Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on
the Web
Boyang Zhang, Jari Veijalainen and Denis Kotkov
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Jyvaskyla, Mattilanniemi 2, Jyvaskyla, Finland
Keywords: Volkswagen, Emission Scandal, Social Media, Crisis, Issues, Stakeholder Theory, Reputation, Image, GM,
Toyota, Malaysia Airlines.
Abstract: Organizations establish their own profiles at social media sites to publish pertinent information to customers
and other stakeholders. During a long and severe crisis, multiple issues may emerge in media interaction.
Positive responses and prompt interaction from the official account of e.g. a car manufacturer creates clarity
and reduces anxiety among stakeholders. This research targets the Volkswagen 2015 emission scandal that
became public on Sept. 18, 2015. We report its main phases over time based on public web information. To
better understand the online interaction and reactions of the company, we scrutinized what information was
published on VW’s official web sites, Facebook, and Twitter profiles and how the image of the company
developed over time among various stakeholders. To investigate this, Twitter and Facebook data sets were
collected, cleaned, and analysed. We also compared this crisis in several respects with the Toyota recall
crisis in 2010-2011 that was caused by sticking accelerator pedals and floor mats, as well as the GM crisis
in 2014 that was caused by faulty ignition switches. Further we compare our findings with the Malaysian
airline crisis that was caused by the disappeared flight MH370 and downed MH14.
1 INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, all major organizations and businesses
have established their own profiles at various social
media sites in order to support the brand image and
launch new products or services also through these
channels. The major advantages of social media are
the rapid information dissemination and interaction
with customers and other stakeholders. When a
particular situation turns to crisis, more and more
public attention arises which might lead to harmful
consequences for the organization. Indeed, the
reactions of various social media user groups have
sometimes exerted a profound impact on the
organizations. In crisis communication, the
responses by the involved actors are vitally
important for the survival and growth of
organizations. Therefore, major failures in crisis
situations cause negative image spread and losses in
reputation for the organizations involved (Schwarz,
2012). The management of e-reputation requires
continuous monitoring of social media and other
Internet channels in order to anticipate the possible
brand losses (Denis et al., 2014). This paper
provides a case study of events around the VW
emission scandal with various stakeholders’
interaction, such as motorists driving VW cars,
various authorities and politicians in the USA,
Europe and Japan, shareholders owning VW group
shares, ordinary consumers and environment
protection groups. The observations on the roles and
motives of the major actors in social media were
performed based on several data sets collected since
Sept. 18, 2015. The target platforms were Twitter,
Facebook and some sites of VW and other
stakeholders. The scandal attracted attention from
many media; this research will elucidate the impact
of crisis on VW, and the crisis management
strategies of the company to mitigate the effects – as
evidenced by the data from the target platforms. We
will also analyse the data sets and how many times
VW was mentioned in Tweets and what kind of
sentiment the comments and tweets had towards
VW.
The 2015 Volkswagen emission scandal became
public on Sept. 18, 2015 in the USA, as EPA issued
a press release. On Sept. 23, 2015 several media
platforms were chosen by the authors to be
monitored in order to analyse how the scandal was
reflected in social media and at some websites. The
176
Zhang, B., Veijalainen, J. and Kotkov, D.
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2016) - Volume 1, pages 176-187
ISBN: 978-989-758-186-1
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
social media platforms included Twitter and
Facebook (especially VW’s official Facebook page),
Volkswagen’s official websites and websites of
major news media companies.
The research questions addressed in this paper
are as follows:
1. How has the VW diesel emission scandal
(#dieselgate) evolved over time since Sept.18, 2015?
2. What are the stakeholders in this crisis and
what have their reactions been in social media
(Twitter and Facebook) and at some other websites?
3 What crisis communication theories could be
applied in this case to explain the online interaction
observed?
4 What kind of crisis communication strategy
has VW group followed in social media, as
evidenced by its official Twitter and Facebook
profiles and its official WWW pages?
To elucidate the above main questions we
investigate also the following sub-questions:
5. How many followers/friends does the official
VW group Twitter profiles and Facebook group
have, i.e. what is VW’s direct sphere of influence at
these sites?
6. How many tweets and Facebook comments
did different stakeholders issue during the crisis so
far?
7. How many tweets or Facebook comments of
ordinary users did contain URLs to web sources?
8. How many tweets were from ordinary users to
VW (VW mentions) and vice versa?
9. What were the main contents of the messages
of VW group in different phases of the crisis so far?
2 THEORIES ABOUT CRISIS
COMMUNICATION IN SOCIAL
MEDIA
The impact of social media on organizational
communication has received considerable attention
recently. Knowledge of crisis communication has
great significance for the smooth development of
organizations and their brands. Crises can be
perceived as complex events with high negative
influence but low probability that threatens
organizational viability and may have a shorter or
longer duration (Pearson and Clair, 1998). Because
of the potentially detrimental effects of a crisis on
organizations, these work on systematic crisis
response and recovery strategies. During a crisis the
public discusses the crisis online and often questions
the causes for the crisis and responsibilities of the
organization towards consumers and other
stakeholders (Schwarz, 2012). Social media is a
challenging arena for crisis communication for
organizations, because they cannot easily control the
sentiment and the direction the communication takes
in the social media during a crisis. The aim of this
paper is to better understand the impact of the crisis
as visible on the web and the crisis response
strategies of the focal organization, in this case the
interaction of Volkswagen group concerning the
emission scandal at core social media sites and on
the websites that are under its control. The results in
this paper are tentative, because, at the time of
writing this paper, the crisis is still going on.
2.1 Response Strategies and Crisis
Communication
Several researchers have proposed response
strategies in general or specific cases. An online
apology launch is one of the crisis response
strategies that tests the sentiment of the customers
(Coombs and Holladay, 2012). Providing solutions
in different steps, from creating confidence and
generating awareness, to enhancing understanding
and gaining satisfaction of customers, is a wider
framework to address the organization’s appearance
towards the public (Ledford and Anderson, 2013).
Hiltz, Diaz and Mark (2011) discuss the criticality of
the immediate reaction to emerging crisis and the
exchange of valid information. Even though the
timeliness of information is also underlined in the
case of natural disasters, in organizational crises the
timing is considered crucial while offering adequate
response and synchronizing the activities with
external stakeholders (Hiltz et al., 2011).
In crisis communication, the credibility of the
source of mediated information plays a critical role
in information diffusion. Confirmed organizational
and governmental sources (such as the Environment
Protection Agency) appear more trustworthy and
thus have more impact than user-generated content
(Freberg, 2012). Coombs and Holladay (2012) agree
that credible sources have an effective role in crisis
communication. Therefore, when it comes to the
dissemination of information from confirmed
reliable organizations and governments, involved
organizations should immediately begin to engage in
social media communication counteracting negative
tendencies in the crisis that threaten to go viral (Veil
et al., 2012). With the development of crisis, the
adoption of different response strategies are needed
encountering various issues that may emerge over
time. For instance, after a Malaysia Airlines MH370
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web
177
flight vanished on March 8, 2014 the first reactions
of the public and press concerned the fate of the
victims, condolences to the families etc. Soon,
though, the discussions about the reasons for the
disappearance and about who is to be blamed for the
presumable disaster began. Later questions arose
about compensation to be paid to the families of the
victims, the necessity of changes in safety
procedures, etc.
The ability of an organization to monitor,
understand and influence the fast evolving
discussion threads in social media will be put to the
test, while the organization attempts to update its
messages to its social media profiles in order to
reach various audience segments (Freberg, 2012).
By monitoring social networks in suitable ways,
organizations can reduce the reputational damages
(Denis et al., 2014).
Monitoring of social media can be based on
chosen key words and when their frequency in the
message streams exceeds certain thresholds, alerts
could be sent to organizations (Rappaport, 2010;
Zhang and Vos, 2014). The mechanism would rely
on APIs offered by social media platforms that allow
keywords to be used to sieve out matching UGC
streams and collections. For instance, Twitter offers
a keyword based streaming API (“The Streaming
APIs | Twitter Developers,” 2012). Before the crisis,
a branding monitor assists product or service’s
design, marketing and public relations (Divol et al.,
2012). After that, organizations should constantly be
informed of online discussions concerning them and
react immediately before the sentiment is getting
negative. In the market perspective, monitoring the
reputation consolidation in social media also draws
on the competitors’ ideas which helps organizations
to build a stable e-reputation (Zailskaite-Jakste and
Kuvykaite, 2012). This activity could also
strengthen financial performance.
2.2 Stakeholder Concepts
Schwarz (2012) argues that stakeholders are those
groups of individuals and organizations that engage
in the stable development of organizations and
reduce uncertainty. The internal stakeholders mainly
include owners, employees, wholesalers and retailers,
and so forth if these are working within the
organization. In contrast, customer groups,
government agencies, and media houses belong to
the external stakeholders. Elefant (2011) agrees to
the influences from positive stakeholder engagement
in social media dialogues. In critical times, specific
decisions and actions are essential to stakeholders
(Davenport et al., 2012). The exploration of
stakeholder reactions in crisis communication has
revealed different interest groups (Coombs and
Holladay, 2012). In crisis contexts, attributions of
responsibilities have critical influence to the
judgement of organization (Schwarz, 2012). With
long extreme negative process, the roles of internal
stakeholders are vital for the crisis communication.
2.3 Communication Management
Issues that have a strong news value and that people
want to be identified with, will trigger dissemination
of information in social media. The emerging issues
are framed by the participation of actors including
influential users, organizations and some individual
users. The CEO, as the representative of the
organization, plays a key role in a managerial
position and also in crisis communication. For
example, Jeffrey Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com,
played a positive role in the Kindle crisis cases in
2009 (Coombs and Holladay, 2012). In 2009 during
the Toyota recall crisis, CEO Ako Tojoda took the
utmost responsibility for the sticking accelerator
pedals (Fan et al., 2013). Nadeem (2012) argues that
the top priority for a CEO is to approach all
customers in a crisis situation
Nowadays, the public begins to absorb news and
information from social media in a crisis situation,
as mentioned above. Users also seek confirmation
from a reliable source of information, such as
authorities and official organizations (Freberg, 2012).
Therefore, various official social media accounts,
such as Twitter and Facebook accounts of
organizations are worth investigating. In this context
we collected data from several verified Twitter
accounts of Volkswagen group in the USA and
Canada, as well and from the Facebook account of
Volkswagen USA. The goal was to investigate the
participation of the company in the crisis situation
that evolved publicly after the Sept. 18, 2015
revelation of US Environmental Protection Agency
(US EPA) that some diesel engines of VW person
cars (notably EA189) emit much more NOx than
allowed by the environment norms in the USA. To
some extent, the responses from authorities may be
filtered and delayed in some situations (Hiltz et al.,
2011), but in this case the issue was made public the
authorities (US EPA). VW USA reacted on Sept. 20,
2015 by admitting publicly, that it had equipped
certain diesel engines with cheating software that
keeps the NOx emissions at an acceptable level in a
laboratory/dyno test but lets them grow considerably
during normal use. The company apologized for its
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
178
behavior and announced that it would take a full
responsibility for its actions.
3 CASE STUDY
3.1 Case Description: Volkswagen
Emission Scandal Aug. – Dec. 2015
The car emission norms both in the USA and Europe
have been tightened since the beginning of the 90s,
as concerns emitted nitrogen oxides (NO, NO
2),
carbon dioxide (CO
2) and monoxide (CO), as well
hydrocarbon (HC) and particle (PM) emissions
(Delphi, 2015).
During 2014, the United States Environment
Protection Agency (US EPA) got interested in the
test results that certain certified VW person cars
would not comply with the US environment norms,
as set forth in the US Clean Air Act. These were
based on the International Council on Clean
Transportation (ICCT) mandated real world tests.
The tests were performed by West Virginia
University scientists using one 2012 VW Jetta and
one VW Passat during 2014 (Thompson et al., 2014).
As was observed during the real test drives, the
engine of VW Jetta, for instance, generated up to 15-
35 times more NOx into the air than the current US
limit 0.043 g/km would allow, whereas in the dyno
test the values remained clearly under the above
limit. The VW group brands had been earlier
certified to meet either the US EPA Tier 2 / Bin 5
emissions standard or the California LEV-II ULEV
standard (see e.g. (Delphi, 2015)).
Based on the findings, US EPA asked VW for
explanation on the issue. It was not satisfied with the
response of VW. On Aug. 21, 2015 VW executives
admitted unofficially to EPA officials that there are
“cheating devices” installed to certain 2.0L TDI
engines. On Sept. 3, 2015, EPA threatened VW that
it will not certify 2016 diesel models any more. Next,
VW admitted officially to EPA that some TDI
engine control units had been equipped with
software that detects testing situation and regulates
the emissions under the given limits during the test,
but lets them grow in normal use. On September 18,
2015 EPA ordered a recall for certain 2009-2015
VW cars equipped with a 2.0L TDI engine (of type
EA189). The models included Jetta (2009-2015),
Jetta Sportwagen (2009-2014), Beetle (2012-2015),
Beetle Convertible (2012-2015), Audi A3 (2010-
2015), Golf (2010-2015), Golf Sportwagen (2015),
and Passat (2012-2015). Breaking news hit the
headlines in news media that according to the
announcement of USA EPA special emission testing
software (cheating software) had been installed to
certain VW person car models in order to cheat the
emission tests. The engine control unit was using the
information from several sensors to detect that the
car was tested for (NOx) emissions and tuned the
engine parameters so that the test was passed. The
share value of VW group dropped on the market by
25 %.
On Sept. 20, 2015 VW admitted that 11 million
vehicles were affected. Volkswagen encountered
fines up to 18 billion dollars. That same day,
Volkswagen Group of American, Inc., announced an
immediate stop-sale of new 4 cylinder TDI vehicles
in its dealer inventory.
The storyline in Table 1 contains the main events
up to the end of December 2015. Two additional
issues surface. First, COx emissions of certain VW
engines are claimed to be higher than announced by
the company. Further, some 3.0L TDI engines used
in 2009-2016 models also have a cheating device
installed. This is discovered by US EPA tests after
Sept. 18, 2015 and announced on Nov. 2, 2015.
Table 1: Volkswagen emission scandal story line.
Date Events
2007 Volkswagen applies qualified software and
system to meet the U.S. emission standard.
2008 Volkswagen publishes advertisement on clean
diesel cars that presumably meet the US emission
standards.
2011 Best Green Cars of 2011, VW Golf TDI; VW
Jetta TDI. (“Best Green Cars, 2011,” 2011)
2009-
2015
Strong diesel sales on US market, with clean
energy. The affected engine types were primarily
EA189 (1.2L, 1.6L, 2.0L TDI versions)
21.08.
2015
VW group representative admits orally to the US
regulators that VW has installed a cheating
software to some of its TDI models.(Gartner et
al., 2015)
03.09.
2015
VW group admits officially the existence of the
cheating software during a conference call with
US regulators after the latter threaten to withdraw
certificates from 2016 models (see above).
18.09.
2015
Californian Air Resource Board sends a letter to
VW (Hebert, 2015). U.S. EPA orders recall for
certain 2009-2015 VW car models with 2.0L TDI
engines and makes the issue public. Public
discussion on the Volkswagen scandal explodes;
Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. announces
an immediate stop-sale on new 4 cylinder TDI
vehicles in dealer inventory. (EPA, 2015; “EPA,
C,. 2015, EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of
Clean Air Act Violations / Carmaker allegedly
used software that circumvents emissions testing
for certain air pollutants,” 2015)
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web
179
Table 1: Volkswagen emission scandal story line (Cont.).
Date Events
20.09.
2015
CEO of Volkswagen group Martin Winterkorn
issues an apology for cheating during the
emission tests on a video, (“Volkswagen CEO
apologizes for cheating | Business | DW.COM |
20.09.2015,” 2015)
21.09.
2015
Volkswagen Canada launches stop-sale policy as
above; the share value of Volkswagen group
drops 23% after admitting diesel emission
cheating (Weiss, 2015)
23.09.
2015
Mr. Winterkorn resigns and takes the
responsibility as the CEO for the scandal.
(“Martin Winterkorn resigns as Volkswagen
CEO,” 2015)
25.09.
2015
Volkswagen USA launches a webpage with
information and possibility to identify the
affected vehicles and – later- to claim goodwill
packages https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/. The
same day in the US, EPA starts testing all light
duty diesel vehicles with a new testing procedure
in order to detect cheating devices (EPA, 2015)
29.09.
2015
New CEO of VW group, Matthias Müller
announces a refit plan for emission rigged
vehicles. (“New VW CEO says cars hit by
emissions-rigging scandal to be refitted,” 2015)
07.10.
2015
Volkswagen announces the recall strategies to
start in January 2016 and promises to by the end
of 2016 fix the affected vehicles. (Houston-
Waesch, 2015)
08.10.
2015
President and CEO of Volkswagen US had the
testimony before the house committee on energy
and commerce subcommittee on oversight and
investigations. (Twitter, 2015)
22.10.
2015
The emergence of new engine emission scandal;
the CO2 emissions are also larger than
announced in certain VW person cars. This is a
follow up issue. (Kottasova and Thompson,
2015)
02.11.
2015
More branches from Volkswagen were found to
have a similar cheating system on 3.0L TDI
engine for 2014-2016 models (EPA, 2015)
09.11.
2015
VW announces a $1000 goodwill package for the
owners of affected vehicles in USA (Beene,
2015)
19.11.
2015
VW admits to US EPA that the cheating device
for the 3.0L TDI engines has been in use since
2009 (EPA, 2015)
25.11.
2015
Audi, Porsche, VW ordered by CARB to recall in
order to repair emissions software. (“CARB
Forcing VW, Audi, Porsche to Fix More Diesels |
TheDetroitBureau.com,” 2015)
09.12.
2015
The company explains that the CO2 issue is over
(Zollino, 2015)
10.12.
2015
VW explains that the corporate culture and some
lower level managers were responsible for the
scandal. Schedule for recalls of cars equipped
with 1.2L, 1.6L and 2.0L diesel engines
announced for 2016 (Ruddick, 2015)
3.2 Twitter Data Set Collection and Its
Analysis
In Twitter, the tweets were collected relying on the
streaming API using the selection predicate: [(‘VW’
orVolkswagen) and (‘scandal’ or ‘reputation’)
and (‘diesel’ or ‘software’)]. Another collection was
performed using hashtags #dieselgate or
#dieselfraud after the first clause ‘VW’ or
‘Volkswagen’. These collections produced about 7
million different messages from Sept. 23 to Dec. 28,
2015 (in about 10 different, partially overlapping
files). Although the Twitter selection criteria were in
English, and messages in other languages should
have been excluded, many collected messages in the
data set were in German and in other languages.
An overall raw data table was created by parsing
the above raw tweet files. Each tweet content was
stored only once. The table contains data from about
7 Million tweets, among them also job
announcements, and discussions or advertisements
concerning general-purpose software such as
Windows or Android.
Therefore, a cleaning procedure was run based
on the above table that only selected those tweets
where the text fulfills the following predicate:
(@VW or @Volkswagen) or ((‘olkswagen’ or 'vw'
or 'EA189' or 'VW') and ('oftware' or 'candal' or
'iesel' or 'gate' or 'pollut' or 'raud' or 'fine' or 'stock'
or 'mission' or 'heating' or 'CEO' or 'share' or
'hief' )). This resulted in about 703000 tweets that
qualified. These still contained tweets in German
and other languages, but most of them, about
537000, were in English. The graphs below in Fig. 1
are based on this English subset.
In Figure 1 there is a clear peak on September 24
and 25, 2015 with about 34000-35000 relevant
English tweets collected on both days. Our
collection was discontinued because the collector
crashed unnoticed for 48 hours on Sept. 26, 2015.
The next reliable value is for Sept. 29, with about
21000 tweets. After that, the number of tweets per
day mostly remained below 20,000 tweets. The
peaks correlate quite nicely with the timeline of
major events.
The primary verified active accounts of VW
group are:
Volkswagen Verified account
@Volkswagen (55K followers)
Volkswagen Group Verified account
@vwgroup_en (about 4000 followers)
(German @vwgroup_de has about 2500
followers)
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
180
Volkswagen USA Verified account
@VW (about 450K followers)
Volkswagen Canada Verified account
@VWcanada (47K followers)
Volkswagen USA News Verified account
@VWnews (5300 followers)
Volkswagen UK Verified account
@UKVolkswagen (127K followers)
Volkswagen India Verified account
@volkswagenindia (50K followers)
Volkswagen Motorsport Verified account
@VolkwagenRally (74K followers)
Figure 1: Qualifying English tweet set frequency 23.9.-
28.12.2015.
The major profiles of Volkswagen group in North-
America are @vwgroup_en; @VW; @VWcanada;
@VWnews. (@VWOfficial is a verified account of
Vanessa Williams with about 293000 followers at
the time of writing that has nothing to do with
Volkswagen). The content of tweets from the
verified accounts mainly falls under strategic
communication activity and re-direct to other
websites with solutions in the collection period. For
example on September 27, 2015 @VW tweets:
“Visit http://VWDieselInfo.com for information
regarding affected TDI vehicles”, with image on Das
Auto and words explaining the situation and affected
TDI vehicles. The site mediates official information
to customers and general public about the crisis. On
the front page the company apologized (for
betraying customer’s trust - but not for polluting the
air!), offered a 2.0L goodwill package, and shared
answers to FAQs raised by the emission fraud. The
web sites are the central vehicles in taking care of
the crisis. Twitter messages are just used to guide
the customers to the web sites or people are asked to
contact the call center or a local dealer.
About 471000 English relevant tweets include
one or more URLs that refer to earlier Twitter
contents or redirect to another website. There are
about 161000 retweeted tweets in the above subset,
i.e. circa 30 per cent of all qualifying are retweets.
Roughly 10000 tweets in this set are sent by verified
users, whereas about 60000 retweeted tweets and
3500 quoting tweets refer to verified users. Only
1400 tweets retweet a tweet from @VW, none from
@Volkswagen. Further, only roughly 33000 tweets
were in that respect original, that they did not quote
any other tweet, and were neither a reply to, nor a
retweet of earlier tweets.
On Sept. 18, when the crisis became public, VW
USA published tweet linking to a video with the text
“Adam Scott is throwing a party. Are you on the
list? #VW#VWAppConnect”. Nothing is said about
the crisis. The next tweet is from Sept. 25, 2015
where the site publishes an apology of Mr. Michael
Horn, the CEO of VW USA, concerning the
emission scandal. It starts “Volkswagen would like
to offer our deepest apologies to those affected by
our violation of CARB and EPA emissions standards.
We will remedy the issue, and we will make things
right in order to win back the trust of you, our
customers, our dealers, the government, the public,
and our employees.”
In the above text fragment VW USA admits that
it has violated emission standards and promises to
correct the issue so that the trust of the named
stakeholders can be regained.
3.3 Facebook Data Set Collection
The official Facebook account of Volkswagen
makes use of the chat platform. One can argue that
the posts from the official VW account attempt to set
the discussion agenda. User comments are primarily
related to the official agenda. For instance, at the
beginning of the crisis on Sept. 24, 2015 the original
post contains the key words of “CARB and EPA
emission standards”; therefore, there is a huge
amount of comments about the standards and
questioning whether a particular car is among those
affected. On Sept. 27, the post is about launching the
http://VWDieselInfo.com/ website. Comments are
mainly about how the website works and how to
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
18.9.2015
25.9.2015
2.10.2015
9.10.2015
16.10.2015
23.10.2015
30.10.2015
6.11.2015
13.11.2015
20.11.2015
27.11.2015
4.12.2015
11.12.2015
18.12.2015
25.12.2015
Tweetsperday
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web
181
contact the company. As discussed above, the above
site offers functionality, through which car owners
can insert the VIN of their vehicle to be informed
about whether their car is among those affected.
The verified account controlled by Volkswagen
USA is https://www.facebook.com/vw. There are
about 24 million Facebook users who like the page.
Our group collected posts, comments and replies
using the FB Graph API
(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api).
We targeted 9 posts published from September 16 to
November 17, 2015 by VW USA on the above page.
The posts attracted 13,122 comments and 6,954
replies, where 85 replies were published by
Volkswagen USA. Figure 2 is built on the number of
comments and replies by date.
The reason for collecting the data from the
Facebook account above, is because there, unlike in
Twitter, VW USA sets the agenda itself.
Figure 2: Facebook Collection Set.
The content of comments from Volkswagen USA
was categorized into three initial groups:
Apology strategy
Redirection to the website about emission
recall: https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/good
will_package_; www.vw.com/contact
Customer services (other car related issues
except emission scandals).
The content of all Facebook comments could be
divided into four categories:
Arguments of fans of the brand
Arguments of critical consumers
Reactions of Volkswagen group
Others
3.4 The Role of Official VW Websites
This section is about the collection of official
website of Volkswagen in USA, Canada and Europe.
Volkswagen USA:
www.vw.com
The first page contains a direct link to
https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/; the latter is
about the emission scandal and explanations
of the current status. http://media.vw.com/
This is an official media site of VW USA. On
the first page it has a button TDI Updates that
exposes press releases concerning the diesel
scandal from http://media.vw.com/releases/.
The latter contains all press releases.
Volkswagen Canada:
www.vw.ca
The first page again offers a direct link to
https://www.vwemissionsinfo.ca/ but at the
bottom of the page.
Similar to VW USA, it has a direct link to the
emission scandal solution, it provides FAQ
and a channel to send questions to the
company... Interestingly, the section “What
happened” ends with “No one in Canada is
responsible for what occurred.”
Volkswagen Europe:
http://en.volkswagen.com/en.html The site
first asks whether the user wants to the
English or German version of the site.
The first page on both versions offers EU
rules and regulations on the CO2 emission
tests and fuel consumption (but no
information on NOx issues). Under the button
Current Customer Information the site
publishes text where the company promises
to sort out issues as soon as possible and
press releases of the Executive Committee of
VW concerning the emission scandal. It also
offers a button Check if your car is impacted
that takes the user to a page where one can
insert VIN and see whether the vehicle is one
of those with the cheating software or has
CO2 emission issues.
Volkswagen media press: (Crisis response
strategies in the first page)
https://www.volkswagen-media-services.com/en/
The site offers two buttons on the first page,
Information on Diesel-Issue and Information on
CO2-Issue. Once clicked, they return search results
from the media pages, mainly metadata to press
releases and links to pdf-documents. It also contains
a 6 minute long video, where the functioning of
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
Facebook
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
182
EA189 engine exhaust gas processing is explained
and the corrective measures to remove the cheating
device are described, along how much time the
correction takes for each engine subtype (30-60
min).
4 FINDINGS
In this section, observed behavior of VW group and
other stakeholders while the emission crisis evolved,
is discussed. It is not easy to render the response
strategies for this thorny crisis which touches many
sub issues. The root cause of the scandal is VW
group’s attempt to deliberately break the
environment norms and show its engines clean
during tests. The cheating was exposed and the crisis
became public with the breaking news announced by
EPA revealing that Volkswagen’s diesel cars violate
Clean Air Act. The confirmed information triggered
a heated discussion in public and multiple issues
began to emerge with questions and rumors in social
media.
The first response strategy of Volkswagen is
issuing an apology towards customers and other
stakeholders and a stop in selling affected diesel
models. According to Coombs and Holladay (2012),
the apology strategies are considered a clear
acceptance of the responsibility for the crisis.
Volkswagen admitted its responsibility in the
scandal and began to investigate and provide
solutions. In crisis communication terms, the
apology response strategies of Volkswagen are
clearly structured and planned from the moment that
the news broke.
The reactions seem to have been planned since
August 2015. Already on September 18, 2015,
Volkswagen stopped selling 4 cylinder TDI vehicles
and took them from dealer inventory (which makes
sense, as certain diesel models may not necessarily
have a valid environment certificate any more). Two
days later, Volkswagen issued its apology
concerning the cheating software. Five days later,
the former CEO Winterkorn resigned and accepted
to take the responsibility for the scandal. Even
though the apology strategy was implemented
quickly, a huge number of people began to discuss
the scandal in social media. Our tweet collection
started on Sept. 23 and we could observe a peak of
around 35000 matching English tweets on 24
th
and
25
th
of September (and further tweets in German,
Spanish, etc.). On Sept. 29 and 30 there still were
around 20000 matching tweets in our data set. 6235
Facebook comments and replies were observed on
25th September on the official account of VW. One
can argue that the crisis became widely known after
the CEO Winterkorn resigned and the CEO of VW
in the USA, Horn, issued a public apology after
which the company launched a special web site
https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/ that shared
information and later offered a “2.0L goodwill
package”. On October 7 and 8, there is another peak
of 16000-20000 tweets when Volkswagen Group
announced that the recall will start in January 2016,
and promised to provide fixes before the end of 2016.
At the same time the President and CEO of
Volkswagen U.S. gave testimony before the House
committee on energy and commerce subcommittee.
On November 3, over 16000 tweets were observed,
as on Nov. 2 more car types from Volkswagen were
found by EPA to have a similar cheating system on
3.0L TDI engine for 2014-2016 models.
Subsequently, Volkswagen re-directed questions
to the above webpage from both Twitter and
Facebook. In addition, other webpages of VW were
provided with specific FAQ questions; exact
affected vehicles; recall methods, fixing times, and
more.
On September 22, 2015 @vwgroup_en tweets:
“See video: Statement Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn
http://ow.ly/2bvosA”. In the video the CEO issues
the apology for customers, addresses the main
stakeholders and promises to cooperate with the
authorities and clear the issue to the bottom. On
September 25, the profile tweets: “Matthias Müller
appointed CEO of the Volkswagen Group
#VWGroup http://vwgroup.to/SFKtS” and The
Volkswagen Group is restructuring: Supervisory
Board passes resolutions for new organization
#VWGroup http://vwgroup.to/SFOj4”. This
confirmed the resignation of the previous leader,
introduced the new CEO, and presented possible
solutions.
As mentioned before, @VW, the official account
of Volkswagen USA tweeted on September 24:
“Update from Volkswagen regarding the EPA
investigation:”; on Sept. 27
it tweeted: “Visit
http://VWDieselInfo.com for information regarding
affected TDI vehicles.” It thus first apologized and
then provided solutions to customers. @VWcanada
followed the same strategies. Moreover, @VWnews
retweets @VW’s “update from …” tweeted the
above and @vwgroup_en’s “Matthias Müller…”
and so on, to provide transparency to the general
public.
At the same time, fierce discussions between
loyal customers and critical haters grabbed attention
on the Facebook chat platform. It is, on the one hand,
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web
183
observable that a “brand supporters” group defended
the brand by posting former experiences intended to
protect the brand’s reputation. On the other hand, a
critical “brand haters” group commented negatively,
spreading rumors and negative information that
harmed the brand’s reputation.
A controlled sample was selected to provide a
sentiment analysis of the tweets. The categorization
was based on three values, positive, neutral, negative.
The targeted data set consisted of about 25800
tweets in any language where @VW is mentioned.
Every 100
th
tweet in ascending order of the time
stamp was selected resulting in 258 tweets to be
manually checked. The results show that the
sentiment neutral occurs in 152 tweets, positive in
28 tweets, and negative in 78 tweet. The latter tweets
contain complaints about the crisis or the reaction of
VW group to it. Positive sentiment thus forms a
clear minority.
The German government was being blamed for
taking no action and it was demanded that it should
also take responsibility in the emission scandal. It is
commonly known that Volkswagen is the largest
automaker in Germany and aims at becoming the
largest in the world. Several news media have
reported that Angela Merkel’s government had
known about the Volkswagen cheating software in
July 2015, but this has been denied by the German
government. The discussion of the role of the
German government is still going on and damage
control strategies appear to have been set up. For
instance, demands are made that certain software
should be made public by automakers. This is in
order to protect the reputation of “Made in Germany”
technology exports. From the economic point of
view, this crisis could be the Volkswagen investors’
nightmare because of the rapid share price drops.
The value loss affects stakeholders, not only in
Germany, but also in the USA and in other countries.
In summary, Table 3 lists different stakeholders’
reactions along with each stakeholder’s role.
There are similarities and differences between
the current VW crisis and the Toyota crisis in 2009-
2010. The latter was caused by an unintended
acceleration of the vehicle. The first found reason
for this was a floor mat incursion that gave rise to
the recall of 5.2 million vehicles on Nov. 2, 2009. A
bit later it was discovered that the gas pedal itself
was also sticking and the recall was amended with
2.3 million vehicles due to these problems in
January 2010. The National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration reported that the problems had
caused 37 deaths in the USA (Healey, 2010).
Around 1.8 million vehicles were recalled in Europe,
Table 3: Stakeholders’ reaction in detail.
Stakeholders Reaction
VW group CEO Apology issuance; Response
immediately; solution offering
(through web sites).
VW retail
car dealers in
the USA
Stop-sale to affected vehicle and
Volkswagen buys back used diesel
vehicles at pre-crisis prices.
German
government
2014, Auto industry listed a turnover
of 384 billion euro, around 20% of
German industry revenue, 2.7% of
German GDP.. Several damage
control strategies are followed by the
government officials.
Environmental
authorities of
USA (EPA)
and EU
countries
EU is in contact with EPA on
emissions tests and seeks energy
cooperation in environmental
protection, test standards are
reformulated.
Consumer
group with
affected
vehicles
Arguments of fans of the brand,
arguments of critical consumers,
complaints and questions of the
affected car owners.
Other
authorities,
like tax
authorities
Car tax is in some countries based on
emissions, especially in the European
Union, e.g. Volkswagen drivers run
away from higher emissions tax in
UK, governmental organizations face
tax losses.
General public
and
environmental
groups that are
concerned
about the air
pollution
Protests and negative voices arise;
health related aspects are mentioned,
with concerns for continuous long-
term economic growth.
Competing car
manufacturers
After the scandal, Toyota addresses
long run emission-free hydrogen cars;
Mercedes, BMW and Peugeot are
accused over fuel efficiency cheating;
Volvo, Renault and Hyundai worry
about the future EU tests and update
car parts.
Traditional
media
TV stations, newspapers, media
companies are operating in mostly
neutral voices with major headlines to
monitor the growth of the crisis.
There are similarities and differences between
the current VW crisis and the Toyota crisis in 2009-
2010. The latter was caused by an unintended
acceleration of the vehicle. The first found reason
for this was a floor mat incursion that gave rise to
the recall of 5.2 million vehicles on Nov. 2, 2009. A
bit later it was discovered that the gas pedal itself
was also sticking and the recall was amended with
2.3 million vehicles due to these problems in
January 2010. The National Highway Traffic Safety
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
184
Administration reported that the problems had
caused 37 deaths in the USA (Healey, 2010).
Around 1.8 million vehicles were recalled in Europe,
and 75.000 in China. The massive recall cost
approximately 2 billion U.S. dollars in lost output
(new model manufacturing) and sales. During the
crisis, Toyota had established a website to inform
relevant consumers. Blogs were a leading indicator
of the negative image of Toyota (Fan et al., 2013) in
the social media. Only on Feb. 5, 2010, about 3
months after the first recall, Akio Toyoda, the CEO
of Toyota announced an apology to consumers for
the massive recall. Toyota had lost 22% market
share since January 21, 2010, its stock dropped 12%
in February 2010.
Comparing the Toyota and VW crises, in both
cases there were failures in crisis response and
internal communication inside the corporation. In
the case of Toyota it has been noted, that because of
the lack of internal communication, decision makers
could not immediately receive alarm signals from
the market (Anthony P. Andrews et al., 2011),
whereas it is not clear how well the top management
of VW was informed about the discussions with
EPA during 2014-2015 concerning the observed
high emission values. This underlines how
significant communication is with customers and
authorities, but also points to the role of frictionless
internal communication. According to some reports,
the corporate culture inside VW was not healthy, or
pressure to perform so high, that this kind of
cheating software could be deployed for many years.
General Motors (GM)’s ignition switch scandal
in 2014 is also in some sense similar to the VW and
Toyota crisis. It began in February 2014. The GM
scandal was caused by an ignition switch that could
accidently turn off the engine while driving and stop
airbags from inflating. This led to 124 deaths (as
opposed to zero passenger or driver casualties in
VW case). 30 million cars were recalled worldwide,
and it did cost the company around 4.1 billion U.S.
dollar to fix the problem. GM immediately
established websites to inform consumers, just as
VW did after the scandal broke. The new GM CEO,
Mary Barra, issued a video with an apology like
Winterkorn did later - and a new vehicle safety chief
was announced one month later. In March 2014, GM
shares were down approximately 14 % since the
Barra took the CEO position on January 15, 2014.
This scandal is still developing. It revealed a lack of
internal communication in the organization, as
voices from the safety department were neglected by
decision makers, who in spite of the warnings
applied low cost strategies. As to VW, the senior
managerial level would have to be strongly aware of
activities of the entire organization to prevent
detrimental design decisions.
Compared to the case of Malaysia Airline
“MH370”, all the above crises have a negative
impact on organizations, but the organizations’
reactions are totally different. Especially
Volkswagen’s responses were immediate and
efficient, several apologies and resolution strategies
were applied, relevant car owners could easily be
located and technical solutions were developed.
Compared to the slow and inefficient handling of
MH370 crisis, VW seems to have done better.
Malaysia Airlines seldom replied on the official
Facebook account during the crisis to people that
posted messages and it neither set up special web
pages to inform the public. Malaysia Airlines is
“technically bankrupt” since June 2015, although not
only the fate of MH370, but also MH17’s downing
in East Ukraine on July 17, 2014 has been of
importance in this respect.
5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
RESEARCH
In this work, we have presented a specific case study
in crisis communication that is still going on, namely
the VW emission scandal and compared it to similar
cases. The scandal became public on Sept. 18, 2015
and went through several phases while new issues
surfaced. We have taken the information concerning
the crisis from media outlets, official web sites of
VW, Twitter streams and official VW USA
Facebook page. From the latter two we have
collected larger data sets. It also turned out that the
company did not engage much in private
communications with customers through social
media (Twitter or Facebook), but rather set up web
sites and shared links to them. However, on some of
their web sites the company collects questions from
audience and answers them in a FAQ section. It is
worth noticing that VW had at least a month time to
plan a crisis strategy, because it admitted already in
August 2015 to the EPA that a cheating device was
installed. VW probably also studied the Toyota and
GM cases. In conclusion, various response strategies
of VW group could be observed, including apology
making, acting immediately, and offering solutions
to affected customers. VW was active online in
preventing further reputation damage. The case
provides hints how to design and implement crisis
response strategies when an organization is facing a
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web
185
similar crisis in the future.
A limitation of our study is that we only
collected data from one account in Facebook and
had challenges in getting collected a reasonably
representative set of tweets. A further limitation is
that we did not study extensively major media
outlets and the way they handled the VW, Toyota, or
GM crises. The vast majority, 88 %, of tweets
related to VW contained a URL, most of which
might be web sources belonging to various media
houses. The exact distribution of the referenced web
sources is for future study. For future research, we
also suggest to analyse the emerging sub issues to
shows how different issues evolve during the crisis.
The first challenge of keyword based stream
collection from Twitter is to start the collection right
from the beginning of the crisis and continue it
throughout the crisis. We started the collection on
Sept. 23, 2015 when the tweeting activity was still
rising. The second challenge is to find the right
keywords. In this case the hashtags such as
#dieselgate, #vwgate, #dieselfraud appeared rather
soon after Sept. 18, but not all the relevant tweets
contain them. The keywords ‘VW’ or ‘Volkswagen’
appeared rather often in relevant tweets, but also in
various ad tweets. We took all the tweets into the
final set that mentioned @VW or @Volkswagen,
because most of them seemed to concern the crisis.
There were over 30000 of them. Our entire data set
only contained about 200 tweets sent by @VW, but
a manual check showed that the account had sent
over 1000 tweets between Sept. 17, 2015 and Dec.
28, 2015; only 7 were clearly relevant. In them the
company announced the major events, like
Winterkorn’s video speech, the establishment of the
VWdieselinfo.com, the recall schedule and the
goodwill package.
In general, Twitter and Facebook data collection
suggests the growing tendency towards state-of-the-
art heated latest issues. Monitoring Twitter might be
a part of an early warning system for organizations
to be able to generate accurate responses later. This
research evidenced the high impact of current crises
in the online environment and highlights the
relevance of social media monitoring to facilitate
organizational crisis response strategies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors were supported in part by the Academy
of Finland, grant number 268078 (MineSocMed).
REFERENCES
Anthony P. Andrews, John Simon, Feng Tian, Jun Zhao,
2011. The Toyota crisis: an economic, operational and
strategic analysis of the massive recall. Manag. Res.
Rev. 34, 1064–1077. doi:10.1108/014091711111
71474.
Beene, R., 2015. VW offers “goodwill package” to
appease diesel owners [WWW Document]. Automot.
News. URL http://www.autonews.com/article/
20151109/RETAIL/151109829/vw-offers-goodwill-
package-to-appease-diesel-owners (accessed 12.30.
15).
Best Green Cars, 2011 [WWW Document], 2011. .
Mother Earth News. URL http://www.motherear
thnews.com/green-transportation/green-vehicles/2011-
best-green-cars-zm0z11zroc.aspx (accessed 1.2.16).
CARB Forcing VW, Audi, Porsche to Fix More Diesels |
TheDetroitBureau.com, 2015.
Coombs, W.T., Holladay, S.J., 2012. Amazon.com’s
Orwellian nightmare: Exploring apology in an online
environment. J. Commun. Manag. 16, 280–295.
doi:10.1108/13632541211245758.
Davenport, T.H., Barth, P., Bean, R., 2012. How “Big
Data Is Different. (cover story). MIT Sloan Manag.
Rev. 54, 43–46.
Delphi, 2015. Worldwide Emissions Standards; Passenger
Cars and Light Duty Vehicles, 2015-2016 [WWW
Document]. Delphi. URL http://delphi.com/docs/
default-source/catalogs/delphi-worldwide-emissions-
standards-pc-ldv-15-16.pdf?sfvrsn=2 (accessed 12.28.
15).
Denis, G., Klein, S., Gueguen, B., 2014. Use of social
networks for outreach, education and training on space
applications: Know-how and experience of Planete
Sciences Midi-Pyrenees and CNES. Acta Astronaut.
94, 765–775. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2013.09.010.
Divol, R., Edelman, D., Sarrazin, H., 2012. Demystifying
social media. McKinsey Q. 66–77.
Elefant, C., 2011. The “Power” of Social Media: Legal
Issues & Best Practices for Utilities Engaging Social
Media. Energy Law J. 32, 1.
EPA, C., 2015. EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of
Additional Clean Air Act Violations [WWW
Document]. URL http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/
admpress.nsf/21b8983ffa5d0e4685257dd4006b85e2/4
a45a5661216e66c85257ef10061867b!OpenDocument
(accessed 12.28.15).
EPA, C,. 2015, EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of
Clean Air Act Violations / Carmaker allegedly used
software that circumvents emissions testing for certain
air pollutants [WWW Document], 2015. URL
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/a883dc3da7
094f97852572a00065d7d8/dfc8e33b5ab162b985257e
c40057813b!OpenDocument (accessed 1.2.16).
Fan, D., Geddes, D., Flory, F., 2013. The Toyota Recall
Crisis: Media Impact on Toyota’s Corporate Brand
Reputation. Corp. Reput. Rev. 16, 99–117.
doi:10.1057/crr.2013.6.
Freberg, K., 2012. Intention to comply with crisis
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
186
messages communicated via social media. Public
Relat. Rev. 38, 416–421. doi:10.1016/
j.pubrev.2012.01.008.
Gartner, T., Lienert, P., Morgan, D., 2015. After year of
stonewalling, Volkswagen stunned U.S. regulators
with confession. Reuters.
Healey, J., 2010. Toyota deaths reported to safety database
rise to 37.
Hebert, A., 2015. ARB Letter to VW.
Hiltz, S.R., Diaz, P., Mark, G., 2011. Introduction: Social
media and collaborative systems for crisis
management. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 18,
1–6. doi:10.1145/2063231.2063232.
Houston-Waesch, M., 2015. Volkswagen to Launch
Diesel-Car Recall in January. Wall Str. J.
Kottasova, I., Thompson, M., 2015. Volkswagen admits
more cars may have cheat device [WWW Document].
CNNMoney. URL http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/22/
news/volkswagen-diesel-scandal/index.html (accessed
1.2.16).
Ledford, C.J., Anderson, L.N., 2013. Online social
networking in discussions of risk: applying the
CAUSE model in a content analysis of Facebook.
Health Risk Soc. 15, 251.
Martin Winterkorn resigns as Volkswagen CEO [WWW
Document], 2015. . CNBC. URL http://www.cnbc.
com/2015/09/23/martin-winterkorn-resigns-as-
volkswagen-ceo.html (accessed 1.2.16).
Nadeem, M., 2012. Social Customer Relationship
Management (SCRM): How Connecting Social
Analytics to Business Analytics Enhances Customer
Care and Loyalty? Int. J. Bus. Soc. Sci. 3, n/a.
New VW CEO says cars hit by emissions-rigging scandal
to be refitted [WWW Document], n.d. . CNET. URL
http://www.cnet.com/news/new-vw-ceo-says-cars-
affected-by-emissions-rigging-scandal-to-be-refitted/
(accessed 1.2.16).
Pearson, C.M., Clair, J.A., 1998. Reframing Crisis
Management. Acad. Manage. Rev. 23, 59–76.
doi:10.2307/259099.
Rappaport, S.D., 2010. Listening Solutions. J. Advert.
Res. 50, 197–213.
Ruddick, G., 2015. VW admits emissions scandal was
caused by “whole chain” of failures. The Guardian.
Schwarz, A., 2012. How publics use social media to
respond to blame games in crisis communication: The
Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg 2010. Public Relat.
Rev., Public Relations History 38, 430–437.
doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2012.01.009.
The Streaming APIs | Twitter Developers [WWW
Document], 2012. URL https://dev.twitter.com/docs/
streaming-apis (accessed 5.16.12).
Thompson, G., Garder, D., Besch, M., Thiruvengadam,
A., Kapanna, H., 2014. In-Use Emission Testing of
Light-Duty Diesel Vehicles in the United States (Final
Report). West Virginia University, Center for
Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions.
Twitter, B.C., 2015. “It Was Installed For This Purpose,”
VW’s U.S. CEO Tells Congress About Defeat Device
[WWW Document]. NPR.org. URL http://
www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2015/10/08/446861855/volkswagen-u-s-ceo-
faces-questions-on-capitol-hill (accessed 1.2.16).
US EPA, O., 2015. Volkswagen Light Duty Diesel
Vehicle Violations for Model Years 2009-2016
[WWW Document]. URL http://www.epa.gov/vw
(accessed 12.28.15).
Veil, S.R., Petrun, E.L., Roberts, H.A., 2012. Issue
Management Gone Awry: When Not to Respond to an
Online Reputation Threat. Corp. Reput. Rev. 15, 319–
332. doi:10.1057/crr.2012.18.
Volkswagen CEO apologizes for cheating | Business |
DW.COM | 20.09.2015 [WWW Document], 2015. .
DW.COM. URL http://www.dw.com/en/volkswagen-
ceo-apologizes-for-cheating/a-18726156 (accessed
1.2.16).
Weiss, N.K. naomikresge R., 2015. Volkswagen Drops
23% After Admitting Diesel Emissions Cheat [WWW
Document]. Bloomberg.com. URL http://
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-
21/volkswagen-drops-15-after-admitting-u-s-diesel-
emissions-cheat (accessed 1.2.16).
Zailskaite-Jakste, L., Kuvykaite, R., 2012. Implementation
of Communication in Social Media by Promoting
Studies at Higher Education Institutions. Eng. Econ.
23, 174–188. doi:10.5755/j01.ee.23.2.1550.
Zhang, B., Vos, M., 2014. Social media monitoring: aims,
methods, and challenges for international companies.
Corp. Commun. Int. J. 19, 371–383.
doi:10.1108/CCIJ-07-2013-0044.
Zollino, P., 2015. CO2 issue largely concluded [WWW
Document]. URL https://www.volkswagen-media-
services.com/en/ (accessed 12.30.15).
Volkswagen Emission Crisis Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web
187