Crisis Communication

We saw how crisis communication can effect companies thru the case study on Coco Cola and also how Tylenol handled the cyanide incident. It is quite important how a company communicates with the public when a crisis occurs. A crisis can be human induced like the Tylenol incident or a natural disaster as many businesses experienced on September 11, 2001. In either incident companies need to have some kind of plan. They need to know who will be the spokes person and what steps they will need to take to keep the reputation of the company intact. Tylenol did an excellent job of keeping their reputation. They knew they needed to pull all the Tylenol off the shelves to make consumers aware that they cared what was happening and that they were going to do whatever it took to ensure that their product could not be tampered with in the future. Their efforts proved highly successful. A company needs to own up to its errors. They need to be straight forward with the public and let everyone know what is going on. If they don't have an answer they need to say that.

Personal Experience

Companies are not the only ones that need to consider communication in a crisis. When the attacks came on 9/11 the world watched New York. We saw how the first plane hit one of World Trade Center towers and then we watched while a second plane came in and hit the second tower. The world was watching this while the people in those towers didn't know what was going on. The emergency crews that entered the building couldn't communicate with each other. Some of the emergency workers were in the second tower and did not know a plane had it the building. It seemed as though people watching television knew more about what was going on, than the emergency workers that were on the scene. Hopefully, we have all learned from this situation and emergency personnel have made sure that they are able to communicate between each other so if there is another situation that arises, we are better able to communicate with each other.

References
Here is a web site to get you started on a Crisis Communication plan:
http://www3.niu.edu/newsplace/crisis.html

Here are a couple more links on Crisis Communication:
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/pressoffice/crisis.htm
http://www.e911.com/monos/A001.html

This is an example of a University's Crisis Communication plan:

http://www.wku.edu/ur/crisis.html