Xuerong Lu, an assistant professor in the School of Communication, co-authors two new studies about how corporations can manage a crisis
Xuerong Lu
By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - September 26, 2025
Public relations scholar Xuerong Lu focuses her research on crisis communications and how people engage with or decode messages from corporate institutions. In a competing and conflicting informational environment, messages published in a crisis can be interpreted by the public in a myriad of ways; Lu’s research looks to understand how certain voices stand out amongst informational conflict.
“Today, the public is an active player because they can post, share and communicate just about anything on social media,” explained Lu. “The public is no longer a passive audience, but a part of crises and now more than ever, conspiracy polarization has complicated the information landscape, particularly in public health.”
In a new study published in March 2025 in the Journal of Communication Management, Lu and her co-authors Wenqing Zhao and Yan Jin, both from the University of Georgia, as well as Toni van der Meer, University of Amsterdam, explore how corporations engage in social-political issue communication with exacerbating a crisis. The findings reveal both challenges and opportunities should a corporation choose to explicitly communicate its issue stance with stakeholders on social media.
“For public relations purposes, people expect government agencies to comment on societal issues,” explained Lu. “But for organizations, there’s a distinct challenge and hesitancy to take a clear stance. What kind of voice should corporations have around societal issues?”
According to Lu and her co-authors’ findings from a mixed-design online experiment, when a corporation chooses to engage in political advocacy by taking an explicit stance, it is inevitable to contribute to the perceived polarization among stakeholders. In contrast, corporate engagement in political corporate social responsibility aimed at fostering mutual understanding rather than taking a stance, resulted in significantly lower perceived polarization.
“While studies have well understood how social media and mass media facilitate the formation of polarization, little is known about how corporations contribute to the polarization process,” said Lu. “Practically, the results provide guidance on what type of political engagement corporations can make for social good.”
Getting ahead of a crisis is a strategy that organizations can and have utilized to stop false stories from spreading. Under misinformation attacks, particularly on social media, organizations can proactively and effectively correct misinformation to counter the misinformed narrative. Known as “prebunking,” Lu and Jin test the effectiveness of this strategy in a new study published in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.
In an online experiment with over 350 U.S. adults, Lu and Jin tested how different prebunking messages during a misinformation crisis affected readers’ trust and perception of the company. Everyone read a prebunking message by a spokesperson at a fictitious company and a misinformed post by a fake social media user. The prebunking message came in four styles: (1) the spokesperson blamed themselves, (2) the spokesperson shared a sad story that portrayed the company as a victim, (3) the spokesperson spoke about learning and growing from the crisis, and (4) the spokesperson shared a non-narrative story, but only facts about the crisis.
Lu and Jin’s found that the narrative stories didn’t change the readers’ perceptions of the crisis, but if people liked the spokesperson and felt a connection to them, they were more likely to believe their statement and want to correct the misinformation.
“It’s a huge challenge to debunk each voice on social media during a crisis and people will inherently dismiss prebunking messages” explained Lu. “But it turns out that liking the spokesperson mattered more than trusting them, and appealing to empathy and connection is what affected people’s perception.”