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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crisis Management is a hot issue in modern society,
回复删除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?
I think that your topic is a theme nowadays.
回复删除Crisis management is an important direction in modern society. This research is meaningful and very useful for us.
Nice presentation with deep analysis.
Wang Donghong (Tom) (53189150)
回复删除nice presentation with clear illustration and organised content. Crisis management is still the popular topic worth more studying. Anyway, great job!