Does my Social Media Burn? – Identify Features for the Early Detection of Company-related Online Firestorms on Twitter

Abstract

Online firestorms pose a serious threat to companies and cause spontaneous information asymmetry between companies and social media users, which is part of the principal-agent theory. Corporate crisis management has already developed strategies to deal with firestorms, but these strategies are more effective if the company identifies a firestorm at an early stage. Therefore, we first identify literature-based characteristics of firestorms and quantify these using data-driven features in a multiple-case study approach based on Twitter data. Secondly, we identify per case the beginning of the firestorm and days with the least fluctuation in the number of posts as reference days. Finally, we compare the features between the starting points and the reference days to determine which features are significantly different. We could identify 24 features that change significantly at the beginning of a firestorm. This enables us to determine which features a company must pay particular attention to in order to detect a firestorm at an early stage. Likewise, we discuss these features in the context of the principal-agent theory with the use of social synchrony and crowd psychology to show how these features change information diffusion and contribute to information asymmetry.