0:00:16my name's timothy comes from a professor in the communication department here it is known
0:00:20or university i want like talking today is about christ communication or how managers respond
0:00:26what they say and do after a crisis
0:00:28my research is being in the area of developing an actually testing the situational crisis
0:00:33communication theory which we just call s e c t for short
0:00:37what makes it unique and if you're crates communication is that most christ communication research
0:00:41is k study based series all the results are just specular their suggestible what christ
0:00:47managers might do s e c t on the other hand this social scientifically based
0:00:51and used experiments actually test the recommendations within a pretty crisis managers
0:00:57this is an example of what's known as an evidence based approach and so we're
0:01:01trying to develop what's known as an evidence based approach to crisis communication s e
0:01:05c t with actually inspired by attribution theory so that's a good place to start
0:01:10to explain what s e c t is and how it works
0:01:14attribution three says that we people encounter a bands particularly unexpected and negative events they
0:01:20trying to come up with explanations for why things happen
0:01:23well a crisis is negative or not expect so when a crisis it would expect
0:01:27stakeholders people are interested new organisation to try to determine why that crisis occur
0:01:33and we know from attribution theory is the people either attribute the why to the
0:01:38person involved in this case the organisation or to the situation surrounding the event
0:01:43and this is a big difference for organisations when you attribute crisis responsibility to the
0:01:49organisation many negative things are associated with that for the organisation
0:01:54this includes such things as damage to the reputation
0:01:58less intend to purchase from the organisation and then increased intentioned actually engage a negative
0:02:03word of mouth so the attributions do matter
0:02:06s e c t tries understand how people perceive the situation so that managers can
0:02:11anticipate does reactions and offer communicative responses that will fit bass with the demands created
0:02:18by the situations
0:02:19so we look at those two elements now of s e c t first being
0:02:23had you assess the situation a segment each medication aspects from their we can review
0:02:27and wrap it up to a situation is really a two-step process the first step
0:02:32is just to look at what type of crisis you've encountered
0:02:36and what we found in our research is that you can actually break crises down
0:02:41into three types
0:02:43the first type is picked some crisis none of it can crisis there's very little
0:02:47responsibility given to the organisation next as accidental minimal responsibility and then finally there is
0:02:54a preventable prices and naturally attribute very strong attribution the crisis responsible to the organisation
0:03:00and that's the most difficult one actually cope with
0:03:03for organisations
0:03:05from their that gives you a base how people might react to your crisis then
0:03:10you look at in the second step two intensifying factors
0:03:13the first factors crisis just re whether or not you had similar crisis in the
0:03:17past and prior reputation
0:03:19and what we have found that if you have prior histories
0:03:23similar to the one you're experiencing now for you have a negative reputation physical before
0:03:28crisis that intensified attributions the crisis responsibility
0:03:33so if you had an accidental crisis which is minimal attributions that you organisations responsible
0:03:39either one or both these intensify factors result that christ a shifting becoming one to
0:03:45be viewed as preventable having very strong attributions a crisis responsibility
0:03:50and that's critical because that chefs how you that have to engage in communication with
0:03:54your stakeholders and we talk about christ communication there are two parts of that first
0:04:00database response and secondly there's reputation a management efforts
0:04:05and the base responses actually the most important because you need to use this in
0:04:08every type of christ assuming counter because the focus of the base responses on your
0:04:13number one priority during a crisis and that's public safety in your bass response to
0:04:18begin by telling people what they need to know to protect themselves physically from the
0:04:22crisis
0:04:23this is can include such things as telling people to of accolade in area because
0:04:28something is dangerous there or avoiding certain products or returning products the might be dangerous
0:04:33for them such as of right of voicing
0:04:37the second part the base responses to express sympathy to the victims
0:04:40and also
0:04:42to tell them what you're doing to correct the problem so the crisis what happen
0:04:45again together to separate the in this corrective action or trying to help people co
0:04:50psychologically with the crisis
0:04:53for the a crisis involves just minimal or moderate levels of crisis responsibility all you
0:04:59really need is the base response and you'll have an effective response
0:05:03because you will have doubled public state the issues and you will actually start to
0:05:08repair you reputation
0:05:09but when the crisis involves various drawing attributions a crisis responsibility you then need to
0:05:15add in the idea of reputation repair strategies
0:05:19and reputation repair strategies there are two ones are the most common at the first
0:05:24what we call compensation where you offer victims either money or some types of goods
0:05:28and compensation
0:05:30and the second one's an apology where you publicly accept responsibility for the crisis and
0:05:35you ask victims for forgiveness
0:05:37while these sound like although to be automatically things an organisation we do we have
0:05:41to keep in mind these two strategies are very expensive from a financial perspective so
0:05:46crisis managers and mention teams do debate whether or not to use these strategies to
0:05:51repair the organisation's reputation
0:05:54for the past fifteen years we've conducted quite a bit of research
0:05:58on s t sixty
0:05:59and can summarise that research fairly simple e
0:06:03first idea is notion that you need to understand the crisis situation to create an
0:06:08affective christ communication response in to be back to the response was first on or
0:06:13public safety and then look to repair the reputation the might be damaged during the
0:06:17crisis
0:06:19and what we have found is that as attributions of organisational responsibility for the crisis
0:06:24increase you need to change your strategy so they're more common data and they focus
0:06:29more on the big jump and addressing his or her needs
0:06:34i liked and by saying that crisis communication can really be fairly simple and effective
0:06:39if you're willing to follow the existing advice and the cabinets it's currently available crisis
0:06:45communicators
0:07:04we didn't
0:07:06i have addressed
0:07:09have