Tobias Metzner

Crisis Management - Technology Acceptance in Crisis Communication: to What Extend Can Social Media Contribute to Crisis Communication? Tobias Metzner

During the last couple of years one could observe the increase of news about natural disasters in the global media. A justified question would be whether the amount of disasters will further increase? However, a more intriguing question in this context is how to deal with the arising consequences. Therefore this paper?s scope is going to focus on crisis communication as part of crisis management. To be more precise, this paper tries to test people?s acceptance of social media for crisis communication. In order to examine this research question, the scientifically approved Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) will be used to derive an appropriate research model. In accordance with the research model hypotheses will be phrased, which will be tried to validate or falsify by using a survey. The evaluation will be done by simple frequency analysis and correlation analysis. The results indicated that people generally accept social media as tool for crisis communication, but only as additional information source to the traditional media. This depends largely on the credibility of information that is communicated through social media. Furthermore, the correlation analysis and thus the hypotheses testing showed that the applicability of the research model that was derived from the TAM is questionable. Therefore, some adaptations are suggested.