Abstract in English:

The advent of social media and its commodification have created a never-ending feedback loop between businesses and their customers. In this context, constant negative Word-of-Mouth (NWOM) may jeopardize a corporate image and cause defensiveness in corporate communication. This paper presents a case study of several customer service accounts of the railway company Deutsche Bahn on Twitter to investigate the management and control of constant NWOM and the impact of accountability strategies on customers’ perception of the firm. To this end, a sample of 36,757 Twitter postings was drawn and analyzed by means of sentiment and content analysis techniques. The findings suggest that the perceived accountability towards the firm declined in case of an attitude shift towards the user. In contrast, the firm was being held accountable more insistently after expressed defensiveness, regardless of the firm’s actual accountableness. With this paper, we introduce the notion of accountability management and an accompanying theoretical framework to the literature. This provides a novel perspective on constant NWOM countermeasures for organizations that are part of ‘toxic’ industries or face unrightfully claimed accusations, i.e., when being held accountable for outer circumstances beyond their control.