The group formulated the overall problem of crisis communication and reputation management and agreed on the following learning objectives for the next PBL:
- Pre: How to prepare for a crisis?
- During: Crisis communication
- Post: Effects of a crisis and reputation management
1. How to prepare for a crisis?
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| Source: http://www.huijskensbickerton.com/en/our-work/crisis-communication-2/ |
First of all it is important to define what a crisis is: A crisis is the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization's performance and generate negative outcomes. Furthermore, a crisis is perceptual: it is the perception of stakeholders that help to define an event as a crisis. (Coombs 2012, 2)
A crisis is unpredictable but not unexpected. Wise organizations know that crisis will befall them; they just do not know when. Crisis can be anticipated. Some crisis offer a great deal of warning: For instance if a major television news magazine is planning to run a negative story about an organization, management will know the event months in advance. Crises can violate expectations that stakeholders hold about how organizations should act: planes should land safely, products should not harm us, management should not steal money etc. This may threaten the relationship between the organization and its stakeholders. That is why crisis are considered dangerous to an organization's reputation, which is how stakeholders perceive the organization. (Coombs 2012, 3) I will address this point later on in the third learning objective.
According to Fill (2013, 464) a shift in corporate behaviour concerning crisis management can be observed. Formerly, the first stakeholders to be summoned by the CEOs were merchant bankers, whereas nowadays the public relations consultant is addressed first. Organizational crisis can be usefully considered in the context of chaos theory. Chaos occurs when complex systems break down and the established order or equilibrium are broken by events that are often abrupt and discontinuous. Chaos theory considers system breakdowns as a necessary event in order to ensure that the system be refreshed. They can occur due to managerial mistakes or environmental events. (Fill 2013, 464)
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| Chaos Theory. Source: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/Bun-Comp/Chaos-Theory.html |
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| Organisational crisis matrix. (Fill 2013, 464) |
Fill describes three phases through which a crisis passes. The first period, the pre-impact phase, consists of two main episodes: scanning and planning & event identification and preparation. Along with good strategic management comes a regular scan of the environment in order to detect the first signs of a significant change. Organisations that pick up signals that are repeated are in a better position to prepare for a disaster than those that do not scan the environment. The next episode is characterised by the identification of events that move from a possible to a probable status. The objective is not to prevent the crisis but to defuse it as much as possbile, to inform significant stakeholders and finally to manage the crisis process. (Fill 2013, 467)
According to Coombs, social media also have an effect on the precrisis state: Social media provides an opportunity for finding warning signs generated by stakeholders. The challenge is to locate emerging trends that are ready to develop into a crisis. Not every online statement or video is really a potential crisis.
2. During the crisis: Crisis communication
The impact phase is the phase when the crisis breaks out. Management is tested to the limit and if a plan has been developed it is implemented with the expectation of ameliorating the damage inflicted by the crisis. One method of reducing the impact is to contain or localize the crisis. Thorugh the necessity to talk to all the stakeholders, management will inevitably reveal its attitude towards the crisis event. Is its attitude one of genuine concern for the victims and stakeholders? (Fill 2013, 467)
It is also interesting to know, what kind of crisis are existing. Coombs (2013, 158) describes a scheme by how crisis can be categorized according to the level of responsibility. The following types/cluster are existing:
- Victim Cluster (Organization is seen as a victim of the crisis, little responsibility is attributed to the orga)
- Natural Disasters
- Rumors
- Workplace Violence
- Malevolence
- Accidental Cluster (Low attribution of crisis responsibility, threat to reputation is moderate)
- Challenges
- Technical-error accidents/product harm
- Preventable Cluster (Strong attribution of crisis responsibility, deliberately placed people at risk etc)
- Human-error accidents/product harm
- Organizational misdeeds
- The crisis communication planning should first of all include a crisis communication team, including at minimum the CEO, the chief of Public Relations, the Vice President, the Senior manager from the division in charge of the area that was involved in the situation that has brought about the crisis, the safety and/or security officer, the organization Lawyer, and anyone else who might be able to shed some light on the situation such as eye witnesses.The job of this team is to come up with a plan of action and decide who the spokesperson should be.In addition to the crisis communication team the Public Relations or Communications department should be supplemented with competent people who can answer phones and if required escort media. Having calls from the media answered promptly is essential. As soon as possible a prepared statement should be given to this staff.
- Positioning: To decide on a position, it is important to step out of your role in the company and put yourself in the situation of whom ever was involved in the crisis or try to view the crisis from the eye of the public. One possbility is to assign the crisis to one of the clusters mentioned above.
- Designated spokesperson: One individual should be designated as the primary spokesperson to represent the Company, make official statements and answer media questions throughout the crisis. The criteria to choose could be the following:
- Comfortable in front of the camera and with the reporters
- Skilled in handling media
- Competence to establish credibility with the media
- Suitable in regard to diction, appearance and charisma, sincere, straightforward and believable
- Media policies and procedures:Select a place to be used as a media center. It should be some distance from offices of the crisis communication team, spokesperson and emergency operations center to ensure that media are not in the middle of the action if they happen to take the wrong turn or have to pass by those offices or areas on the way to the restrooms.
- Practicing tough questions: A crisis situation is always difficult when dealing with the media. Therefore, tough questions and rehearsals are necessary to help the spokesperson prepare. It is better to over-prepare than to be surprised by the depth of questioning by the media. Be tough and be prepared. Don't volunteer information unless it is a point the company wants to make and the question hasn't been asked.
- Prepared statements: If you don't communicate immediately, you lose your greatest opportunity to control events. Your first news release should include at a minimum the who, what, when and where of the situation. You must give the facts that have been gathered from reliable sources and confirmed. As the crisis progresses and new information and facts become available, it is also advisable to develop prepared statements to be made by the spokesperson at the onset of any media interview, briefing or news conference.
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| Source: https://e-edu.nbu.bg/course/view.php?id=22120 |
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| Issues Management Response Flow Chart. Source: http://melissaagnes.com/issues-management-response-flow-chart/ |
Again, an emphasis needs to be placed on the role of social media in the crisis response. Coombs (2012, 27) introduces three basic rules:
1) be present (crisis managers should not hide from the online world)
2) be where the action is (refers to using the online origins of the crisis as one location for the crisis response message)
3) be there before the crisis (if the company did not use social media before the crisis it should not use them within the crisis)
3. Post-Effects of a crisis and reputation management
Definition
The readjustment phase consists of three phases concerning the recovery and realignment of the organisation and its stakeholders to the new environment. Common characteristics of this phase are also the investigations, police inquiries, court cases and media probing that inevitable follow major crises and disasters. The rate at which organisations need to adjust depends partly on the strength of the image held by the customers/stakeholders prior to the crisis. If the organisation had a strong reputation, then the source credibility attributed to the organisation will be high: messages might be received trustfully and favorably. (Fill 2013, 467)
Reputation Management
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| Source: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/ |
- Denial
- Attacking the accuser (e.g. threat of lawsuit)
- Denial ("No crisis exists")
- Scapegoating (Someone else is blamed)
- Diminishment (Reduce attributions of organizational control over the crisis)
- Excusing (Minimize responsibility for crisis)
- Justification (Minimize perceived damage)
- Rebuilding (Try to improve the organization's reputation, benefit the stakeholder, offset the negatives)
- Compensation (Provide money or gifts to victims)
- Apology ("organization takes full responsibility")
- Bolstering (Supplemental to the others, build a positive connection to stakeholders, would seem egocentric if used alone
- Reminding (Orga tells about past good works)
- Ingratiation (Praise of stakeholders)
- Victimage (Why does the orga is also a victim?)
Social media have also created new arenas of information exchange where dynamic
and interactive flows of data are in the hands of millions of individuals, who
seek a more evidence-based participatory form of risk and crisis communication. The social media can be used to enhance risk and crisis communication in
several ways. First, they are collaborative and participatory. Online discussions
can improve situation awareness. Second, they are decentralised. The information can
circulate very quickly among actors, thanks to RSS feeds or Tweets, which are immediately
available online to multiple organisations. Third, social media are popular and
accessible. Emergency services can extend their reach when sending information
or warning. Finally, social media can provide data that are geographically or
temporally traceable. It becomes possible to monitor the geographical and time
development of a crisis thanks to digitally generated content. (Wendling, C., J. Radisch and S. Jacobzone 2013, 11) The main characteristics of social media in crisis communication are the following:
- enhance coordination among volunteers and emergency services
- conducting situational awareness
- enables dialogue between different stakeholders
- blogging and microblogging tools such as Twitter can be used to share facts in realtime and to convey recommendations and warnings rapidly
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| Different types of social media used in crisis and risk management. Source: Wendling, C., J. Radisch and S. Jacobzone (2013, 13) |
The table provides a good overview of which social media channel should be used for crisis and risks communication. Wendling et al. (2013, 16) also included cases of what did not worked well in social media crisis communication:
- Not including volunteer who turn to the blogosphere instead
- The case of information coming from another source than the emergency service
- The Overload of Information
- The Fear and "Shiny New Object"-Syndrome: Organisations had often to battle against the fear of using social media, when they emerged. But they also had to be aware of the “shiny new object” syndrome. As new social media tools emerged, some organisations want to jump on each technology bandwagon, without strategic thinking.
Case studies
The following slideshares analysis 3 case studies (BP, Nestle and Ford) regarding their crisis communication: http://de.slideshare.net/elishatan/social-media-crisis-management-three-case-studies
Here is a link to a negative example of crisis communication. The case study deals with Germanwings, which faced a crisis this year after the suicide of a pilot on a flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf: http://sm4good.com/2015/03/26/germanwings-failed-crisis-communications/ What are the lessons learnt out of the cases?
- In a crisis, social media is a primary information channel, not something “extra” that you can take care of later
- If you are outsourcing your day to day social media management, staff with signoff authority need to quickly take control in a crisis
- A prepared crisis communications plan is only as good as your ability to adapt to the real crisis
- The person who manages your social media accounts needs to be in the loop
- In a crisis you need to provide information, information, information.
- Translate critical information
Sources:
- Clawson Freeo (n.d.). Crisis Communication Plan: A PR Blue Print. Online: http://www.niu.edu/newsplace/crisis.html Quoted: 01.10.2015.
- Coombs W. 2012. Ongoing Crisis Communication. 3rd edition. Sage.
- Fill C. 2013. Marketing Communications. 6th edition. Pearson.
- Wendling,
C., J. Radisch and S. Jacobzone (2013). The Use of Social Media in
Risk and Crisis Communication. OECD Working Papers on Public Governance. No. 24. OECD Publishing.http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k3v01fskp9s-en Quoted:01.10.2015.
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