Speakers » Nicolas Vanderbiest

Nicolas Vanderbiest is a teaching assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the Université Catholique de Louvain. His thesis subject is “Reputation crises of organizations on social media: A systemic approach.” He is the author of the blog Reputatio Lab which gathers a database of more than 360 social media crisis. He also analyzes crisis, astroturfing and social media phenomena for the French media Rue89 and the Belgian radio La Première (RTBF). His past experience includes corporate and agency public relations positions. Finally, Vanderbiest is a volunteer for the French Virtual Operations Support Group.

The six phases of crisis on Twitter

The importance of social media during crisis is more and more important. Each individual has become a potential source of information easily identifiable by journalists. As a consequence, the “information monopoly” is no longer only in the hands of organizations. While the crisis lifecycle has been studied by many researchers, there is almost no theory concerning the lifecycle of people’s reactions to a crisis. Yet, determine the different phases of a crisis on Twitter can help to:

• Give the right message at the right time
• Identify relevant hashtags to gather information
• Find the hashtags to use

Using four case studies (The Charlie Hebdo attack, the Germanwings plane crash, the Villa Castelli helicopter collision, and recent Paris attacks), Nicolas Vanderbiest will expose the six phases of crisis on Twitter and how those phases can help decision makers during a crisis.