INTRODUCTION
There is a general agreement that a crisis, typically unpredictable crisis is an event that has potential to damage the influenced organization, its stakeholders and the general public. Not all negative events become crisis as long as there is a sound management system for handling events. Therefore crisis management plays an important role of making decisions to head off or mitigate the effects of crisis. For now, crisis management has changed a lot, one of the motives is social media.
Social Media, without doubt, is one of the greatest innovations in modern times. It is changing the ways of communication by making the advanced technology accessible to the most of the world. For now, the coverage of social media have been expanded to the areas of crisis management. As Argenti mentioned in his articles, social media is certainly a part of crisis management and is contributing to the increased media scrutiny today (Argenti, 2006).
Social media actually adds some new elements to crisis management – speedy and multiplicity. This is due to the attributions of social media – Ubiquity, Immediacy, Availability. Social media is ubiquitous, most of people in world are using social media; social media is immediate, which allows people to share information instantly with anyone in the world; social media is highly available to everyone with high-tech equipments.
At the same time, social media is a tool to overcome the stages of crisis.
Ÿ Pre-crisis Planning. Planning relates to preventing or lessening the negative outcomes of crisis and getting affected company in the best position to react to, and recover from a crisis.
Ÿ Managing the Crisis. In this stage, crisis response is the crucial thing that is the process to ensure that the company reacts properly to an incident.
Ÿ Post-crisis & Learning. Managing post-crisis means follow-up process after crisis, especially in rebuilding trust and image repair.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE & CURRENT SHITS
1. Pre-crisis Planning
First of all, in previous time, crisis management plans is vital for company to navigate the crisis because they do not only guarantee an organization is ready for the crisis, but also ensure the company’s surviving a crisis. Company could easily control the situation because they know how the traditional media covered, and know how to cope with these media. The crisis management plan usually had 10 to 15 crisis categories that a company might face. Then within these broad categories, the company would develop solutions separately, like “if this happens, this is what spokesperson should say”. Just as Thomas did, the crisis usually handled by himself with specific plans and collaboration just limited between company and traditional media. The spokesperson had all messages according to the plan. So during a crisis, company didn’t have to set up team or committee and nobody had to argue with the manager about what should do or what should say. For example, Thomas Lee used to be a spokesman of MWRA (Massachusetts Water Resources Authority). In 1999, he illustrated his experience in handling a crisis communication. “I did everything, I wrote press releases, and sent it to the medias have nurtured relationships with us. Basic cell phone and fax machine are the communicating tools, email and internet were hardly used at that time. A pre-set protocol which has long been established were set into motion and quickly made to the key personnel. Within an hour of the incident, we had established control of the information and stood in a position to transfer the information as we saw fit in a well considerable, concise manner”. At that time, the dissemination of crisis was solely done by traditional news outlets, the core concept was “controlling the media”, which meant “controlling the message”.
Fast forward to nowadays, if this same incident occurred today and the plan they had established in 1999 was still all that was in place, there is no doubt that crisis management plan would be seriously flawed today. The emergence of social media make crisis hardly to be predictable. You wouldn’t know which YouTube videos were going to get the most attention, also you cannot predict how the media is going to covering the crisis. Since crisis are unpredictable, and social media is vital, a good crisis management plan are more complicated and must incorporate social media.
In 2009, Domino’s Pizza was involved in a crisis when two employees posted videos of adulterated food on YouTube. Based on the principles of public relations management crafted by Arthur W. Page and best practices from real, Domino had a series of protocols when the incident happened. Also, after confirming the authenticity of the video, Vice President, Tim McIntyre, then began to communicate internally and externally with people on the YouTube, security and senior management team. At the same time, collaboration with the consumer watchdog organization played an important role. With the help of social media and CWO, Domino identify the employee who posted video and quickly responded to customers on Twitter about the process of investigation. At last, President of Domino’s Pizza, uploaded an apology video by himself onto YouTube. In this case, Domino delivered the company’s crisis communication plan through social media. When they did this thing well, customers will consider this communication as one which happened to take place during a crisis rather than the crisis communication by Domino.
Furthermore, for now, only has crisis management plan is not enough for a company to assess crisis in real time. Thus, the collaborative ways are also changed from “few people” to “a complex and extensive network”. In Domino’s case, external collaboration with CWO is a good example to prove this phenomenon. While internally, more and more companies are selecting the Crisis Management Team (CMT), which is a cross-functional group to cooperate and handle any crisis. Considering to build a high performance team need to go through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. Crisis Management Team is usually set up long before the crisis. And compared with previous “individual fight”, now CMT forces members to work together with fast pace (Fischer & Boynton, 2005). Before the team achieve the last performing stage, the crisis team has to practice to working through simulated scenarios, in which team members build cohesion in order to work out any problems. As Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson mentioned in their “Ways to Build Collaborative Team”, there are eight factors that lead to successful team, one of which is “Ensuring Requisite Skills” (Gratton & Erickson, 2007). Because social media added new elements in crisis, the technology skills in handling social media become necessary skills for a CMT. Sometimes the company assemble a typical social media team to deal with social media. Burger King used to have a potential crisis when an employee taking a picture or standing in lettuce caused accusing voice from Internet. However Burger King made an excellent and swift response to the crisis by using social media CMT. The CMT used internet to find the store in question, then identified the employee, fired him immediately and shared crisis resolution on social media. It took only 24 hours for the CMT to handle the crisis from eruption to resolution.
Secondly, in the past the news cycle of crisis used to be small, which consisted by a couple of distinct points during a day (morning news & evening news). Under this situation, affected companies only needed to limit the new cycle, because the small number of media cover. Therefore, it seemed much easier to monitor both media and public reaction. The collaboration mainly focused on working with traditional media and handling the incidents in order to go through the crisis. In 1982, Johnson & Jonson’s Tylenol capsules was added poisons by a criminal, seven people were killed within a week. Jonson & Jonson was confronted with a huge crisis and Tylenol might lost its position as a market leader. However, for the reports of this crisis were delayed by the new cycle, the incidents was known to the public over several hours. So Johnson & Jonson took full advantage of this period, they ran ads on newspapers and TV that promise to offer exchange capsules to tablets.
While, for now, constant news cycle has been made by social media, since everyone who has access to a computer is now a viable news sources, it is impossible to completely control news cycle. By which means, only monitoring is not sufficient to handle crisis, social media should also be used as a platform to maintain relationship and build mutual trust with customers when crisis is not happened. Now savvy companies use social media to communicate with customers, to do the marketing campaign, so that when crisis happened, the good relationship with customers could help company overcome incidents. Kraft Foods is a good example that take advantage of “Fans Effect”. Oreo Cookie posted add that in support of various issues, holidays: a rainbow stuffed cookies for Gay Pride month. Some people strongly disagree this kind of idea, but there were still loyal fans who support it. Some of them even helped company announce on the Facebook, “As a company, Kraft Foods has a proud history of admiring diversity and inclusiveness. We feel the OREO ad is a fun expression of their values”.
On top of that, some situational collaborations with customers are done, such as role-play customer’s reactions, to get into customers’ head so that find the best way to complement their behavior when crisis hits (Tybout & Roehm, 2009). For example, extensive trainings are provided in British Petroleum, because the experience of failure in “Deep Horizon oil spill” crisis. Social media wise is a not new concept for BP, they owned and updated Facebook and Twitter page, but they failed to engage with fans, comments were not replies, mentions on twitter were not done. Such absence made it hard for BP to build any rapport with fans.
2. Managing Crisis
Response quickly is the key factor for the company control the crisis and repair their reputation. However, the differences between the past and now is social media is substantially accelerating crisis communication, the need to be quicker determine that having more than 24 hours respond to a crisis are not valid anymore. In previous time, organization had significant more time to respond to a crisis for the delay of traditional media.
Just like the case of Johnson & Johnson, at that time, traditional media took several hours for the crisis to be reported on the first day, while coming to today, US Airways had only minutes to response to the crash because of social media. In 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 plunged into the Hudson River. Within ten minutes of the crash, Janis Krums, a blogger who happened to on the spot, uploaded a photo of the downed plane on Twitter and distributed the news to tens of thousands of people. It was roughly half an hour before the first news coming out from traditional media. Within an hour, US Airways made its first statement and the CEO held a press conference in the next half an hour. Therefore, the collaboration from top to down has to be quite efficient. All of the response should be directly from the peope at the top of the organization. Also, the engagement of employees are crucial for resolutions, so the creative company culture and practical training are in great need to build up an integrating response system.
Under this situation, stakeholders, especially consumers, have much higher requirements for crisis management, not only for efficient response but also for quality of response. It’s better to explain it with “Ethos Theory”. Ethos is the part of persuasion, which stands for the character and credibility of messenger. In the past, for the lack of information, customer could not completely figure out the truth of company response, sometimes might be cheated by their so-called authority, experts, etc. For example, denial strategy is widely used at that time, because there were always some experts pointed out the harmlessness of their products and fooled people by promising nonsenses. However, for now, consumers become smarter and are not easily fooled because of social media. Mark Twain foresaw it a hundred years ago “if you lie, it can travel halfway around the world, while the truth, although you talk about it thousands times, it still putting on its shoes”. Therefore, affected company have to rack its brains to make the most appropriate response. Still with “Ethos”, more companies find out “liking” and “listening” are easier to be accepted and forgiven by consumers when they made horrible mistakes. Citi Bank successfully handled a crisis of a video that threatening consumers who is trying to close accounts might to be arrested. The CMT firstly checking the reaction from Facebook page, and within 12 hours, they get the initial data from social media, and analyzed it in customers’ point of view rather than management’s perspective. What Citi did is not a traditional approach, they created a human interest as a key part of their values. Listening to the needs of customers help Citi knew the audience better, accordingly, crisis response strategy would be more effective in terms of objective assessment of the incident.
The principle of reciprocity in persuasion is also useful in managing crisis (Cialdini, 2001). If you want forgiveness from customers, you had to give them the suitable response or apology. Whether you should be assertive or likable, let me use two examples. One is also the case of Citi, after assessing the incident, the CEO, Frank Eliason, held a conference within 24 hours and showed more videos from the scene in order to tell the complete pictures, rather than simply offer a cold press release. While on the contrary, Sanlu Group wasn’t aware that the products had been adulterated with melamine but kept throwing the blame on its failure to rigorously test its products, until it was too late to apology and ended with accruement from the whole society. Just as the two opposite dimensions in ethos: Likable, Assertiveness.
It seems that social media make everything uncovered, therefore, likable (Citi) is far more useful than assertiveness (Sanlu), which is also true in terms of outcomes – Citi Bank is still one of the powerful banks in the world, while Sanlu Group is disappear from the public. You can be assertive, but at first you have to be likable in order to be forgiven by customers, assertiveness can be used in strengthening commitment, writing it down in assertive words, announcing to the public in assertive tones, etc.
3. Post-crisis & Learning
Long time ago, companies used to only manage crisis by traditional media, they apologized on newspapers and TV, but they hardly initiated ad campaigns in the stage of post-crisis to rebuild the trust among customers. People at that time hesitated to re-trust but had to, because of the limited choices of products. However, nowadays, social media helps to reveal the truth of the matter so that people are aware that they are not always very smart about whom they trust, especially many scandals accrue (Kramer, 2009). Also with the enlargement of the merchandise selection, people are less likely to trust only one brand because of the higher risk if the brand let people down (Hurley, 2006). As long as experienced scandals or crises, companies have to spend more efforts in learning from that experience, reshape their image and trying to win people back than ever before. In other words, rebuilding trust from customers has been an issue must be addressed for every company in the post crisis.
First of all, marketing campaign has become one of the most important ways to rebuild trust. After crisis, Domino’s Pizza spent several months on getting data and feedback from social media, and decided to create a campaign named “The Pizza Turnaround” to market their new pizza. Besides using social media sites, Domino also created some collaborative approaches with internal and external. For example, they showed feedback from social media to the public, gave gifts for people who post the picture of pizza on Facebook, and even created an innovation team for better ideas. This campaign help Domino won peoples back, the sales increased a lot in the next year. As we learned in collaboration class, rebuilding trust also needs to “listen first”, which is the same with “Response Strategy”. Domino made decision on the basis of public voice, and they quickly find out what the most important behaviors are to the people. During the process of the campaign, Domino created feedback system - delivered the feedback and communicate with customers with open and authentic heart. Also, they didn’t bury head in the sand but adopted ideas from people around for constant learning and continuous improve.
Secondly, to rebuild trust also has to own strategy to develop better relationships in the future. In 2006, Dell went through a crisis that one of their computers spontaneously caught on fire. However, they had no idea what caused it, and how to improve. So the chairman of Dell released transparent blog and admitted that they did not know the reason. And then they asked for help to who had worked with Dell, and tried to figure out ways to improve in collaborative ways. On top of that, top management encouraged empowerment to their employees for more communication with customers on the social media. What Dell did is a typical way to create transparency in public, they explained it in real and authentic words, and didn’t hide any information, that is why customer reaction to this blog was not irritated but thankful for their honesty. If transparency is a way to rebuild trust external, empowerment to the employees is an approach to rebuild the trust within company. Both of them lead to the recovery and image repair of Dell.
CONSLUSION
There is no doubt that social media has changed and promoted collaboration in crisis management in accelerating and complicating ways. At the same time the advent of the “citizen journalist” have significantly added to the challenges for crisis management. For now, social media has become an indispensable part of dealing with crisis management, the success of a company depends on how they overcome crisis, while how to take advantage of social media in collaboration determine whether a company could go through crisis successfully.
REFERENCE
1. Thomas Lee (2009). The Evolution Of Crisis Communication. http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/newsletter/crisis-manager-091016.html
2. Christophe Roux-Dufort (2007). Is Crisis Management (Only) a Management of Exceptions? Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. Volume 15 Number 2
3. Cialdini, Robert B. (2001). Harnessing the Science of Persuasion. Harvard Business Review. P75
4. Fischer, Bill; Boynton, Andy (2005). Virtuoso Teams. Harvard Business Review. P121
5. Gratton, Lynda; Erickson, Tamara J. (2007). Egight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Harvard Business Review. P104
6. Hurley, Robert F. (2006). The Decision to Trust. Harvard Business Review. P56
7. Kramer, Roderick M. (2009). Rethinking Trust. Harvard Business Review. P70
8. Tybout, Alice M.; Roehm, Michelle. (2009). Let the Response Fit the Scandal. Harvard Business Review. P87
9. Paul A. Argenti (2006). A Strategic Approach to Crisis Communications and Management.
http://www.emscom.usi.ch/sites/www.emscom.usi.ch/files/media/event-exc-lecture-crisis-management-2.10.2006.pdf
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