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