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Since public sector organizations provide services to citizens but struggle with poor perceptions of their functioning, it is valuable to examine how their online responses to complaints on social media could impact their reputation. Yet, surprisingly little is known about effects of public organizations' webcare. Therefore, this study assesses the impact of the webcare's tone, response strategy and user's involvement on participants’ continuance intention and perceptions of reputation.

Two experimental studies (Study 1: N = 424; Study 2: N = 203) with an interval of one week were carried out to assess the effects of singular and repeated exposure to webcare by a Dutch public transport organization on the participants' continuance intention and perceived organizational reputation. Study 1 examined the effects of the webcare's tone (corporate vs conversational human voice (CHV)) and response strategy (accommodative vs defensive); Study 2 contained tone of voice and user's involvement (observer vs complainer). The effects of repeated exposure to the webcare's tone were also examined.

The results indicate that perceptions of CHV in webcare contribute to webcare as reputation management tool, since it leads to immediate higher reputation scores that also remain stable after repeated exposure. Furthermore, people's continuance intention increased after repeated exposure to webcare responses that were perceived as CHV, thus a natural and engaging communication style, indicating this is an effective strategy for customer care as well. No substantial impact was found for response strategy and user's involvement in the complaint handling.

The novelty of this study is that the authors assess the effects of the webcare's tone combined with response strategy and user's involvement in a public sector context with a sector-specific conceptualization of reputation and continuance intention measured after singular and repeated exposure to webcare.

Although issue management has received ample attention, changes in the media landscape and increased societal scrutiny are currently challenging organizations’ communicative handling of issues. This raises the question of how communication professionals currently perceive and communicatively deal with issues, and what impact issue response strategies have when organizations are addressed regarding their involvement in an issue.

We explore issue communication perceptions and practices by communication professionals in two focus groups. A subsequent experimental study assesses the consequences of issue response strategies for corporate reputation and legitimacy and examines to what extent this relationship can be explained by skepticism while taking issue phase into account.

Although most issue communication practices (still) resemble earlier descriptions, the focus groups also indicate the importance of timing and medium of issue communication. The experiment shows that organizations are better off responding to an issue than not responding at all. Organizations should choose for an accommodative or adaptive response to positively impact reputation and legitimacy, and should be aware of the phase of an issue. Remarkably, these empirical differences only apply for a sustainability issue, not for a social issue.

The focus group study illuminates current issue monitoring and communication practices in today’s challenging media and societal landscape. The subsequent experiment enhances our understanding of a sub-field of issue communication: the communicative options of organizations when they are the addressed actor in issues.

In the assessment of student nurses, there is limited research exploring why the contributions of people with lived experience (LE) have an impact on learning. The purpose of this paper is to compare the nature of feedback provided to students by people who have both worked in and used mental health services.

To explore the nature of qualitative student feedback generated from an assessment involving people who have experience of using and working in mental health services. Therefore, an inductive content analysis conducted on the formative written feedback provided to students following a simulated assessment.

The results demonstrate significant similarities in the feedback provided by those with LE of using and working within mental health services, suggesting a shared conceptualisation of professionalism.

The research indicates the potential socialisation of professionals and service users to not only the assessment process but also the professional expectations of mental health nurses. These findings resonate with Barker et al.’s (1999) description of the “pseudo ordinary me” and emphasise the principles and importance of person-centred care.

The paper highlights that assessment approaches which incorporate feedback from people with LE offer a vehicle to demonstrate and explore how attributes, subjectively associated with professionalism, can be recognised and developed by student mental health nurses.