A great source but not in a crisis!
March 26th, 2008Frank Oviatt has picked up on a useful source of PR academia, with the new Essential Knowledge Project from the Institute of Public Relations in the US. As much as the articles are interesting in themselves, the bibliographies are equally, if not more useful. It also led me straight into some great reading.
Timothy Coombs’ paper on Crisis Management and Communications presents some fascinating, and at times surprising, research. There are some very helpful lists of best practice and an excellent bibliography. However, I do question the blame response as the best method of reputation repair, even though several of these strategies appear to be high on the Master List of those used in real crises. I can’t question the research, or that these strategies have actually been used on many occasions. What concerns me is that so many organisations in time of crisis turn to, or turn up, the ‘blame culture’ rather than taking responsibility and being open in crisis.
Professor Denis Smith, now at Glasgow University, is one of the UK’s leading authorities on crisis management and talks about ‘crisis incubation’ - i.e. issues that are left un-managed which incubate and eventually manifest themselves as apparently unrelated crises. One of the main reasons he cites is an inflexible management structure and a corporate ‘blame culture’. In Sjoberg’s recent article in Risk Management, he clearly shows that antagonism erodes trust faster than even competence or honesty.
So why on earth would any organisation hoping to protect its fragile reputation at the most critical time, choose a blame response to repair the damage? is this a culture that is being encouraged or unsuccessfully combated by their public relations advisors?
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList