings.

RQ3 asked how publics of Chinese and U.S. companies engaged with companies behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively and their differences. Behaviorally, the average Chinese company post received about 41 likes (M = 41.30, SD = 213.93), 48 shares (M = 47.62, SD = 111.77), and 18 comments (M = 17.73, SD = 45.88). In comparison, each U.S. company Tweet received around 50 likes (M = 49.72, SD = 374.06), 15 shares (M = 15.23, SD = 108.04), and 4 comments (M = 3.85, SD = 24.72). The average share count for Chinese company posts were significantly higher than U.S. company tweets (t = 5.49, p < .001). Also, the average comment counts for Chinese company posts were also significantly higher than U.S. company tweets (t = 6.88, p < .001). Table 1 provides the full results.

When looking at emotional engagement in the responses, publics of Chinese companies tended to express more positive (n = 176, 31.8%) than negative (n = 33, 6.0%) emotions. Happiness/satisfaction was the most frequently used emotion in the comments by publics to Chinese companies’ (n = 93, 16.8%), which was significantly higher than in the publics’ comments to U.S. companies (χ² = 33.48, p < .001). Comments by publics also displayed more hope than publics of U.S. companies (χ² = 31.24, p < .001). Similar to publics of Chinese companies, publics of U.S. companies also posted more positive comments (n = 63, 22.6%) than negative comments (n = 46, 16.5%), despite their most frequently used emotion being disappointment/dissatisfaction (n = 38, 12.8%), which was also significantly higher than the disappointment/dissatisfaction comments from publics of Chinese companies (χ² = 21.96, p < .001). Refer to Table 1 for details.

Cognitive engagement had eight categories (see Table 1) and among those categories, over one-third of the top-rated public comments were coded as emotional expressions in China (n = 238, 43.0%), which suggested that the public comments may have served the goal of releasing public emotions (Ginossar, 2008). In comparison, fewer public comments to the U.S. company messages were coded as emotional expressions (n = 57, 20.4%; χ² = 107.36, p < .001). Publics of Chinese companies were also more likely to provide an informative reply to companies’ posts than publics of U.S. companies (χ² = 4.48, p < .05). Conflicts, complaints or criticisms were rare public responses in both China (n = 21, 3.8%) and the U.S. (n = 29, 10.4%). Please see Table 1 for full descriptive results.

RQ4 explored how Chinese and U.S. companies’ relationship cultivation strategies and disaster social media use influenced the engagement of publics during the COVID-19 pandemic. As shown in Table 2, the overall results revealed that in China, access was the most effective strategy because it was positively associated with all of the behavioral engagement indicators, including the total number of likes (Coef. = 35.83, p < .001), shares (Coef. = 51.65, p < .001), and comments (Coef. = 20.12, p < .001). However, the effect of access was not significant in the U.S. Instead, openness significantly predicted all three levels of behavioral engagement, that is, likes (Coef. = 204.98, p < .001), shares (Coef. = 64.72, p < .001), and comments (Coef. = 17.35, p < .01). Table 2 displays the full results.

Table 2.

Random Effects Tobit Regression Results.

Predictors	Dependent variables
	Likes		Shares		Comments
	China	US	China	US	China	US
Relationship cultivation strategies
Access	35.83***	7.53	51.65***	−1.95	20.12***	−0.28
Positivity	−10.15	−4.54	−5.64	−2.11	0.09	−1.32
Openness	4.74	204.98***	15.30*	64.72***	4.55	17.35**
Sharing of tasks	22.86	−30.31	58.22*	−24.56	11.76	−2.45
Networking	−12.12	−27.21	9.96	−4.96	0.45	−3.14
Assurances	−12.09	−17.75	−11.86	−6.48	−5.73*	−2.99
Disaster social media use a
Signal and detect disease threat	−2.02	−159.42	−427.22	−27.52	−181.75	−23.39
Send information on help or assistance	2.91	−34.38	11.65	−6.93	−13.48	−38.33
Discuss medical/scientific information/plans	4.24	84.56	58.65	33.46	10.54	−29.87
Raise public awareness	11.20	−21.05	30.93	−20.14	−17.57	−36.16
Express emotions, concerns, wishes and memorial	3.34	14.34	19.87	3.84	−5.97	−35.40
Tell stories and personal experiences	6.27	−24.05	22.14	−4.65	−6.14	−42.58
Discuss socio-political/scientific implications	29.07	−32.66	27.00	3.08	−3.59	−51.01
Respond to criticism and questionings	b	−30.15	b	−8.35	b	−39.85
Public education about knowledge, tips, and measures	−4.64	−30.51	24.30	−2.99	−8.60	−42.06
Model fit	χ2 = 1120.11 p < .001 Pseudo R2 = .12	χ2 = 95.23 p < .001 Pseudo R2 = .01	χ2 = 727.74 p < .001 Pseudo R2 = .10	χ2 = 116.27 p < .001 Pseudo R2 = .02	χ2 = 725.39 p < .001 Pseudo R2 = .11	χ2 = 222.91 p < .001 Pseudo R2 = .07

Note.^aBase category: Other function; ^bZero case was observed in this variable.

^*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

When looking at the effects of relationship cultivation strategies and disaster social media use on emotional engagement, the overall results suggested that emotions of publics of Chinese and U.S. companies were predicted by very different factors. In China, the relationship cultivation strategy of access had a significant impact on positive emotions (B = 0.68, OR = 1.98, p < .01), and a variety of disaster social media uses had a significant influence, including sending information about help or assistance (B = 2.51, OR = 12.32, p < .05), raising public awareness (B = 3.06, OR = 21.41, p < .05), expressing emotions (B = 2.74, OR = 15.49, p < .05), telling stories and personal experiences (B = 2.87, OR = 17.68, p < .05), and discussing socio-political and scientific implications (B = 2.57, OR = 13.12, p < .05). In the US, only the relationship cultivation strategy of assurance significantly predicted positive emotions (B = .98, OR = 2.66, p < .05). No variables significantly predicted negative emotions in either China or the U.S. (See Table 3).

Table 3.

Logistic Regression Results.

Emotions		Predictors	B	SE(b)	Wald χ2	ORs
China	Positive emotions	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Access	.68**	.23	8.57	1.98
		Disaster social media use a
		Send information on help or assistance	2.51*	1.12	5.07	12.32
		Raise public awareness	3.06*	1.30	5.60	21.41
		Express emotions, respects, wishes and memorial	2.74*	1.11	6.14	15.49
		Tell stories and personal experiences	2.87*	1.14	6.38	17.68
		Discuss socio-political and scientific implications	2.57*	1.25	4.24	13.12
	Negative emotions		NS
US	Positive emotions	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Assurances	0.98*	0.49	4.02	2.66
	Negative emotions		NS

^aBase category: Other function.

Note. The table displays only significant variables. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

For cognitive engagement, we conducted a multinomial logistic regression analysis to examine the effect of relationship cultivation strategies and disaster social media use on public responses. Table 4 gives a summary of the results, showing that relationship cultivation strategies and disaster social media use both had a significant influence on the responses by publics of Chinese companies, but responses by the publics of U.S. companies were only influenced by a companies’ disaster social media use.

Table 4.

Multinomial Logistic Regression Results.

Purpose of responses		Predictors	B	SE(b)	Wald χ2	ORs
China	Help /information seeking	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Access	1.46*	0.52	7.88	4.30
	Informative reply	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Positivity	2.10***	0.51	17.10	8.20
		Disaster social media use a
		Public education about knowledge, tips, and measures	−5.65	2.25	6.33	0.00
	Emotional expression	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Access	1.00	0.42	5.85	2.73
		Express emotions, respects, wishes, and memorial	2.87***	1.23	5.46	17.65
	Advocacy or request	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Access	1.72*	0.66	6.77	5.56
	Conflict /complaint /criticism	Relationship cultivation strategies
		Access	1.22 *	0.60	4.14	3.38
		Positivity	1.19 *	0.54	4.87	3.28
		Disaster social media use a
		Discuss socio-political and scientific causes and implications	7.29 *	3.35	4.73	1459.78
US	Help /information seeking	Disaster social media use a
		Send information on help or assistance	7.28**	2.43	8.96	1450.99
		Discuss medical/scientific information/plans	6.77**	0.34	8.35	871.31
		Express emotions, concerns, wishes and memorial	9.54**	3.49	7.46	13904.95
	Advocacy	Disaster social media use a
		Send information on help or assistance	4.54*	2.23	4.15	93.69
	Conflict	Disaster social media use a
		Send information on help or assistance	4.69*	2.11	4.95	108.85

Note. The table displays only significant variables.

^aBase category: Other function.

^*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Discussion

Social media played a critical role in connecting organizations and their publics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Constrained organizational resources, heightened public emotions, and a turbulent social environment imposed challenges for companies who tried to engage with their publics. Drawing on relationship management theory, this study examined and compared the relational efforts employed by large Chinese and U.S. corporations.

Our first observation was that Chinese companies and their publics were much more engaged in the COVID-19 related discussion on social media than their U.S. counterparts. There were substantially more COVID-19 related messages posted by Chinese companies than those tweeted by U.S. companies and they received a great deal more responses by their publics. This could be explained by the two countries’ different pandemic responses. China carried out a rigorous anti-pandemic campaign that mobilized their entire society (He et al., 2020) and the COVID-19 pandemic became a major spotlight in China. In contrast, the U.S. took a decentralized national approach and placed responsibility for containing the virus on their individual states (Altman, 2020). Additionally, national social issues, like the George Floyd protests and the presidential election, drew public attention away from the pandemic. While the specific causes of the differences remain unknown, the results showed that there were clear differences between the two countries’ business communication practices and outcomes.

Our study also revealed interesting observations about the similarities and differences in relationship cultivation decisions, identified by which strategies effectively triggered public engagement, and provided insights from a cultural perspective. Although Chinese and U.S. companies both made use of relationship cultivation strategies during the pandemic, U.S. companies may have been more keen in their use of the strategies across most dimensions. A higher proportion of tweets posted by U.S. companies applied the relationship cultivation strategies than Weibo posts made by Chinese companies. This finding may be related to a relatively long history of public relations in the United States compared to China (Hu et al., 2015), with better established norms and more developed strategies (Grunig & Grunig, 1992; Grunig et al., 2006).

In terms of specific relationship cultivation strategies, openness was most frequently used among companies in both China and the U.S. That finding underscores a consensus that maintaining proactive, honest, and candid communication is important in high-uncertainty situations (Seeger, 2006). Sharing of tasks was the least used strategy by companies in both countries. Interestingly, Chinese and U.S. companies presented drastically different preferences in relationship cultivation strategies. U.S. companies showed a stronger tendency toward using access, positivity, and sharing of tasks to build relationships with publics on social media than their Chinese counterparts. In contrast, Chinese companies had a stronger preference for assuring their publics, a strategy marked by the tactics of emotional attachment and showing care. Their use of assurances was likely representative of their strong relation-oriented culture (Huang et al., 2018). Also, China was the first country hit by the outbreak and, at that time, people may have been faced with greater perceived risks and uncertainty because little was known about the severity of the virus. Therefore, it seems reasonable that Chinese publics may have been in great need of assurances and emotional comfort. While relationship management theory is regarded as a normative guideline for cultivating and fostering positive, stable organization-public relationships, our findings add empirical evidence of variance in relationship cultivation strategies across countries.

The relationship cultivation strategies also influenced public engagement in different ways in the two countries. Access was a strong predictor of the Chinese publics’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement, but that was not the case in the U.S. sample. By implementing the access strategy, Chinese companies make themselves reachable to publics (Ki & Hon, 2009), something they may want to consider as Chinese companies have been criticized for poor performance in demonstrating corporate transparency (Transparency International, 2016). Access is a gesture that shows Chinese companies’ efforts of improving information disclosure in a responsible and timely manner, which is particularly important during crises and appreciated by publics (Padgett et al., 2013). As for U.S. companies, Tweets showing openness were more liked, shared, and commented on by publics. Recent years have seen declining corporate trust and rising consumer skepticism in the U.S. (Edelman, 2020; Thomas & Kureshi, 2020). Thus, publics in the U.S. showed a strong appreciation for open and candid corporate communication that reveals an organizations’ humanistic nature.

Our findings also suggest that companies in both China and the U.S. were utilizing social media’s affordances to micro-target messages for disaster communication. However, Chinese companies’ messages focused significantly more on providing help or assistance and expressing emotions, which significantly raised publics’ emotional engagement in a positive way. Worth noting, Chinese publics also showed a significant tendency to express their emotions in their responses, especially in reaction to organizational messages with emotional expressions. That was consistent with China’s relationship-oriented culture (Huang et al., 2018), where expressing emotions, respects, wishes and memories are possibly effective means to building social bonds. In comparison, U.S. companies seemed to use social media more for information dissemination and opinion expression during the pandemic; as they were more keen to discuss prevention measures, causes or implications, remind, and educate the public, and tell stories and share experiences.

Finally, positive emotions, especially happiness, satisfaction or hope, were found significantly more often in Chinese publics’ responses compared to the U.S. publics’ responses, which tended to show more disappointment or dissatisfaction. On the one hand, that tendency was consistent with the cultural differences between the two countries. China, as a collectivist culture, showed a higher degree of harmony and a stronger conflict avoidance orientation, while the U.S., as an individualist culture, tended to express honest feelings and opinions with the belief that conflicts could be beneficial (Hofstede et al., 2005). On the other hand, Chinese publics, influenced by higher authority-directed orientation, may have been aligning with the official narratives which framed the anti-pandemic campaign as an epic war between the people and the virus (He et al., 2020), thus appealing to citizens for positive emotions to boost morale.

Theoretical and Practical Contributions

The primary purpose of this study was to examine organizational relationship management strategies and social media functions used by Chinese and U.S. companies during the COVID-19 global pandemic to test relationship management theory in a unique context. The results showed that relationship management played an important role during a widespread disaster in both China and the U.S. Company’s relationship management efforts proved effective at engaging their strategic publics when certain strategies were used, even during turbulent times. Therefore, this study expanded the application of the relationship cultivation model to a social media-based disaster communication context.

The findings also build on the extant research showing differences in Eastern and Western public relations strategies during normal economic conditions (Men & Tsai, 2012). The current findings add empirical evidence to the cross-national comparison of strategies for business communication, as Chinese and the U.S. companies employed distinct relationship management strategies and social media usage during the disaster and their publics’ responses varied based on which relationship management strategy was used. Ki and Ye (2017) called for more research designed specifically for theory testing, while also noting that comparative research is the first step to understanding global business communication and public relations. This study addressed the need in business communication research for comparative results that can aid in international public relations theory development, as well as guide practitioners during future disasters.

For practitioners, it appears there may be a public relations knowledge gap between the two countries used in this comparison. For example, nearly all of the U.S. posts relied on the openness strategy and that strategy received the highest engagement levels with their publics, indicating that U.S. companies may have been closely monitoring which strategies were most effective with their publics. In contrast, Chinese companies received the highest engagement levels when they made themselves accessible, yet only one third of their posts used that strategy. Both Chinese and U.S. companies used the openness strategy most often, despite the strategy returning noticeably lower engagement levels than access for the Chinese companies. The takeaway is that applying what may be Western-based public relations strategies might not be an effective approach for Chinese practitioners, who likely need to develop their own relationship maintenance strategies; strategies that rely on accessibility because it showed higher engagement levels than openness.

Limitations and Future Research

There were several notable limitations in the current study. The first was that the sample size of the social media posts was small because there were limited COVID-19 related messages posted by the U.S. companies. Next, the data collection period for each country was different because of the time it took for the virus to reach the U.S. and the different national responses to the virus. As a result, U.S. responses may have been influenced by any prior knowledge they had of the virus and the containment situation that had developed in China. Next, two different sets of coders were used to code the two data sets. Although all the coders were provided with the same codebook and rigorous training to ensure inter-coder reliability, the coding process could have introduced some human error. Likewise, the translation of the coding scheme, although following a back-translation process, could have caused some degree of measurement error. Finally, data was collected only during the disaster phase of the pandemic and therefore does not allow for comparisons with pre or post-disaster scenarios.

These findings indicate that more research could be directed toward the culture-based approach to global business communication, as the cultural differences were robust enough to be present even during a global disaster. Future research could replicate the study in other countries and further test the explanatory power of the theories utilized in this study in turbulent times. Scholars could also adopt alternative theoretical approaches such as dialogic communication (Kent & Taylor, 1998), authenticity (Molleda, 2010), organizational transparency (Rawlins, 2008), and empathetic communication (Kent & Taylor, 2002) to examine organizations’ communication practices with publics during a disaster in a cross-cultural context. Moreover, a comparison of companies’ communication strategies in the prepandemic, pandemic and postpandemic phases would also generate meaningful results because it might help determine if the strategies work differently in normal and abnormal times, like during a pandemic. Lastly, researchers could utilize other methodologies, such as surveys and in-depth interviews, to better gauge publics’ attitudes toward organizations during the pandemic in reaction to the various communication strategies and channels used.

Author Biographies

Qiongyao Huang is a lecturer in the School of Public Administration, Nanchang University in China. She is also a phd candidate in the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on strategic organizational communication, public relations, organization-public relationship management, and computer-mediated communications, especially from a cross-cultural perspective.

Benjamin J. Lynn is a doctoral student fellow from the University of Florida who studies live remote sports productions from an organizational perspective. His work is aimed at articulating the underlying communication structures found in live remote sports broadcasts and exploring the decision-making processes that occur within the industry. His research draws on media management scholarship, internal/external organizational communication, leadership, interpersonal, and nonverbal communication.

Chuqing Dong is an assistant professor at the advertising and public relations department of Michigan Stata University. Her research focuses on public relations, corporate social responsibility, relationship management, and digital media.

Shijun Ni is a second-year PhD student in Communication at School of Communication and Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. He received a M.Sc degree in Advanced Information Systems from Hong Kong Baptist University. He has a background in Computer Science, and is expert in programming. His research interests focus on using computational approaches to investigate false and misleading information diffusion on online discussing platforms in the US, Mainland China, and Hong Kong.

Linjuan Rita Men is an associate professor in the Department of Public Relations, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida. Her research interests include internal communication, leadership communication, social media, and enterpreneurial communication.