An increasing number of companies use social media such as micro blogs to promote celebrities in Internet communities. Companies may run their official micro blogs differently, which in turn leads to different public engagements on micro blogging sites. This study takes a perspective on the adoption behaviours of micro blogs in enterprises by looking at the relationship between media frame and audience frame based on the China Fortune 500 firms in 2014. The results show that the updates, active days and followings are associated with public engagement with the corporate official micro blogs. In particular, we found information overload from information updates. The marginal utility of the public engagement decreases as number of updates increases. The results also show that the daily variance of updates has a significant influence on the audience frame.

The main purposes of government environmental policy include improving the objective natural environment as well as reducing the health risk of the public. A majority of studies have tested the means of achieving the first goal. In this paper, we aimed to gather empirical evidence pertaining to the realization of the second goal by drawing on a quasi-natural experiment that was conducted based on the “Action Plan on Air Pollution Prevention and Control” issued in 2013 (AP2013). The research data came from the tracking data of 17,766 individuals from 112 prefecture-level cities of China in 2012 and 2014. Through ordinal logistic regression and DID analysis, a causal relationship between the AP2013 policy and public health risk perceptions was verified, indicating that this policy can significantly decrease public health risk perceptions. By constructing different subsamples, an inverted U-shaped relationship between the causal effect and the length of the policy implementation window was established, which demonstrated the short-term signal effect and long-term implementation effect of this policy. The conclusions can help with the communication and implementation of a government’s policy.

The COVID-19 outbreak has been a public health crisis of international concern, causing huge impact on people’s lives. As an important part of social public crisis management, how to quickly and effectively raise resources to participate in emergency relief in the era of self-media is a common challenge faced by global charitable organizations. This article attempts to use empirical evidence from Tencent charitable crowdfunding platform, the largest charitable crowdfunding platform in China, to answer this question. We consider 205 COVID-19 charitable projects and 11,177,249 donors to assess the process by which non-profit organizations raise funds through the information about project descriptions. Based on the effects of information and emotional framing, we explore the effects of the readability (i.e., complexity and understandability) and negative tone of the project description on fundraising amount. We then investigate the mediating role of forwarding times, as affective response to the text might explain forwarding times, which in turn affects money raised by increasing the visibility of the campaign. On this basis, the moderating role of recipient’s crisis involvement is tested during this process. The empirical results indicate that the complexity of the description will reduce the fundraising amount, while understandability and negative tone help to improve it. Furthermore, we found that forwarding times played an important mediating role in this process. Then the buffer effect of crisis involvement on the negative effect of complexity was validated, and its amplification on the positive effects of understandability was also verified.

Purpose: In this study, the process of crisis information communication is viewed as a systems-based concept. An integrated and systematic three-phase model has been constructed to describe the process of crisis information coverage on the internet. By analyzing factors in the three stages that affect the coverage ratio and speed, this study aims to explore the law of information communication in this process and provide useful evidence for crisis managers to make informed decisions. Design/methodology/approach: A complete information communication model has been constructed including the following three stages: crisis information release, crisis information diffusion and crisis information reception. The effects of important factors and variables in the model have been studied, including the crisis information release quantity, crisis information release mode, crisis information diffusion speed and crisis information obsolescence speed. Findings: The quantitative analysis shows that crisis information release quantity and diffusion speed are positively correlated with coverage ratio; crisis information obsolescence speed is negatively correlated with coverage ratio; and crisis information release mode affects the speed of coverage but does not affect the final coverage ratio. Originality/value: Theoretical value: from the perspective of systems thinking, a detailed, systematic and coupled information coverage model has been constructed. Application value: this study finds the most efficient methods to regulate coverage speed and final rate, knowledge of which may play an important role in guiding the practice of crisis communication management.