In the event of natural disasters and large-scale accidents, crisis communication mainly consists of quickly and correctly informing/activating local residents and stakeholders, while in human affairs such as politics or administration, the crisis mainly revolves around managing emotions.
Online crisis communication becomes emotion management
When it comes to human error, the Dutch in particular are the first to nail the guilty ones to the pillory once again. We organize ourselves en masse in anti-Facebook pages, for example, or in online petitions. On Change.org, everyone can start online petitions, for example Sara Lee collects signatures here to ensure that RTL apologizes for his remarks towards a Chinese singer.
Petition | RTL_ Apologize for Gordon Heuckeroth_s racist remarks at Chinese singer Xiao Wang | Change.org
Below you see a screenshot of a Facebook page against the Velthuis Clinic and the shame imposed by them in an advertising poster for not living up to an ideal image.
Action against Velthuis Clinic advertising poster
We tweet and complain online to the point of obsession, all to express – in incidents – guilt and punishment that are apparently stored in our national DNA. Social media are in that respect the sewers of our emotions.
Sometimes the pillorying goes further. Much further. Jelle Brandt Corstius leaked the email address of SNS bank CEO Sjoerd van Keulen via Twitter to force him to return his bonus while the bank collapsed. This was the result.
Elsevier.nl - Former SNS CEO goes into hiding after threats-1
Online crisis communication has thus become one big instrument of emotion management. On a daily basis, more or less; internal fires are becoming more numerous because the sources for leaking and exposing abuses are increasing. The good news with this bad news, however, is that the internal fires quickly extinguish themselves. Whoever calculates the automatic question of guilt in a communication guideline is automatically prepared for such an incident and, in an exceptional case, a crisis. This also blurs the difference between crisis communication and daily communication.
Social media as a source of the crisis
An important trend is that with the increase in all information channels, the crisis arises in social media itself and not so much outside on the street. Think of the case of Trijntje Oosterhuis : by placing an appeal on Facebook (for every Like of her Page, one euro to the Philippines) and underestimating the effect of this, the reactions turned against her. She withdrew the message when the likes approached 200,000 euros, she then did not communicate (a mortal sin in crisis communication) and when she did respond, she did so poorly that the entire Twitter became a cabaret channel.
The massiveness with which we all operate in social media also means that the truth paraguay mobile phone number list regularly loses out. When amusement park Walibi opened a quiet room for visitors (which was suspected to be used mainly by Muslim visitors), the Telegraaf headlined that an Islamic prayer room would be opened. Geert Wilders made a 1-2 of that:
Wilders furious with Walibi-1-1
The truth was immediately on the chopping block and it was only months later that Minister Asscher put things right after questions about it in the House of Representatives. However, the damage had already been done and messages about the 'Islamic Walibi' still appeared regularly on Twitter. If Walibi had responded immediately and frequently, this internal fire would not have become a (reputation) crisis. In other words; put things right quickly, because sentiments stick around longer than facts and truths.
Mayor Annemarie Jorritsma of Almere recently said that when two robberies had taken place in her municipality, she had let 'the whole world' know with a lot of fanfare that she was going to do something about it. The result was that everyone in the immediate vicinity started to feel unsafe and Almere was subsequently put on the map as a criminal. So react proportionately and do not cause the crisis yourself.
In short: do not turn an incident into a crisis. Always respond quickly and proportionately, so that daily communication is no different in nature from crisis communication. Disasters excepted.
Photo intro courtesy of Fotolia