"Risk communication is crucial to building community resilience and reducing risk from extreme events. True community resilience involves accurate and timely dissemination of risk information to stakeholders. This book examines the policy and science of risk communication in the digital era. Themes ... include public awareness of risk and public participation in risk communication and resilience building. The first half of the book focuses on conceptual frameworks, components, and the role of citizens in risk communication. The second half examines the role of risk communication in resilience building and provides an overview of some of its challenges in the era of social media. This book looks at the effectiveness of risk communication in socially and culturally diverse communities in the developed and developing world. The interdisciplinary approach bridges academic research and applied policy action. Contributions from Latin America and Asia provide insight into global risk communication at a time when digital technologies have rapidly transformed conventional communication approaches. This book will be of critical interest to policy makers, academicians, and researchers, and will be a valuable reference source for university courses that focus on emergency management, risk communication, and resilience." (Publisher description) more

"Social Media and Crisis Communication provides a unique and timely contribution to the field of crisis communication by addressing how social media are influencing the practice of crisis communication. The book, with a collection of chapters contributed by leading communication researchers, covers ... the current and emerging interplay of social media and crisis communication, recent theories and frameworks, overviews of dominant research streams, applications in specific crisis areas, and future directions. Both the theoretical and the practical are discussed, providing a volume that appeals to both academic-minded readers as well as professionals at the managerial, decision-making level. The audience includes public relations and corporate communication scholars, graduate students studying social media and crisis communication, researchers, crisis managers working in communication departments, and business leaders who make strategic business communication planning. No other volume has provided the overarching synthesis of information regarding the field of crisis communication and social media that this book contains. Incorporated in this volume is the recent Social-mediated Crisis Communication Model developed by the editors and their co-authors, which serves as a framework for crisis and issues management in a rapidly evolving media landscape." (Publisher description) more

"This study provides insights that can inform disaster communication management, policymaking, and theory building through a nationally representative field experiment (N = 2,015 U.S. adults) grounded in media richness theory, information and communication technologies (ICTs) succession theory, and ... the social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model. Key findings include the following: (1) Significant main effects of disaster information source were detected on how likely participants were to seek further disaster information from TV, local government websites, and federal government websites; (2) regardless of information form and source, participants reported strongest intentions to immediately communicate about the disaster predominately via offline interpersonal forms rather than through online organizational and personal forms; and (3) regardless of information source, participants reported strong intentions to evacuate if instructed to do so by the government. These findings call for developing crisis communication theory that is more focused on how publics communicate with each other rather than with organizations about disasters and predict a wider variety of crisis communication outcomes." (Abstract) more