Summary Of Timothy Sellnow And Matthew Seeger's Book, Theorizing Crisis Communication

Crisis communication is the most important aspect of external and internal organization communication. This type of communication ranges from image restoration campaigns to employee turnover. In the articles that I have analyzed, I discovered many examples of crisis communications and its importance. I will discuss the Bridgestone-Firestone Corporation's image restoration campaign and explain Benoit's theory of image restoration. Also, I will discuss how crisis communications fits into public relations models. Two examples for discussion will be how supervisors should convey bad-news to their employees, and group communication within employee turnover. My last example for this discussion will be Bill Clinton's image repair discourse.

In the Disaster in Franklin County simulation (Regents of the University of Minnesota [UMN], 2006), there were several key personnel in the incident command team. This concept is utilized in real disasters when the Public

When I lived in Los Angeles during high school, me and my neighbor Brandon would frequently take the Metro train to get to school. While we waited on the platform for the train to come, we would occasionally hear the automated intercom announcement say, “In case of an emergency, do not hesitate to locate the nearest emergency phones or Metro sheriff.” This recurring message was often ignored by not only us. Who seemed to also disregard the monotone voice were other passengers who either were occupied with other things or had earphones in and simply did not hear it. The problem with this is, if an emergency or disaster happened at that moment, how many of us would know the right way to react? If there was a fire, we wouldn’t know how to properly engage in saving ourselves. Unfortunately, the only warning us everyday citizens were given was to call officials. There were no specific instructions on what we could do in case an emergency arises at the train station. In Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, she covers disasters when they happen and how humans that are involved respond to them. Ripley argues that when someone is involved in a disaster, they experience human responses such as being in denial or delaying proper reactions. Because we can not control the brain and our irrational thoughts tend to obscure us, we should raise more awareness of likely disasters and train regular citizens accordingly.

The various local, state, and federal emergency management systems of the United States suffered a crude awakening in the decade of the 2000s. Systems expected to hold up were put to the test and failed to prepare for disaster, mitigate the damage, and, in some instances, actually hampered responses in life-or-death situations. Worse, all failings were highlighted in an age of global communication and mass media, on display first whether a man-made incident like September 11th attacks or natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. The decade found the complacent government failing to maintain modern emergency management practices, stimulating began a series of doctrinal upgrades and training improvements. Yet, no matter the bureaucracy, writings, or money thrown at a problem, the first responder to the incident has and will continue to influence the outcome. While the individual responder stands as the most important part of

Advances in communication technology give the crisis teams the ability to reach out to communities and rural areas using reverse phone calls and the emergency broadcast system. Traditional communication methods, such as television and radio, allows the crisis teams to distribute correct information and help reduce the effects of errors that can be communicated through news spread by word of mouth.

“Social media makes the community part of the actual crisis communication response. For example…Twitter was used to quickly share initial information and updates during the 2007 and 2008 California wildfires, 2008 Mumbai massacre, 2009 crash of US Airways Flight 1549, 2010 Haiti earthquake, and 2011 Tunisian uprising.” This information, again in Veil’s 2011 article, reinforces the idea of how social media communication is highly beneficial and furthers an individual’s ability to remain informed on current events.

Getting a staff together to bring in useful information to plan for the release of the information to the news media is a great way to enhance communication to the public. The media will then get the information out to the public by ways of News releases, web sites, news conferences, newspapers and other social media (Hicks, 2012). The advantages of using these types of media are they quickly allows for the public to know what type of crisis has happened, and what kinds of precautions are being taken to ensure their safety. If there were to be any fatalities caused by the crisis event(s), these types of avenues also will give information on that. Some disadvantages can be unreliable technology of the citizens that will not allow for them to get access to the information that is being released by the media, such as no television, computer is not working properly, or they don’t received the local newspaper to be able to read it, etc.

In “Wither the Emergency Manager,” Niel R. Britton comments on Drabek's “Human Responses to disaster: An Inventory of Sociological Findings.” Britton describes six positive and negative issues in emergency management as it is today. In this paper, we will discuss the implications on emergency management as a field and on the individual manager.

The burden of emergency management has grown great deal in the last few decades. We have seen an increase in natural disasters, a new threat of terrorism on our front door and an increase in manmade disasters. All of these have tested emergency management in a number of cities and towns across the nation. It is not always disasters that present problems for emergency managers. We have to look beyond our traditional view of emergency management of helping us during times of disasters and view what issues they consider may affect their emergency response. Issues that emergency management see that are moving into the critical area are issues of urbanization and hazard exposure, the rising costs of disaster recovery, and low priority of emergency management.

Communication is widely regarded as one of the most essential elements in successfully managing an emergency situation. The dissemination of information, which is both timely as well as accurate, to the parties concerned goes a long way to lend a hand in ensuring that the recovery activities in an emergency situation, together with its management takes place effectively. For that reason, five critical assumptions are used to provide the basis of disaster management strategy.

This emergence of social media has also changed emergency management and disaster response. Emergency management as a whole is fairly new, only creating widely recognized, integrated emergency management systems beginning in the 1970s. Furthermore, at this same time people realized that the effects disasters have on the communities they strike can be mitigated by the creation of disaster plans ahead of time, proper disaster response training, and the efforts of human actions in these situations. Because social media has enabled mass amounts of instant information sharing, it allows not only locals and disaster response teams to help with the management of crises, but also many remote citizens.

The company eBay Inc. is an American multinational Internet consumer-to-consumer corporation. Founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar in San Jose, California, it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries including China and India. It’s main enterprise is eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website that allows people and businesses to buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services internationally. Millions of collectibles, décor, appliances, computers, furnishings, equipment, domain names, vehicles, services, intangibles and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, or sold daily on eBay. Anything can be auctioned on the site as long as it is not illegal and does not violate the eBay’s Prohibited and Restricted Items policy.

The response to any emergency is considered to be very critical and therefore should be as efficient as possible. In the healthcare sector, responses to situations are counted by the seconds. From natural disasters to epidemics, the only chance left to respond to any of this occurrence could only be counted in seconds. That means life is either saved or lost in a matter of seconds. Putting in place certain responses to these unexpected occurrences, such as crises management communication plan, help save lives and arrest crises from aggravating. Failure to have crises management communication plan is considered by many commentators to be a crisis in itself. Accepted medical care is highly dependent on effective communication between healthcare providers and the patients; among healthcare providers and the outside world. The characteristics of crises make it necessary for prior planning and effective communication among stakeholders in the health sector (Klaene and Sanders, 2006; Ronen, 2006).

Over the past few decades, the significance, magnitude and consequence of risk management and communication have been brought before the world over and over again in a number of situations related to health, terrorist activities, natural disasters etc. When one turns the pages of history, it is rather obvious that lack of planning and absence of resources due to unpreparedness makes it difficult for the concerned authorities to manage an emergency or epidemic a problematic and traumatic task. The chaotic situations can turn out to be more nerve-racking and tense when preparations are not made before hand (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2002).

This report outlines the current crisis situation and provides a range of crisis communication strategies and methodologies that are suggested for use immediately.