Multiple voices and multiple media: Co-constructing BP's crisis response

• Both source and media contribute to overall crisis response.
• Organizations can and should use multiple online platforms to create complementary versions of crisis response that capitalize on the nature of the medium used.
• Facebook offers organizations the potential for creating a “shared” narrative with the traditional media, suggesting a new element of dialogic communication, inter-media dialogue, which considers cross-source dialog as a way to co-opt narrative legitimacy.
• Stakeholders use social media to engage in dialog with each other, specifically for venting and personal communication, making an emotional contribution to the overall crisis narrative.
• Both traditional and non-traditional voices contribute semantically to crisis response.

This article explores the impact of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on the field of crisis communication, and argues that the term “crisis response” needs to be re-conceptualized in order to include the polyvocality of crisis response enabled by online media. This article deconstructs the crisis response to the British Petroleum (BP) Oil Spill from organizational, media, and stakeholder perspectives. Using semantic network analysis, linguistic maps of news articles, press releases, BP Facebook posts, and stakeholder Facebook posts were created to detect the core messages of each group and to determine the roles that source and media play in creating crisis response. Findings support the idea that both source and media contribute to the overall crisis narrative, emphasizing the importance of online media in both organizational and stakeholder response. This study offers insight into the emotional contributions of stakeholder response to the overall crisis narrative, as well as, suggests a new element of dialogic communication called inter-media dialog.