2014年4月13日星期日

Crisis Management - Collaborative Shifts and Motives


1.      Introduction

A business crisis can be anything that can negatively affect a company’s reputation or bottom line. In the current day situation no business is immune to crisis. How to deal with public relations where company’s image and pride are at stake is the crucial thing during business crisis. Therefore, crisis management turns to be necessary for any company to handle a major event that threatens to harm the organization, the stakeholders, and the general public. However, with the development of economy, crisis management has been changed a lot in terms of different kinds of motives. Social media, resources as well as expertise are regarded as the key motives that induce the shifts of crisis management.

1.      Social Media

As Argenti mentioned in his articles, social media is certainly a part of this crisis management and is contributing to the increased media scrutiny present today.
Ÿ   Historical Perspective
Crisis management actually are consist of broad continuum of stages as follows: Pre-Crisis, Crisis Response, Post-Crisis.
In the past, in the stage of “pre-crisis”, company always has a plan to prevent or lessen the negative outcomes of a crisis and thereby protect the organization, stakeholders from damage. Besides, the news cycle of crisis used to be small, which means it was not very hard to monitor a certain number of media who would cover the crisis and the reaction from public.
In the stage of formulating strategic responses. In the past, organizations had significantly more time to respond to a crisis for the delay of traditional media (newspaper or TV).
In the stage of post-crisis, in the past, companies used to manage the crisis by working with traditional media. But they hardly use traditional media to follow up the situation after the crisis.
Ÿ   Shifts
Social media make crisis hardly to be predictable, which means, it’s tough for company to prepare for every single crisis event. You wouldn’t know which YouTube clips were going to get the most attention or hits and you can’t predict how the media is going to end up covering the crisis. Therefore, crisis management plan is not enough to assess the crisis in real time, now are more companies to crisis management team to handle any crisis.
On top of that, Owing to social media, savvy companies today not only monitor the social media for crisis but also use these platforms to listen customers concerns and keep people informed, which actually a way to build mutual trust with customers.
In the next stage, with the speed that social media is facilitating, the old rules of thumb like having 24 hours to respond to a crisis are no longer valid. In other words, companies must response to crisis extraordinarily quickly as soon as it comes up.
At last, for the characteristics of speed and multiplicity, social media now are widely used to manage post-crisis, like collecting crisis records, stakeholder feedback, especially in reshaping their image and persuade people to go back using their products.

2.      Multiple Resources

The resources that needs to be utilized in a crisis management includes relation resources like media and states, technical resources like software and internal network, financial resources and human resources like PR experts, scholars and other professional talents.
Ÿ   Historical Perspective
In the past, when there is no so many resources, the operations and strategies to deal with crisis are very simple and mainly concentrated on the crisis stage. But now those resources are also utilized in pre-crisis stage and post crisis stage. And the process of integrating and utilizing them becomes more complicated in the collaboration in a crisis.
Ÿ   Shifts
From the three stages of crisis, we can see how the function of integrating and utilizing those resources changes the collaborations in crisis management. In the pre-crisis stage, relation resources will contribute to scanning sources of crisis and assessing situation. And human resources helps selecting crisis management team. In the crisis stage, human resources function well in assessing types of crisis and using different strategies. Technical resources is useful for containing the crisis. Technical resources, financial resources, human resources and relation resources all contribute to managing post-crisis, including post-learning and image repairing.

3.      Expertise

Crisis management concerned a lot about the expertise such as communication skills, psychology knowledge, sociology knowledge, politics knowledge and management knowledge.
Ÿ   Historical Perspective
In the past the expertise used in crisis management is limited such as where is rarely related major and specific department to deal with crisis; they just sent the most talent people who can communicate with public in a better way to manage the crisis.
Ÿ   Shifts
As the crisis management became more and more important in the business and political area, the expertise applied in the crisis management also play a more important role than ever. The situation in dealing with crisis has shifted from common sense practice to expertise practice.
First of all, the demand of expertise in dealing with crisis results in the appearance of related majors and research, the birth of Public Relations Company and Consultant Company as well as the various kinds of related training and lectures.
These changes in crisis management have caused the innovation of collaboration pattern when developing crisis management plan and cooperating with tea members in crisis management.  For example, hiring expert to design tools and systems to detect the crisis, assess the situation and recover from the crisis; Selecting communicate expert who can manage the accuracy and consistency of the delivered messages to be the spokesman; employing psychologists to design the reaction strategy according to people’s different psychological activity in different situations.

4.      Conclusion

It seems that under the influence of these three motives, the shifts of crisis management will still exist and turn out to be both magnitude and complexity in the future.


3 条评论:

  1. Crisis Management is a hot issue in modern society,

    I wonder that will you give us more cases about social media have helped companies deal with crisis successfully.

    And I also wonder that since social media carries fake information, then, how companies can deal with that?

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  2. I think that your topic is a theme nowadays.
    Crisis management is an important direction in modern society. This research is meaningful and very useful for us.
    Nice presentation with deep analysis.

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  3. Wang Donghong (Tom) (53189150)
    nice presentation with clear illustration and organised content. Crisis management is still the popular topic worth more studying. Anyway, great job!

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