Among its main goals, crisis management aims at promoting people awareness in respect of the crisis which they are going to face or in which they are already involved. In order to do that, it uses a wide range of communication tools, among which, over the last decade, social media have proved to be of paramount importance. Based on these premises, the chapter analyses a very meaningful case of crisis communication, which consists of the social media coverage of the early stages of the COVID-19 emergency coming from Italian national and local institutions. The media content analysis carried out on Facebook and Twitter confirms a communication strategy aimed at creating people awareness in respect of the health emergency, suggesting citizens which conducts they need to stop or adopt. However, the analysis also shows that the goal of crisis awareness represents the first step of a wider agenda coming from the Institutions' social posting, which aims at transferring their awareness to citizenship and, as a consequence, inspiring citizens' own responsibility.
TopIntroduction1
In the final season of Scandal (episode 7x12), the popular US political thriller television series, the main character Olivia Pope, a well-known crisis manager, after her dismissal from the White House starts to serve as a guest lecturer at a local university. During her first class, she asks which is “the biggest mistake people make in a crisis” and students answer quoting “a failure to plan” or “an ineffective communication strategy”, or – provoking the lecturer – “telling the truth”; however, all these statements don’t seem able to satisfy Olivia. After a short silence, a voice from the latest desks suggests that the biggest mistake could consist in “not knowing people are in a crisis”. The voice belongs to Annalise Keating, the main character of another popular TV series (How to Get Away with Murder), and this meeting kicks off the crossover between the two series created by Shonda Rhymes.
Even though very short, the dialogue between Olivia and Annalise points out a feature of paramount importance aiming to introduce crisis communication, that is the central role played by crisis awareness.
We are living through a major period of historical transition and constant transformation defined by authoritative scholars as a “crisis society” (Fraser, 1981; Heide & Simonsson, 2019), marked by a persistent exposure to multiple and different risks (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990; Adam et al., 2000) that lead both to endemic uncertainty (Bauman, 1999) and the need to handle, also from a communication point of view, the disrupting events breaking normal routines (just like crisis events) (Perry, 2007). Nevertheless, as Annalise Keating suggests, and Olivia Pope confirms, managing a crisis is the second step of an upstream process based on the primary need to personally gain (and even more let people gain) awareness of being in a crisis situation, and this happens regardless of the nature of the crisis (natural disasters, terrorist attacks, health emergencies, etc.) (Grant & Mack, 2004; Quarantelli, 2005).
Indeed, the very first step in managing a crisis is clearly understanding what is going on and then predicting how the crisis may evolve (Endsley & Garland, 2000) which is essentially about the so called “situation awareness” relying on three main components: «the perception of the elements in an environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future» (Endsley, 1995, p. 36).
What is more, situation awareness is considered as a key precondition to develop an efficient and accurate crisis communication and turns to be necessity both for citizens (and their pressing need for information during a crisis event) and for Public Authorities (PAs), who seek to get control over high-risk environments – from public safety to unpredictable events, such as natural disasters or health emergencies – and to monitor how they develop, carrying out at the same time the indispensable tasks to spread (and get) information, to interact with the public and to perform an effective and real-time decision-making process (Coombs, 2004; 2007a; 2007b).
Over the last years, the process of achieving and maintaining situation awareness has been making evident that social media can play a strategic role on the occasion of the main crisis affecting modern societies (Bruns & Burgess, 2014; Kaufmann, 2015), because of their attitude to act as “awareness system” (Maireder & Ausserhofer, 2014), responding to emotional needs and making people feel as they are contributing and coping with the crisis events (Liu et al., 2013). Of course, the social media strategic role emerges also referring to PAs, which bear a significant responsibility for managing crisis events (Coombs, 2014; Austin & Jin, 2017).
In fact, in an increasingly connected world where citizens are often victims of information overload, PAs have the duty and the need to attract the attention of individuals. Modern decision-making processes do not end in the chambers of power but go on with communicating the implementation of certain public policies or initiatives correctly and in the most widespread way. The spread of social media has radically transformed the ways in which users access the news they are interested in and this is a mechanism that PAs have had to take into account over time, promoting a new communication pact in which the citizen/user is central (Comunello, 2014; Comunello & Mulargia, 2017).