Drs. Eric Waters and Scott D’Urso virtually earned top paper at the Association for Business Communication (ABC) panel at the National Communication Association’s annual convention. The paper, entitled “Space is Hard: A Case Study on Using Social Media for Selective Investigative Disclosure as a Crisis Communication Strategy to Achieve Technical Transparency,” focuses on the use of social media in a transparent manner to navigate a corporate crisis.

Waters and D’Urso conducted a content analysis of 18 tweets and eight website updates released by a private spaceflight corporation in response to a crisis. This analysis allowed the authors to offer investigative disclosure as a new crisis response category and technical transparency as a new crisis response objective. Proposing a nuanced view that situates investigative disclosure as an antecedent to corrective action, Waters and D’Urso extend situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) as a useful guideline for an organization to protect its reputation during a crisis. 

A version of this paper will also be published in an upcoming edition of the ABC Journal, International Journal of Business Communication.