Coombs 7 – Crisis Containment and Recovery
Mic Brookshire, Nadya Vera, Meredith Woods & Gisele de la Moriniere
This reading from Ongoing Crisis Communication will focus on the intial crisis response, reputation management during the crisis and follow-up communication. The task: You will provide a 500 word comment that summarizes three key points that you don’t want your peers to miss in the chapter and raises at least three questions or discussion points for consideration by the class. Doc students: remember that you, especially, should be looking for theoretical points and not just application.
This reading from Ongoing Crisis Communication will focus on the intial crisis response, reputation management during the crisis and follow-up communication. The task: You will provide a 500 word comment that summarizes three key points that you don’t want your peers to miss in the chapter and raises at least three questions or discussion points for consideration by the class. Doc students: remember that you, especially, should be looking for theoretical points and not just application.
posted by prteacher at
3/28/2007 06:33:00 AM
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Ongoing Crisis Communication
Chapter 7: Crisis Containment and Recovery
Coombs discusses the ways in which communication is used to contain a crisis and help and organization to recover. He explains that the initial crisis response needs to be quick, but accurate because it shows that the organization is in charge and it’s capable of handling the crisis. If the organization doesn’t fill the information void, someone else will. Any organization that maintains silence around a crisis appears to be uncertain and lacking control of the situation and it allows others to control the situation.
Organizations need not limit themselves to one spokesperson, but all people speaking on behalf of the organization must deliver the same message. The organization should be honest and express sympathy for the problem, but not accept blame. After a crisis event, stakeholders need 3 types of information:
1. Who, what, where, when, why, how
2. Are there precautions stakeholders should take to protect themselves?
3. Tell them how the situation is being controlled/ rectified.
Crises also present reputational management issues. Coombs explains that the best way to minimize reputation damage is by training crisis communication staff to employ the correct crisis communication strategy for any given situation. Crisis communication strategies follow a continuum of varying degrees of acceptance or denial of culpability, ranging from full apology to attacking the accuser. One of the challenges of employing this method to determine the appropriate response is that the crisis communication staff need to be very well trained in which response should be used when and in ensuring that all communication staff are thoroughly familiar with the various specifics of each tactic. A final note for employing solid crisis communication techniques is to always follow up with stakeholders and the media as more information becomes available. This increases an organization’s transparency and helps to increase the trust factor in the company.
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Meredith, at 10:12 AM
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