Page 213 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

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1 194 Crisis Communication
ongoing loss of confidence;
loss of market share;
loss of stock market value;
R&D expenses necessary to recuperate the three previous items.

Of course, it is just these, the most costly risks, that are not covered by
insurance companies and which could drive a company out of busi-
ness. Faced with this situation and other dramatic examples in the
1990s and the early 2000s (Enron, Andersen, Parmalat, etc) risk man-
agers of large organizations found themselves faced with the necessity
of having to coordinate with company spokespeople.
The implications of recent events give renewed meaning to preven-
tion and management of crisis communication. Where before commu-
nications departments focused solely on boosting the brand image,
without necessarily taking into account the overall stakes for a
company, adding risk managers to the picture will give companies a
big-picture strategy.
The main advantage is to expand the company vision and make it
more all-encompassing. The crisis management team is in a better
position to anticipate super-crises and to take into account the destabi-
lizing factors that crisis management itself implies.

Crises need to be handled in real-time

Because of the new forms of media like blogs, forums, e-mails and text
messages that allow consumers, citizens and employees to broadcast
and receive all sorts of information, crisis management can no longer
completely control the situation. For Christophe Roux Dufort,
Professor of Strategic Management at the Management School in
Lyons, France, when a crisis occurs, the speed that information travels
greatly exceeds the capacity of companies to deal with it:

Moreover, the information gets distorted as it rapidly spreads. What is
worse, the new forms of media lead their users to believe in their
perfect transparency, which is an illusion, while company communica-
tion is regarded with suspicion.

In order to act quickly, it is imperative to prioritize targets and to make
certain choices. It is unrealistic to think that the company can deal with
all the targets at once. Moreover, it is necessary to plan upstream for
the organization to have a robust IT infrastructure in place to deal
with congested servers and also to mobilize the human resources nec-