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Recent publications - Negative Word of Mouth On Social Media: A Case Study of Deutsche Bahn’s Accountability Management

 |  Forschung - Research

While social media allows businesses unprecedented levels of communication, those also come with risks, as constant negative Word-of-Mouth (NWOM) may jeopardise a corporate image and cause defensiveness in corporate communication. This paper presents a case study of the railway company Deutsche Bahn and how they communicate through Twitter. For this, Professor Mirbabaie and his co-authors analysed 36,757 Twitter postings using sentiment and content analysis techniques to investigate the management and control of constant NWOM and its’ impact on customers’ perception of the firm. Regardless of their actual accountableness, expressing defensiveness led to users holding the firm accountable more insistently. Therefore, this paper introduces the notion of accountability management and an accompanying theoretical framework to the literature to provide a novel perspective on constant NWOM countermeasures.

Mirbabaie, M., Stieglitz, S., & Marx, J. (2023). Negative Word of Mouth On Social Media: A Case Study of Deutsche Bahn’s Accountability Management. Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research.