Scholars in the field of public relations have been focusing on stealing thunder as an potential crisis communication strategy to understand how it could affect the image of an organization after a crisis. The idea of reaching the public with the crisis information first before the third party has many potential positive outcomes, including controlling the pipeline of the crisis information and showing the organization as a reliable source of information. Social media has been a helpful medium to reach the public fast and without a third party's interference like the media. However, perceived reach of the crisis information messages on social media could influence the crisis communication message. The current study investigated the effectiveness of stealing thunder messages and their perceived reach via social media (i.e., Twitter.com) on the public’s satisfaction and the perceived credibility of the organization using four different organizations from different sectors. The study employed a 2 (crisis communication strategy: stealing thunder vs. thunder) x 2 (the public’s perceived reach of the message: high vs. low) between-subjects experimental design. The four industries chosen for the experiment were auto, airline, food and beverages, and the manufacturing industry. For each company, a hypothetical crisis scenario was created with four different conditions (tweets). Stealing thunder was represented by a tweet from the company itself. Thunder condition was represented by a tweet from a media organization (New York Times) with tweets representing either a high perceived reach or low perceived reach. Results were calculated based on the respondents’ perceived reach of the crisis messages. In total, sixteen different conditions were used for the study (n=940). The findings confirm that stealing thunder leads to better satisfaction, credibility, word-of-mouth communication, and purchase intentions. In addition, the public’s perceived high reach of social media messages could lead to better satisfaction when organizations decide to steal thunder. This study opens the door for further investigation into the influence of perceived reach of crisis communication messages using stealing thunder strategy.
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