Crisis Communication

    Crisis Communication is a challenging and dynamic topic. I clearly remembered that for my “Principles of Public Relations” class, when Dr. Hether asked us which part of Public Relations attracts us the most, nobody chose “Crisis Communication”. I think the reason is that no one wants to face crisis, let alone dealing with crisis. However, as a PR practitioner, crisis communication is not only a “compulsory course”, but also ubiquitous in an era of social media.

    According to Brian and Solis, Crisis Communication is a branch of PR that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization, usually from a reactive response, facing a swelling public challenge to its reputation, brand, and community. In Web 2.0 era, the crisis has a broader definition. Conversations, reviews, comments, interactions related to a brand, company, or products, whatever with control or without knowledge, could both help to promote a brand and trigger a crisis.

    The greatest difference between traditional crisis communication and social media crisis lies in that traditional crisis communications was relegated as a reactive response, while for social media crisis communication is proactive. As Brian and Solis put it, in the Social Web, a majority of potential crises are avoidable through proactive listening, engagement, response, conversation, humbleness, and transparency, so that they introduced a dynamic process of crisis management, that is

- Active


- Listening

- Observation


- Conversation


- Learning


- Planning


- Continued Adaptation and Engagement

Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web

   I found that learning crisis communication for social media is an integrated application for what we have learned from Groundswell this semester. By listening to the Groundswell, a company could keep an eye on how their existing and potential customers talking about them, and targeting their audience on social media platforms, and thus, prevent possible crisis. Even when crisis comes, they could figure out the most appropriate solution according to the demographics of their audience. By talking with the Groundswell, a company could establish their unique brand personality and promote their products or services. By doing this, they could collect feedbacks from their customers efficiently so that they could proactively see possible crisis, and utilized the most appropriate social media tools to deal with the crisis. By energizing and embracing the Groundswell, a company will be able to let their enthusiastic customers help them to deal with crisis, and these customers will be the key factor in crisis communication. They could not only help to discover the premonition of an online crisis, but also be the intercessor of the crisis, because what they said is more credible than what a company itself said. Overall, whatever objective and strategy a company will use for crisis communication, “Protention”is the most important characteristic for crisis communication for social media.

    I am excited to find that crisis communication is a combination of what we have learned, and it is an integrated application of various social media strategies. To this extend, crisis communication is both challenging and significant for a company. We could actually gain funs and sense of satisfactory through crisis communication.