The Summary from web Articles
There is no doubt that 21st century will be the century of information. And of course all the information should be accessible and here comes communication.
Information is everywhere around us. What most people consider it to be includes weather information, exchange rate, time tables, news, etc. Until very recently, most of the information transmitted in the world was analog, that is, some kinds of continuous change of a certain property like color, sound, etc. And the main reason for that is that humans cannot perceive directly digital information, i.e. with strictly quantatized properties like colors can be either black or white(no gray), or something can be either on or off. Another reason was that there were no efficient means to store, transmit and convert between digital and analog form.
Mike Rhodin, the General Manager of IBM Lotus software, talked about the future communication trends that will increase demand for unified communications, reshaping the way businesses and workers communicate and collaborate.
• The virtual workplace will become the rule. Desk phones and desktop computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling on being there in-person.
• Instant messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail.
• Companies will go beyond the initial uses of instant messaging and will integrate IM with business processes and line-of-business applications.
• Interoperability and open standards will tear down proprietary walls within business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing industry standards will force unified communications providers to embrace interoperability.
• Meetings will become increasingly ad hoc and instantaneous based on context and need. 3-D virtual world and gaming technologies will have a significant impact on online corporate meeting.
What future will bring us nobody knows. Looking at the latest trends in communication, however, I think that the huge demand for high speed low cost communication will be strong enough solutions to be soon found.
** My opinion **
Owing to the development of information technology, the means of communication in both among people and between organizations as well as between persons and companies are much more diverse than in the past. These changes of communication tools also give companies crises and opportunities simultaneously. Thus, individuals and companies should effort to catch up with these rapid changes. Otherwise, individuals and companies that neglect of embracing new information technology are likely to decline in competitive global environments.
Today the importance of communication is more and more increasing both within organizations and among individuals. As mentioned earlier, Not only are the diversities of communication tools, but also the speed is so fast. In addition, the importance of communication with between managers and employees within organizations influences on the success or failure of firms. The relationship with external communication channels also is considered as important elements of a crisis management manual of companies. In this sense, the top management needs to appropriately handle newly emerging communication tools such as email, UCC, RSS and blogs as well as the communication relationship with internal and external stakeholders.
References
www.bcg.com/publications/files/Company_Comm_Trends_Rpt_Feb02.pdf
www.laptopsarena.com/future-communication-trends
2008년 4월 26일 토요일
Info-Communication in the 21st century
From : www.soumu.go.jp/joho_tsusin/eng/Resources/WhitePaper/WP2000/1-1.pdf
1. The IT Revolution
The world is facing a big change in industrial
civilization: the info-communications technology
(IT) revolution. The IT wave, most recently
exemplified by surging popularity of the Internet
and mobile telecommunications, is hastening
the paradigm shift, already in progress, from an
industrial society to an information society.
At the moment, however, economic revitalization
is a major concern in Japan, as are the
aging of society, globalization, diversifying
lifestyles, and the environment. All of these are
problems that need to be dealt with over the
medium and long terms, and many believe that
IT will play a crucial role in solving them.
2. Expectations for New Info-communications
Services
Internet User Survey indicates that the Internet
is the most important info-communications
medium in present daily life (more than even
TV), as indicated by a score of 8.4 on a scale of
1 to 10. The score rises to 9.4 when survey
respondents consider their daily lives five years
from now, while cell phones/PHS scored 8.1
. Furthermore, Study on the use of
information & telecommunications equipment and
services reports that about 60% of people with
PCs in their homes are connected to networks
and that only very few people will have standalone
terminals in the future.
3. Info-communications Trends
The Internet and mobile telecommunications
are rapidly gaining in importance in Japan’s infocommunications
sector. PC shipment volume
in Japan grew 31.9% year over year in fiscal
1999, reaching 9,941,000, while shipments of
color TVs slipped 0.3%, to 10,146,000 units
4. The Internet
As of the end of 1999 there were estimated
some 27.06 million Internet users in Japan in
the 15–69 age range, an increase of 59.7% year
over year. The outlook for 2005 is for 76.7 million
users. The Internet reaches 19.1% of
Japanese households, 31.8% of establishments,
and 88.6% of enterprises, and these penetration
rates are expanding.
5. Mobile Telecommunications
In its September 1999 report, the Next-
Generation Mobile Telecommunications
System Committee of the MPT’s Telecommunications
Technology Council projects that the
total number of future public land mobile
telecommunication service subscriptions in
Japan, including cell phones (portable and
automobile) and PHS but not limited to
subscriptions for IMT-2000 service, will
number 64.5 million at the end of fiscal 2000
and 81 million at the end of fiscal 2010.
Interpolating from these figures gives an estimate
of about 79.03 million at the end of fiscal
2005.
1. The IT Revolution
The world is facing a big change in industrial
civilization: the info-communications technology
(IT) revolution. The IT wave, most recently
exemplified by surging popularity of the Internet
and mobile telecommunications, is hastening
the paradigm shift, already in progress, from an
industrial society to an information society.
At the moment, however, economic revitalization
is a major concern in Japan, as are the
aging of society, globalization, diversifying
lifestyles, and the environment. All of these are
problems that need to be dealt with over the
medium and long terms, and many believe that
IT will play a crucial role in solving them.
2. Expectations for New Info-communications
Services
Internet User Survey indicates that the Internet
is the most important info-communications
medium in present daily life (more than even
TV), as indicated by a score of 8.4 on a scale of
1 to 10. The score rises to 9.4 when survey
respondents consider their daily lives five years
from now, while cell phones/PHS scored 8.1
. Furthermore, Study on the use of
information & telecommunications equipment and
services reports that about 60% of people with
PCs in their homes are connected to networks
and that only very few people will have standalone
terminals in the future.
3. Info-communications Trends
The Internet and mobile telecommunications
are rapidly gaining in importance in Japan’s infocommunications
sector. PC shipment volume
in Japan grew 31.9% year over year in fiscal
1999, reaching 9,941,000, while shipments of
color TVs slipped 0.3%, to 10,146,000 units
4. The Internet
As of the end of 1999 there were estimated
some 27.06 million Internet users in Japan in
the 15–69 age range, an increase of 59.7% year
over year. The outlook for 2005 is for 76.7 million
users. The Internet reaches 19.1% of
Japanese households, 31.8% of establishments,
and 88.6% of enterprises, and these penetration
rates are expanding.
5. Mobile Telecommunications
In its September 1999 report, the Next-
Generation Mobile Telecommunications
System Committee of the MPT’s Telecommunications
Technology Council projects that the
total number of future public land mobile
telecommunication service subscriptions in
Japan, including cell phones (portable and
automobile) and PHS but not limited to
subscriptions for IMT-2000 service, will
number 64.5 million at the end of fiscal 2000
and 81 million at the end of fiscal 2010.
Interpolating from these figures gives an estimate
of about 79.03 million at the end of fiscal
2005.
21st Century Communication
From : thinrope.net/misc/report021
Introduction
Communication, data, speed, digital, security, Internet... All these words are all over the media, in most commercials and advertisements - there is no doubt that 21st century will be the century of information. And of course all the information should be accessible and here comes communication. So whether to call it Information Century or Communication Century is a bit unclear.
So what is this information all about? Why do we need it? Where can we get it? This and other questions arise...
What is information?
Information is everywhere around us. What most people consider it to be includes weather information, exchange rates, time tables, news, etc. But in a broad sense information is also a movie you rent nearby your home, the music CD you can buy in any music shop... Have you ever thought that your voice carried by the telephone company is also a kind of information? It is, believe me.
Digital vs. Analog
Until very recently, most of the information transmitted in the world was analog, i.e. some kind of continuous change of a certain property like color, sound, etc. And the main reason for that is that humans cannot perceive directly digital information, i.e. with strictly quantatized properties like colors can be either black or white (no gray), or something can be either on or off. Another reason was that there were no efficient means to store, transmit and convert between digital and analog form. With the advent of LSI and computing theory in general, the second reason is partially solved. But why, you will ask, we need digital at all? There is one BIG reason: any information in digital form looks the same and can be transmitted and stored without change and loss.
Lets think in terms of making multiple copies of one page of a book:
First, the analog way: You take the page and go to the best copy machine you can find. You make a copy of the page and send it to a colleague of yours. Assuming the mail is perfectly secure, the page will reach its first stop unaltered, but in the meantime it can be bent, rained upon, etc. Your colleague gets the page, goes to his (very good) copy machine, makes a copy and sends it to another colleague. After the page has been copied several hundred times it comes back to you and you discover that it resembles just barely the original: somebody has folded it and from that point all the copies have a black line in the middle, somebody's copy machine has spit some more toner, or even somebody spilled a cup of coffee over the poor page... Note that an alternative to mail/copier is a fax, but the quality will be worse!
So let's see how to do it digitally: First step is to digitize the page. For that you use a (good) scanner. If you are interested just in the contents (i.e. what is written, not how it looks) you can use your favorite OCR program to make a simple text file (we assume there is only text on the page). Whatever you decide, after that you have to send the file (which is now the digital copy of the original page) to your colleague. You can use either e-mail or just send a floppy (MO, CD, Zip...) by normal mail. When your colleague gets the file he sends it to somebody else to repeat the process. After several thousand people have read the file (and everybody printed it, some twice because of the spilled coffee on the first printout) you get it back and it is exactly the same!
Backbone and terminal connections
For a starter, let's look at how does your voice get from your home phone to your friend on another continent. There are three main segments of the information flow between you and him/her.
First segment is between your phone and your telephone company central. This is usually a twin copper-wire cable connection, but it may also be wireless in case of a mobile phone. You can safely assume that all the (speed) bandwidth of this connection is used only by you at the given time.
Second segment is between the central and your friend's telephone company central. This part consists of one or more inter-satellite connections as well as wire and fiber optic cables. This connection is not for the sole purpose of your conversation, but is used simultaneously for other phone calls, control data, faxes, Internet connections and who knows what else. This plays the role of a network backbone.
Finally, the third segment is between and your friend's telephone company central and his phone. This is more or less the same as the first segment and that is your friend's terminal connection.
Quality vs. Speed
Now let's consider what will happen if your neighbor decides to call at the same time as you do, to his friend who happens to be a neighbor of your friend from the previous example. Most likely both calls will be transmitted simultaneously by the (same) telephone company without a problem. We suppose that the company has more than one line for this particular route. Now imagine a lot of people (say several hundred) trying to do this at the same time. Does the long distance operator have to support this many lines? What if next day the same group of people calls some other group on another continent? Do we need a line between every two phones on Earth? Fortunately the answer is "No"!
A long time ago people have invented multiplexing, a way to transmit several signals over the same media at the same time. However this does not go without compromise in speed or quality. As well as it is not acceptable to have delay (i.e. low speed connection) in your telephone conversations, it is unacceptable to have errors (i.e. low quality connection) when transmitting your credit card number over the same telephone line!
How is speed measured?
Talking just about digital data, it is measured in bps - bits-per-second - where one bit is a value that is either 0 or 1. To say it in another way if you have to transmit raw information for example about who is (transmit 1) attending a particular meeting and who is not (transmit 0) and there is a list (in the same order) of all the names on both sides of the connection, you will need n bits for n people in the list. Another example is when you have to transmit text data. A long time ago a standard for encoding text data into binary (bit oriented) form was proposed, known as ASCII. For particular reasons one character is encoded with 8 bits and this 8 bits are called a "byte". So for one page A4 with 60 lines, 80 characters each you need 60x80x8=38,400 bits! And when it comes to photographic quality images or video (where every second 24 different images are needed) the numbers become really HUGE!
Current telephone system standards allow speeds up to 64 Kbps (1 Kbps = 1024 bps) which means roughly 2 pages of text per second - a good speed that made e-mail so popular way of personal communication. However...for real time video a speeds around 6-10 Mbps (1 Mbps = 1024 Kbps) are needed - very far even from the 128 Kbps that the relatively new ISDN phones can reach! And this is just the speed of the terminal connection to/from your home.
Now let's go back to the example of many people calling simultaneously. Let's assume they all have 10 Mbps connections. So what happens if 100 people try to use the full speed of their connections at the same time? Their (common) service provider will need 100x10=1,000 Mbps or around 1 Gpbs! Well, currently that is about the speed of the major backbones around the world. And there are several thousand million people using phone and Internet from their homes every day. Imagine everybody had 10 Mbps connection...
The future
What future will bring us nobody knows. Looking at the latest trends in communication, however, I think that the huge demand for high speed low cost communication will be strong enough solutions to be soon found.
Soon everybody (me) will have fast enough connection from his home and office and I won't need a coffee break to upload the file that you've just read...
Introduction
Communication, data, speed, digital, security, Internet... All these words are all over the media, in most commercials and advertisements - there is no doubt that 21st century will be the century of information. And of course all the information should be accessible and here comes communication. So whether to call it Information Century or Communication Century is a bit unclear.
So what is this information all about? Why do we need it? Where can we get it? This and other questions arise...
What is information?
Information is everywhere around us. What most people consider it to be includes weather information, exchange rates, time tables, news, etc. But in a broad sense information is also a movie you rent nearby your home, the music CD you can buy in any music shop... Have you ever thought that your voice carried by the telephone company is also a kind of information? It is, believe me.
Digital vs. Analog
Until very recently, most of the information transmitted in the world was analog, i.e. some kind of continuous change of a certain property like color, sound, etc. And the main reason for that is that humans cannot perceive directly digital information, i.e. with strictly quantatized properties like colors can be either black or white (no gray), or something can be either on or off. Another reason was that there were no efficient means to store, transmit and convert between digital and analog form. With the advent of LSI and computing theory in general, the second reason is partially solved. But why, you will ask, we need digital at all? There is one BIG reason: any information in digital form looks the same and can be transmitted and stored without change and loss.
Lets think in terms of making multiple copies of one page of a book:
First, the analog way: You take the page and go to the best copy machine you can find. You make a copy of the page and send it to a colleague of yours. Assuming the mail is perfectly secure, the page will reach its first stop unaltered, but in the meantime it can be bent, rained upon, etc. Your colleague gets the page, goes to his (very good) copy machine, makes a copy and sends it to another colleague. After the page has been copied several hundred times it comes back to you and you discover that it resembles just barely the original: somebody has folded it and from that point all the copies have a black line in the middle, somebody's copy machine has spit some more toner, or even somebody spilled a cup of coffee over the poor page... Note that an alternative to mail/copier is a fax, but the quality will be worse!
So let's see how to do it digitally: First step is to digitize the page. For that you use a (good) scanner. If you are interested just in the contents (i.e. what is written, not how it looks) you can use your favorite OCR program to make a simple text file (we assume there is only text on the page). Whatever you decide, after that you have to send the file (which is now the digital copy of the original page) to your colleague. You can use either e-mail or just send a floppy (MO, CD, Zip...) by normal mail. When your colleague gets the file he sends it to somebody else to repeat the process. After several thousand people have read the file (and everybody printed it, some twice because of the spilled coffee on the first printout) you get it back and it is exactly the same!
Backbone and terminal connections
For a starter, let's look at how does your voice get from your home phone to your friend on another continent. There are three main segments of the information flow between you and him/her.
First segment is between your phone and your telephone company central. This is usually a twin copper-wire cable connection, but it may also be wireless in case of a mobile phone. You can safely assume that all the (speed) bandwidth of this connection is used only by you at the given time.
Second segment is between the central and your friend's telephone company central. This part consists of one or more inter-satellite connections as well as wire and fiber optic cables. This connection is not for the sole purpose of your conversation, but is used simultaneously for other phone calls, control data, faxes, Internet connections and who knows what else. This plays the role of a network backbone.
Finally, the third segment is between and your friend's telephone company central and his phone. This is more or less the same as the first segment and that is your friend's terminal connection.
Quality vs. Speed
Now let's consider what will happen if your neighbor decides to call at the same time as you do, to his friend who happens to be a neighbor of your friend from the previous example. Most likely both calls will be transmitted simultaneously by the (same) telephone company without a problem. We suppose that the company has more than one line for this particular route. Now imagine a lot of people (say several hundred) trying to do this at the same time. Does the long distance operator have to support this many lines? What if next day the same group of people calls some other group on another continent? Do we need a line between every two phones on Earth? Fortunately the answer is "No"!
A long time ago people have invented multiplexing, a way to transmit several signals over the same media at the same time. However this does not go without compromise in speed or quality. As well as it is not acceptable to have delay (i.e. low speed connection) in your telephone conversations, it is unacceptable to have errors (i.e. low quality connection) when transmitting your credit card number over the same telephone line!
How is speed measured?
Talking just about digital data, it is measured in bps - bits-per-second - where one bit is a value that is either 0 or 1. To say it in another way if you have to transmit raw information for example about who is (transmit 1) attending a particular meeting and who is not (transmit 0) and there is a list (in the same order) of all the names on both sides of the connection, you will need n bits for n people in the list. Another example is when you have to transmit text data. A long time ago a standard for encoding text data into binary (bit oriented) form was proposed, known as ASCII. For particular reasons one character is encoded with 8 bits and this 8 bits are called a "byte". So for one page A4 with 60 lines, 80 characters each you need 60x80x8=38,400 bits! And when it comes to photographic quality images or video (where every second 24 different images are needed) the numbers become really HUGE!
Current telephone system standards allow speeds up to 64 Kbps (1 Kbps = 1024 bps) which means roughly 2 pages of text per second - a good speed that made e-mail so popular way of personal communication. However...for real time video a speeds around 6-10 Mbps (1 Mbps = 1024 Kbps) are needed - very far even from the 128 Kbps that the relatively new ISDN phones can reach! And this is just the speed of the terminal connection to/from your home.
Now let's go back to the example of many people calling simultaneously. Let's assume they all have 10 Mbps connections. So what happens if 100 people try to use the full speed of their connections at the same time? Their (common) service provider will need 100x10=1,000 Mbps or around 1 Gpbs! Well, currently that is about the speed of the major backbones around the world. And there are several thousand million people using phone and Internet from their homes every day. Imagine everybody had 10 Mbps connection...
The future
What future will bring us nobody knows. Looking at the latest trends in communication, however, I think that the huge demand for high speed low cost communication will be strong enough solutions to be soon found.
Soon everybody (me) will have fast enough connection from his home and office and I won't need a coffee break to upload the file that you've just read...
2008년 4월 17일 목요일
10. Corporate communication relevance
Corporate communications
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Corporate communication - defined as communication which goes to all staff. Corporate Communications serves as the liaison between an organization and its publics.
Organizations can strategically communicate to their audiences through public relations and advertising. This may involve an employee newsletter or video, crisis management with the news media, special events planning, building product value, and communicating with stockholders, clients or donors.
Corporate Communication encodes and promotes:
- strong corporate culture
- coherent corporate identity
- reasonable corporate philosophy
- genuine sense of corporate citizenship
- An appropriate and professional relationship with the press quick, responsible ways of communicating in a crisis
- understanding of communication tools and technologies
- sophisticated approaches to global communications
How an organization communicates with its employees, its extended audiences, the press, and its customers brings its values to life.
☆ My opinion
☐ Why does a corporate communication necessary?
Today, companies need to continuously communicate with external stakeholders as well as internal stakeholders in order to survive and develop in the changing environment.
☐ Corporate communication with external stakeholders
In general, people say that today is a period of advertisement themselves. Thus, companies spend a tremendous amount advertisement cost to inform customers or consumers their products and to establish the good relationship with community as well as the public and local governments. Even though companies make the best products in the world, they cannot expect more then their expectations. In addition, if they make a even little bit misconduct or outlaw, their reputation can be broken in a day and company’s survival cannot be ensured too. In this sense, the importance of corporate communication with external a number of stakeholders such as consumers, suppliers, distributors, non-governmental organizations, local community and the public, especially including mass media, is not overestimate, even if it would be emphasized too much exceed.
☐ Corporate communication with internal stakeholders
It is not an overstatement that the success of companies depends on internal stakeholders, especially employees. Thus, today top management has a considerable amount time and effort
to establish the communication relationship with between managers and employees. Employees are the first customers of the companies to sell their products and services. A communication channel with managers and employees also influences on the morale of employees and
☐ Corporate communication means
The development of information technologies enables companies to use the various and latest new kinds of communication channels such as the Internet blogs and UCC as well as television and newspapers. Furthermore, these channels can deliver with quick speed to all people in the opposite place in the world. It can be simultaneously a good opportunity and crisis to many companies for development and growth. Thus, companies should properly use these various communication channels.
The advent of e-mail has several advantages such as quick speed and delivery to many persons simultaneously regardless of their geographic location. Nevertheless, it also has some problems such as confusing with so much junk or thereby not reading the emails. Thus, today new communication means in organizations or among persons are using blogs, UCC or RSS
reference: www.iabc.com/education/pdf/Argenti_RFLunch.pdf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Corporate communication - defined as communication which goes to all staff. Corporate Communications serves as the liaison between an organization and its publics.
Organizations can strategically communicate to their audiences through public relations and advertising. This may involve an employee newsletter or video, crisis management with the news media, special events planning, building product value, and communicating with stockholders, clients or donors.
Corporate Communication encodes and promotes:
- strong corporate culture
- coherent corporate identity
- reasonable corporate philosophy
- genuine sense of corporate citizenship
- An appropriate and professional relationship with the press quick, responsible ways of communicating in a crisis
- understanding of communication tools and technologies
- sophisticated approaches to global communications
How an organization communicates with its employees, its extended audiences, the press, and its customers brings its values to life.
☆ My opinion
☐ Why does a corporate communication necessary?
Today, companies need to continuously communicate with external stakeholders as well as internal stakeholders in order to survive and develop in the changing environment.
☐ Corporate communication with external stakeholders
In general, people say that today is a period of advertisement themselves. Thus, companies spend a tremendous amount advertisement cost to inform customers or consumers their products and to establish the good relationship with community as well as the public and local governments. Even though companies make the best products in the world, they cannot expect more then their expectations. In addition, if they make a even little bit misconduct or outlaw, their reputation can be broken in a day and company’s survival cannot be ensured too. In this sense, the importance of corporate communication with external a number of stakeholders such as consumers, suppliers, distributors, non-governmental organizations, local community and the public, especially including mass media, is not overestimate, even if it would be emphasized too much exceed.
☐ Corporate communication with internal stakeholders
It is not an overstatement that the success of companies depends on internal stakeholders, especially employees. Thus, today top management has a considerable amount time and effort
to establish the communication relationship with between managers and employees. Employees are the first customers of the companies to sell their products and services. A communication channel with managers and employees also influences on the morale of employees and
☐ Corporate communication means
The development of information technologies enables companies to use the various and latest new kinds of communication channels such as the Internet blogs and UCC as well as television and newspapers. Furthermore, these channels can deliver with quick speed to all people in the opposite place in the world. It can be simultaneously a good opportunity and crisis to many companies for development and growth. Thus, companies should properly use these various communication channels.
The advent of e-mail has several advantages such as quick speed and delivery to many persons simultaneously regardless of their geographic location. Nevertheless, it also has some problems such as confusing with so much junk or thereby not reading the emails. Thus, today new communication means in organizations or among persons are using blogs, UCC or RSS
reference: www.iabc.com/education/pdf/Argenti_RFLunch.pdf
Corporate Communications:Should you Venture into Creative Communications ?
From : http://scientificcontent.wordpress.com/2008/04/11/corporate-communications-re-go-creative-or-technical/
Let’s say you have a key position at a major Biotech company in the Pacific Northwest region of the country. Let’s also say that you are a major decision maker in establishing and moving forward your company’s communications efforts. Lastly, let’s say you have a very detailed job description; yet on your first day of your new job, you go right to Google, and type in keywords, that will help you establish some kind of communications at your company.
Let me stop you right there. I just went to google and typed in Corporate communications and I located exactly 18,600,000 pages for the topic. Wow! So that must mean that what these sites write about should be your company’s communications bible? No, really it should not.
When establishing your company’s corporate communications plan you should have a Technical communications plan ( left to those in your company’s Quality Assurance Department), and then you should really invest into a really good creative Communications team.
Why? Because people need creativity in their everyday lives. They spend more than 40 hours working to build your company’s revenue, and through creative and effective communications, you are deeply investing in them. Now when I say creative communications what exactly do I mean? I am so glad you asked.
Types of Creative Communications:
1. A company blog where people can post their personal needs.
2. Create a Company support committee where people lead the efforts of checking in on employees that are going through various life issues ( adoption of a child, going through a death of a close one, or undergoing a death themselves.
3. Establish quarterly company events; forget about annual events. People like to see and touch each other and feel a part of a team.
4. Its important that the CEO of the company takes a active role in helping with the company newsletter. While another employee will head this effort; people love to feel directly connected to their “ultra” boss the CEO. Many CEOs have a untouchable aura…and this does no good for anyone.
5. Company Meetups—Many people may have some of the same issues across departments. These same people may be located in different locations, it would be helpful to have ongoing Meetups, where people with like professional issues link up and solve their own problems. Example: Say employees have issues with Time Management; they meet up; and together they invite a professional out to coach them.
6. This list could go on and on…but your company needs a Full-time communications staff; to ensure that everyone at the company is in the know; and overall they simply feel connected. This is a weekly task, and a fully engaged person is best suit to drive this goal home!
Let’s say you have a key position at a major Biotech company in the Pacific Northwest region of the country. Let’s also say that you are a major decision maker in establishing and moving forward your company’s communications efforts. Lastly, let’s say you have a very detailed job description; yet on your first day of your new job, you go right to Google, and type in keywords, that will help you establish some kind of communications at your company.
Let me stop you right there. I just went to google and typed in Corporate communications and I located exactly 18,600,000 pages for the topic. Wow! So that must mean that what these sites write about should be your company’s communications bible? No, really it should not.
When establishing your company’s corporate communications plan you should have a Technical communications plan ( left to those in your company’s Quality Assurance Department), and then you should really invest into a really good creative Communications team.
Why? Because people need creativity in their everyday lives. They spend more than 40 hours working to build your company’s revenue, and through creative and effective communications, you are deeply investing in them. Now when I say creative communications what exactly do I mean? I am so glad you asked.
Types of Creative Communications:
1. A company blog where people can post their personal needs.
2. Create a Company support committee where people lead the efforts of checking in on employees that are going through various life issues ( adoption of a child, going through a death of a close one, or undergoing a death themselves.
3. Establish quarterly company events; forget about annual events. People like to see and touch each other and feel a part of a team.
4. Its important that the CEO of the company takes a active role in helping with the company newsletter. While another employee will head this effort; people love to feel directly connected to their “ultra” boss the CEO. Many CEOs have a untouchable aura…and this does no good for anyone.
5. Company Meetups—Many people may have some of the same issues across departments. These same people may be located in different locations, it would be helpful to have ongoing Meetups, where people with like professional issues link up and solve their own problems. Example: Say employees have issues with Time Management; they meet up; and together they invite a professional out to coach them.
6. This list could go on and on…but your company needs a Full-time communications staff; to ensure that everyone at the company is in the know; and overall they simply feel connected. This is a weekly task, and a fully engaged person is best suit to drive this goal home!
The Evolution of Corporate Communications
From: www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200510/ij_10_26_05a.html
Paul Chin
(postpaulchinonline.com), 10/26/2005
Trying to get a message across to every employee in an organization is a lot like trying to control kids in a school bus: some will listen; some will hear but misunderstand the message; and some will ignore the message altogether and later complain, "But nobody told me."
Communicating to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of employees within an organization is no small feat. This challenge is further complicated in organizations with a global presence, where corporate headquarters is responsible for delivering the same message to satellite offices in geographically dispersed locations. But it's not enough to just create the message.
Effective corporate communication involves not only the message itself, but also the medium that carries and delivers it. It's these two components of a communication that dictate whether employees will receive and understand it. But don't fool yourself in thinking that there's some long process of deliberation when they receive one of these messages. Most corporate communications will grab the attention of an employee for no more than a few seconds — if at all. It's within that very narrow window of opportunity that they will decide whether to read something or toss it aside.
Employees are processing more information than ever before — information dealing with their projects, their clients, and their industry as a whole. With all this information competing for employees' attention, does a single corporate communication stand a chance of making it through?
Effective Communication
Organizations have struggled to find the best way to get company communications to their employees for years. These communications can range from notices of service interruptions to announcements of corporate events. But is anyone really listening? Communication is a two-way street; it requires a sender and a receiver. If no one is listening, you're just a crazy person talking to yourself.
Anyone involved with corporate communications needs to be aware of their receivers' habits and idiosyncrasies before deciding on message and medium. It wouldn't make sense to use technology-based communications with an audience who's not tech-savvy without first providing them with adequate training; or to post an important announcement on a bulletin board when most users rely solely on their intranet for news. An understanding of the audience will help determine the best medium to use in order to get your message across.
Communication mediums can be classified into two methods: the sender pushes the message to the receiver (e.g., sending an e-mail) or the receiver pulls the message from a source (e.g., reading an intranet post). In the '90s, the IT industry was abuzz with the concept of push technology, a method of delivering content to users' desktop without requiring them to actively seek it out. The technology, however, never lived up to its hype (see my article "Push Technology: Still Relevant After All These Years?" for more on this) and communications fell back to old stalwarts: the intranet and e-mail. But they have their problems too.
Posting corporate communications on an intranet requires employees to access the system repeatedly because they won't know when new information will be posted. There's a good chance that some employees will miss an important announcement because they were busy with other things and don't get the chance to check when the communication was posted.
E-mail has the ability to alert every employee once a communication is sent, but there are uncontrollable factors that hinder its effectiveness as a corporate communications medium. E-mail failed through no fault of its own, and was perhaps a victim of its own success.
E-Mail, What happened to You?
The advent of e-mail changed the way organizations communicated with their employees in a big way. Rather than post and send out large quantities of paper-based announcements, a single e-mail message could be sent to all employees at the same time, regardless of their geographic location. At the time, e-mail was the biggest advancement in corporate communication — until users just stopped reading them.
So what happened? Has e-mail outlived its usefulness as an internal corporate communications medium? The answer is yes and no. It's still a big part of corporate communication, but it's lost a lot of its effectiveness. There's perhaps no bigger contributor to this decline than spam.
E-mail has been contaminated by so much junk that it's difficult to get an important message across. Users might give a company announcement a cursory glance and pass it by thinking it's just more unsolicited mail; or they might set-up e-mail filters so restrictive that the message never even makes it through. With the sheer volume of e-mail that comes pouring in daily, employees may simply treat these types of internal communications as white noise and ignore them. And with the time-sensitive nature of corporate communications, it might be too late when users finally discover the message.
Problems With E-mail as a Corporate Communications Tool
* Difficult to grab users' attention since messages are indistinguishable from all other e-mail
* Messages can be mistaken for spam
* Messages can be stopped by users' restrictive e-mail filtering
* Employees have no choice as to what they receive
RSS, the New E-mail?
Many news Web sites and bloggers are already using RSS feeds to "broadcast" their content. Even marketers and advertisers are realizing the advantages of RSS as a means to attract potential customers. It's an easy, unintrusive way to syndicate frequently changing Web content such as daily blog entries or news headlines.
Momentum is also growing in the corporate environment for RSS. Organizations are beginning to see that RSS can be used to pick up where e-mail left off (or, some would say, failed) as an internal corporate communicator. One of the problems with corporate-wide e-mail announcements is that they can't be categorized. An important announcement concerning network downtime will end up in users' inbox, sandwiched between joke mail and spam. There's no context to e-mail messages short of the subject header, which is not always easily noticeable.
RSS, however, offers more communication control on the part of both the sender and the receiver. Senders can create topical RSS feeds based on different types of corporate communications, and receivers have the choice of which feeds they subscribe to. This ensures that employees only receive content that's relevant to them.
It's up to organizations to decide how to best categorize its RSS feeds, but some examples might include:
* Important announcements: Crucial, time-sensitive information requiring immediate attention such as scheduled downtimes for IT and facility infrastructures
* Executive communications: Messages from management.
* Corporate events listings: Details of special events such as company sponsored fundraisers, family days, and holiday parties.
* Intranet changes and upgrades: Announcements of new features and changes to the corporate intranet.
* Corporate policy changes: Updates to internal corporate policies such as flex hours, Internet usage and etiquette, and employee benefits.
* Personnel changes: Announcements of promotions, departmental transfers, and retirements.
Migrating to RSS is also a relatively simple proposition when compared to other types of IT implementations. It's not necessary to install standalone RSS readers (known as aggregators) throughout the company. RSS readers are becoming standard features in many e-mail clients and Web browsers, or they can be installed as plug-ins to existing applications that don't already have them. This allows employees to get the benefits of RSS without having to learn a whole new interface.
Shout Out! Podcasting and Vodcasting
Podcasting (audio) and vodcasting (video) are other methods that can be used for corporate communications, although they haven't been widely adopted yet. Contrary to popular misconception, podcasting and vodcasting are not simply multimedia files stored on a server for users to download. Like RSS, they're based on a subscription model. Users subscribe to podcast and vodcast feeds through similar aggregator software that can be set-up to automatically download new content when it's available. But instead of reading the message, they listen to it or watch it.
Podcasting and vodcasting are ideal ways to get messages — especially lengthy messages — across to large corporate audiences since it presents them with a much more convenient (and some would say, more natural) form of communication. It's far more convenient to listen to an audio podcast of a CEO's quarterly results presentation on a portable media player while going to work than it is to sit at a desk reading through the twenty page equivalent.
But there might be an annoyance factor when it comes to using a multimedia approach to corporate communications. Users who decide to listen to podcasts or watch vodcasts at their desks without the use of headphones might irritate their neighbors. What's worse is if several people were to access a podcast or vodcast at the same time, raising the noise pollution and tempers of the office.
Closing Thoughts
There's no perfect solution when it comes to corporate communications. You'll never be able to reach every employee all the time because even if the solution is rock solid, there will always be someone who just doesn't bother — regardless of the medium used.
It's the responsibility of the organization to inform its employees, and to provide the means by which it gets its communications across easily and efficiently. But as the sender, organizations can only do so much. They can only make sure that it's not the message and the medium that fails the user community. The receiver of the communication also has a part to play.
Each individual employee must be receptive to the message when it arrives. This is their responsibility. If they continually disregard corporate communications and claim, "But nobody told me," perhaps the response to that should be, "Why didn't you listen?"
Paul Chin
(postpaulchinonline.com), 10/26/2005
Trying to get a message across to every employee in an organization is a lot like trying to control kids in a school bus: some will listen; some will hear but misunderstand the message; and some will ignore the message altogether and later complain, "But nobody told me."
Communicating to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of employees within an organization is no small feat. This challenge is further complicated in organizations with a global presence, where corporate headquarters is responsible for delivering the same message to satellite offices in geographically dispersed locations. But it's not enough to just create the message.
Effective corporate communication involves not only the message itself, but also the medium that carries and delivers it. It's these two components of a communication that dictate whether employees will receive and understand it. But don't fool yourself in thinking that there's some long process of deliberation when they receive one of these messages. Most corporate communications will grab the attention of an employee for no more than a few seconds — if at all. It's within that very narrow window of opportunity that they will decide whether to read something or toss it aside.
Employees are processing more information than ever before — information dealing with their projects, their clients, and their industry as a whole. With all this information competing for employees' attention, does a single corporate communication stand a chance of making it through?
Effective Communication
Organizations have struggled to find the best way to get company communications to their employees for years. These communications can range from notices of service interruptions to announcements of corporate events. But is anyone really listening? Communication is a two-way street; it requires a sender and a receiver. If no one is listening, you're just a crazy person talking to yourself.
Anyone involved with corporate communications needs to be aware of their receivers' habits and idiosyncrasies before deciding on message and medium. It wouldn't make sense to use technology-based communications with an audience who's not tech-savvy without first providing them with adequate training; or to post an important announcement on a bulletin board when most users rely solely on their intranet for news. An understanding of the audience will help determine the best medium to use in order to get your message across.
Communication mediums can be classified into two methods: the sender pushes the message to the receiver (e.g., sending an e-mail) or the receiver pulls the message from a source (e.g., reading an intranet post). In the '90s, the IT industry was abuzz with the concept of push technology, a method of delivering content to users' desktop without requiring them to actively seek it out. The technology, however, never lived up to its hype (see my article "Push Technology: Still Relevant After All These Years?" for more on this) and communications fell back to old stalwarts: the intranet and e-mail. But they have their problems too.
Posting corporate communications on an intranet requires employees to access the system repeatedly because they won't know when new information will be posted. There's a good chance that some employees will miss an important announcement because they were busy with other things and don't get the chance to check when the communication was posted.
E-mail has the ability to alert every employee once a communication is sent, but there are uncontrollable factors that hinder its effectiveness as a corporate communications medium. E-mail failed through no fault of its own, and was perhaps a victim of its own success.
E-Mail, What happened to You?
The advent of e-mail changed the way organizations communicated with their employees in a big way. Rather than post and send out large quantities of paper-based announcements, a single e-mail message could be sent to all employees at the same time, regardless of their geographic location. At the time, e-mail was the biggest advancement in corporate communication — until users just stopped reading them.
So what happened? Has e-mail outlived its usefulness as an internal corporate communications medium? The answer is yes and no. It's still a big part of corporate communication, but it's lost a lot of its effectiveness. There's perhaps no bigger contributor to this decline than spam.
E-mail has been contaminated by so much junk that it's difficult to get an important message across. Users might give a company announcement a cursory glance and pass it by thinking it's just more unsolicited mail; or they might set-up e-mail filters so restrictive that the message never even makes it through. With the sheer volume of e-mail that comes pouring in daily, employees may simply treat these types of internal communications as white noise and ignore them. And with the time-sensitive nature of corporate communications, it might be too late when users finally discover the message.
Problems With E-mail as a Corporate Communications Tool
* Difficult to grab users' attention since messages are indistinguishable from all other e-mail
* Messages can be mistaken for spam
* Messages can be stopped by users' restrictive e-mail filtering
* Employees have no choice as to what they receive
RSS, the New E-mail?
Many news Web sites and bloggers are already using RSS feeds to "broadcast" their content. Even marketers and advertisers are realizing the advantages of RSS as a means to attract potential customers. It's an easy, unintrusive way to syndicate frequently changing Web content such as daily blog entries or news headlines.
Momentum is also growing in the corporate environment for RSS. Organizations are beginning to see that RSS can be used to pick up where e-mail left off (or, some would say, failed) as an internal corporate communicator. One of the problems with corporate-wide e-mail announcements is that they can't be categorized. An important announcement concerning network downtime will end up in users' inbox, sandwiched between joke mail and spam. There's no context to e-mail messages short of the subject header, which is not always easily noticeable.
RSS, however, offers more communication control on the part of both the sender and the receiver. Senders can create topical RSS feeds based on different types of corporate communications, and receivers have the choice of which feeds they subscribe to. This ensures that employees only receive content that's relevant to them.
It's up to organizations to decide how to best categorize its RSS feeds, but some examples might include:
* Important announcements: Crucial, time-sensitive information requiring immediate attention such as scheduled downtimes for IT and facility infrastructures
* Executive communications: Messages from management.
* Corporate events listings: Details of special events such as company sponsored fundraisers, family days, and holiday parties.
* Intranet changes and upgrades: Announcements of new features and changes to the corporate intranet.
* Corporate policy changes: Updates to internal corporate policies such as flex hours, Internet usage and etiquette, and employee benefits.
* Personnel changes: Announcements of promotions, departmental transfers, and retirements.
Migrating to RSS is also a relatively simple proposition when compared to other types of IT implementations. It's not necessary to install standalone RSS readers (known as aggregators) throughout the company. RSS readers are becoming standard features in many e-mail clients and Web browsers, or they can be installed as plug-ins to existing applications that don't already have them. This allows employees to get the benefits of RSS without having to learn a whole new interface.
Shout Out! Podcasting and Vodcasting
Podcasting (audio) and vodcasting (video) are other methods that can be used for corporate communications, although they haven't been widely adopted yet. Contrary to popular misconception, podcasting and vodcasting are not simply multimedia files stored on a server for users to download. Like RSS, they're based on a subscription model. Users subscribe to podcast and vodcast feeds through similar aggregator software that can be set-up to automatically download new content when it's available. But instead of reading the message, they listen to it or watch it.
Podcasting and vodcasting are ideal ways to get messages — especially lengthy messages — across to large corporate audiences since it presents them with a much more convenient (and some would say, more natural) form of communication. It's far more convenient to listen to an audio podcast of a CEO's quarterly results presentation on a portable media player while going to work than it is to sit at a desk reading through the twenty page equivalent.
But there might be an annoyance factor when it comes to using a multimedia approach to corporate communications. Users who decide to listen to podcasts or watch vodcasts at their desks without the use of headphones might irritate their neighbors. What's worse is if several people were to access a podcast or vodcast at the same time, raising the noise pollution and tempers of the office.
Closing Thoughts
There's no perfect solution when it comes to corporate communications. You'll never be able to reach every employee all the time because even if the solution is rock solid, there will always be someone who just doesn't bother — regardless of the medium used.
It's the responsibility of the organization to inform its employees, and to provide the means by which it gets its communications across easily and efficiently. But as the sender, organizations can only do so much. They can only make sure that it's not the message and the medium that fails the user community. The receiver of the communication also has a part to play.
Each individual employee must be receptive to the message when it arrives. This is their responsibility. If they continually disregard corporate communications and claim, "But nobody told me," perhaps the response to that should be, "Why didn't you listen?"
2008년 4월 10일 목요일
9. Crisis Communication
A) Summary from Textbook
Today, because of changes in technology and the makeup of the media, any corporate crisis is covered in a matter of hours by the national and internal media, and Webcast over the Internet-further hastened by an ever growing population of online “loggers” who document and critique companies’ every move. Thus, a more sophisticated media environment, as well as a new emphasis on technology in business, has created the need for a more sophisticated response to crises.
◎ What Is a Crisis?
Natural disasters cannot be avoided, but there are many crises- those caused by human error, negligence, or in some cases, malicious intent- planning could have prevented in the first place. In fact, most of the crises were human-induced crises rather than natural disasters. Such crises can be more devastating than natural disasters in terms of the costs they entail for companies in terms of both dollars and reputation.
All human-induced crises cannot be lumped together. One type includes cases in which the company is clearly at fault, for instance cases of negligence. In these cases, a falling stock price and rising legal tab are not the only aftereffects a company must weather; often the most serious impact is to the company’s reputation and the subsequent loss of trust with key stakeholders.
The second type of crisis includes cases in which the company becomes a victim, such as Barclays, Citibank, eBay, and other major corporations targeted by online information theft attempts. In all situations, however, constituencies will look to the organization’s response to the crisis before making a final judgment. Thus, to define crisis for organizations today is a bit more complicated than simply saying that it is an unpredictable, horrible event.
A crisis will be defined as follows:
A crisis is a major catastrophe that may occur either naturally or as a result of human error, intervention or even malicious intent. It can include tangible devastation, such as the destruction of lives or assets, or intangible devastation, such as the loss of an organization’s credibility or other reputation damage. The latter outcomes may be the result of management’s response to tangible devastation or the result of human error.
◎ Crisis Characteristics
While all crises are unique, they do share some common characteristics. These include (1) the element of surprise ; (2) insufficient information; (3) the quick pace of events; (4) intense scrutiny.
What makes this difficult for executives is that the element of surprise leads to a loss of control. It’s hard to think strategically when overwhelmed by unexpected outside events. In addition, the media frenzy that typically surrounds a crisis can prompt a siege mentality to ensue, causing management to adopt a short-term focus.
Part of the problem in dealing with crises is that organizations have tended not to understand or acknowledge how vulnerable they are until after a major crisis occurs. Lack of preparation can make crises even more severe and prolonged when they do happen.
◎ Crises from the Past 25 Years
These events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January of 1986 and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 have become etched in the public consciousness for a variety of reasons. First, people tend to remember and be moved by negative news more than positive news. Second, the human tragedy associated with a crisis strikes a psychological chord with most everyone. Finally, crises associated with major corporations stick in the public’s mind because many large organizations lack credibility in the first place.
● 1982: Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol Recall
In late September and early October of 1982, seven people died after taking Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide. However, many experts on crisis communication, marketing, and psychology have conjectured that it was Johnson & Johnson’s swift and caring response that was primarily responsible for turning this disaster into a triumph for the company. Despite losses exceeding $100million, Tylenol came back from the crisis stronger than ever within a matter of years.
What did Johnson & Johnson do? First, it did not simply react to what was happening. Instead, it took the offensive and removed the potentially deadly product from selves. Second, it leveraged the goodwill it had built up over the years with constituencies ranging from doctors to the media, and decided to try save the brand rather than come out with a new identity for the product. Third, the company reacted in a caring and humane way, rather than simply looking at the incident from a purely legal or financial perspective. What is most amazing is not that J&J handled this crisis so formidably, but that the perception of the company was actually strengthened by what happened.
● 1990: The Perrier Benzene Scare
Perrier Sparkling Water faced a contamination crisis of its own nearly 10 years after the Tylenol episode. Perrier’s actions during the 1990 benzene scare provide as many lessons in how not to handle a crisis as J&J’s did of how to handle one effectively. Without an official crisis plan of its own, Perrier relied on the media to communicate its story during the crisis, which proved to be a fatal decision. The press only served to expose the lack of internal communication and the lack of global coordination within the company.
The Perrier benzene crisis illustrates not only the consequences of having a reactive strategy to deal with crises, but also the problems of not having a coordinated and fact-based approach to crisis communication.
● 1993: Pepsi-Cola Syringe Crisis
In June 1993, a man reported that, after drinking half a can of Diet Pepsi the night before, he had discovered a syringe in the can the following morning when he shook out the rest of the contents into the sink. The CEO, Crgig E. Weatherup, did not let the surprise of the crisis overwhelm him when he was contracted at home by FDA Commissioner David Kessler and informed of the situation. Unlike Johnson & Johnson’s immediate recall of Tylenol from the selves, by the next morning Weatherup had decided not to recall the product- despite a flood of new reports to the FDA of dangerous objects found in Pepsi cans.
Pepsi’s highly visible work with the FDA in investing the crisis boosted its credibility in the public eye. Additionally, without an investigative reporting team of its own, Pepsi found that the government agency was invaluable to the company during the crisis. Pepsi-Cola did not stop there, however. To ensure that consumers knew that the tampering claims were false, Weatherup took out an ad to address the concerns of employees and customers.
● The New Millennium : The Online Face of Crises – Data Theft and Beyond
With personal computers and the Internet now integral parts of the fabric of business, organizations face new challenges and the potential for crises that they have not dealt with before. The “I Love You” virus unleashed in 2000 cost businesses across a range of industries an estimated total of $10 billion in damages. Companies of all kinds are also grappling with information security issues involving the theft or attempted theft of company and customer data.
◉ Hacking into Reputations
Today, the majority of online thieves are opting for more surreptitious tactics to steal confidential information. Viruses are now more commonly used to plant “Trojans” in personal or office computers-malicious software that steals sensitive information stored in a computer and relay it back to the criminal.
The proliferation of such online security threats has resulted in crisis situations for myriad companies worldwide that now must redouble their customers.
The most effective reactions have focused on clear, consistent communications disseminated to customers prior to and in the immediate wake of an online attack. Most importantly, communications should concentrate on consumer education.
Demonstrating genuine efforts to educate consumers and safeguard against threats is an important first step for a company to rebuild the trust many customers have lost in resent years, troubled by the potential threats of online transactions.
In the “new economy,” these phenomena, coupled with widespread public concern over information security, now have the power to affect a company’s bottom line substantially. Companies must recognize the increasing influence of the Internet on a growing number of its constituencies and must keep this dimension in mind planning for and handling crises.
◎ How to Prepare Crises
The first step in preparing for a crisis is understanding that any organization, no matter what industry of location it is in, can find itself involved in the kinds of crises discussed in the previous section. Obviously, some industries-the chemical industry; pharmaceuticals; mining; forest products; energy-related industries such as oil and gas and electric utilities; and online retailers- are more crisis-prone than others, but today, every organization is at risk.
Communications managers must follow these examples and prepare company management for the worst by using anecdotal information about what has happened to unprepared organizations in earlier crises. There are so many to choose from that managers should not be hard pressed to find crisis examples in virtually every industry from experiences over the last 25 years. Once the groundwork is laid for management to accept the notion that a crisis is a possibility, real preparation should take the following form.
● Assess the Risk for Your Organization
Publicly traded companies are at risk because of the nature of their relationship with a key constituency-shareholders. If a major catastrophe hits a company that trades on one of the stock exchanges, the likelihood of a sell-off in the stock is enormous. Such immediate financial consequences can threaten the organization’s image as a stable ongoing operation in addition to the damage the crisis itself inflicts.
While privately held companies do not have to worry about shareholders, they do have to worry about the loss of goodwill-which can affect sales-when a crisis hits. Often the owners of privately held companies become involved in communication during a crisis to lend their own credibility to the organization. So all organizations-public, private, and not-for-profit – are at some risk if a crisis actually occurs.
◉ Plan for Crisis
The person in charge of corporate communication should call a brainstorming session that includes the most senior managers in the organization as well as representatives from the areas that are most likely to be affected by a crisis. During the brainstorming session, participants should work together to develop ideas about potential crises. They should be encouraged to be as creative as possible during this stage.
◉ Determine Effect on Constituencies
Once the probability of risk has been assigned to potential crises, organizations need to determine which constituencies would be most affected by the crisis. Crisis communication experts spend too little time thinking about this question. Determining how to rank constituencies when a crisis actually happens is more difficult because so many other things are going on. But thinking about risk in terms of effect on constituencies in advance help the organization further refine which potential crises it should spend the most time and money preparing for.
● Set Communication Objectives for Potential Crises
Setting communication objectives for potential crises is difficult than figuring out how to deal with the crisis itself. Clearly, organizations must do both, but typically managers are more likely to focus on what kinds of things they will do during a crisis rather than action when the crisis involves more intangible things such as the loss of reputation rather than the loss of lives.
● Analyze Channel Choice
Once the ranking of constituencies is complete, the participants in a planning session should begin to think about what their communication objective will be for each constituency. Whether objective will be achieved often depends on the effectiveness of the communication channel the company selects to convey the message.
Perhaps the mass distribution of a memo would be too impersonal for a message to employees in a time of crisis. The company might consider personal or group meetings or a “town hall” gathering instead. The choice of communication channel often can reflect how sensitive a company is to its constituencies’ needs and emotions.
● Assign a Different Team to Each Crisis
Another important part of planning for communicating in a crisis is determining in advance who will be on what team for each crisis. Different problems require different kinds of expertise, and planners should consider who is best suited to deal with one type of crisis versus another.
But managers should avoid putting senior-level executives in charge of communications for all crises. Sometimes the person closet to the crisis is the one people want to hear from. Assigning different teams to handle different crises helps the organization put the best people in charge of handling the crisis and communications. It also allows the organization to get a cross-section of employees involved. The more involved managers are in planning and participating on a team in a crisis, the better equipped the organization will be as a whole.
● Plan for Centralization
Although organizations can employ either a centralized or decentralized approach to corporate communication for general purposes when it comes to crisis, the approach must be completely centralized. Planning for centralization can help strip away layers of bureaucracy, keep lines of communication open throughout the organization, and dissipate conflict, all of which are especially critical in a crisis.
● What to Include in a Formal Plan
Every communications consultant will suggest that you develop a detailed plan for use in a crisis. These are formal in the sense that they are typically printed up and passed around to the appropriate managers, who may have to sign a statement swearing that they have read and agree to the plan. This allows the organization to ensure that the plan has been acknowledged by the recipients, and permits questions and clarifications to be discussed in a noncrisis environment.
◉ A List of Whom to Notify in an Emergency
This list should contain the names and numbers of everyone on the crisis team as well as numbers to call externally such as the fire and police department. The list should be kept updated as people leave the company or change responsibilities.
◉ An Approach to Media Relations
Frank Corrado, the president of a firm that deals with crisis communications, suggests that the cardinal rule for communicating with all constituencies in a crisis should be “Tell It All, Tell It Fast!” Perhaps a friendly amendment to Corrado’s rule might be “Tell as much as you can, as soon as you can,” so that you do not jeopardize the credibility of the organization.
Generally, the person who has the best relationships with individual reporters is probably the right person to get involved with them during a crisis.
◉ A Strategy for Notifying Employees
Employees should be seen as analogous to families in a personal crisis. Employees finding out from the media about something that affects the organization can be likened to a family member hearing about a personal problem from an outsider.
◉ A Location to Serve as Crisis Headquarters
Gathering the appropriate technology(e.g., computers, fax machines, cell phones) as quickly as possible when a crisis hits is also important. This headquarters location should be shared ahead of time with all key internal and external constituencies. All information ideally should be centralized through this office. Other lines of communication should then flow through the headquarters for the duration of the crisis.
◉ A Description of the Plan.
Companies should have their crisis plans documented in writing. In addition to communication strategy, a crisis plan should address logical details as well, for example, how and where the families of victims should be accommodated in the case of an airline crash.
Following the development of an overall plan, all managers should receive training about what to do if and when a crisis strikes. Beyond managers, all employees should be versed in and trained regularly on the company’s emergency procedures and plans.
◎ Communicating during the Crisis
All the planning that an organization can muster will only partially prepare it for an actual crisis. The true measure of success is how it deals with a problem when it occurs.
Step 1: Get Control of the Situation
The first step is for the appropriate manager to get control of the situation as soon as possible. This involves defining the real problem with the use of reliable information and then setting measurable communication objectives for handling it.
When a crisis erupts, everyone in the organization should know who needs to be contacted, but in large organizations this is often unrealistic. Therefore, the corporate communication department can initially serve as a clearinghouse.
Step 2: Gather as Much Information as Possible
Understanding the problem at hand is the right place for communicators to begin dealing with a crisis. This often involves managing information coming from many sources.
Many corporations have been criticized for reacting too slowly during a crisis because they were trying desperately to gather information about the incident. If it is going to take longer than a couple of hours to get the right information, a company spokesperson should communicate this to the media and other key constituencies right away to make it clear that the company is not stonewalling.
Step 3: Set Up a Centralized Crisis Management Center
At the same time managers are getting in touch with the right people and gathering information, they also should be making arrangements for creating a crisis center. Organization also should provide a comfortable location for media to use during the crisis, including adequate computers or Internet hookups, phones, fax machines, and so on.
Step 4: Communicate Early and Often
The organization’s spokesperson needs to say whatever he or she can as soon as possible. Particularly if the crisis involves threat to lives and property, communicators should try shield constituencies from panic by allaying some of the probable fears that people will have about the situation.
Step 5: Understand the Media’s Mission in a Crisis
Members of the media work in an extremely competitive environment, which explains why they all want to get the story first. They are also more accustomed to a crisis environment in their work.
Step 6: Communicate Directly with Affected Constituents
Using the media to get information out is good, but it’s more important to communication with your employees, sales staff, organized leadership, site security, operators, and receptionists, as these will be the media’s best sources of information in the crisis. External constituencies need to be contacted as well. These include the other three key constituencies besides employees-customers, shareholders, and communities- as well as suppliers, emergency services, experts, and officials. All available technologies should be employed to communicate with them, including e-mail, voice mail, faxes, direct satellite broadcasts, and online services.
Step 7: Remember That Business Must Continue
To the managers involved, the crisis will most certainly be uppermost in their minds for the duration, but to others, the business must go on despite the crisis. In addition to finding suitable replacements ahead of time for those who are on the crisis on other parts of the business.
Step 8: Make Plans to Avoid Another Crisis Immediately
Postcrisis, corporate communications executives should work with other managers to ensure the organization will be even better prepared the next time it is faced with a crisis. Companies that have experienced crises are more likely to believe that such occurrences will happen again, and also will recognize that preparation is key to handling crises successfully.
◎ Conclusion
Today we know crises as pivotal times of instability where leadership and decision making can determine the ultimate outcome of the situation-for better or for worse. As we’ve seen, sometimes companies can emerge even more respected in the wake of a well-handled crisis.
B) My opinion
Crises always exist around individuals and organizations regardless place and time. However, the ability to handle crises is different from each person or organization. In this sense, it seems that developed countries usually have well-defined plan to handle crisis management. By contrast, developing countries do not have those plans. In addition, those countries also do not have consciousness of crises or disasters. Thus, once when crisis happens, the volume of damage is tremendously large and is difficult to overcome it because of the lack of crisis management plans.
Another important problem is a consistent concern of top management team within an organization. In fact, employees follow the direction of rules and order of supervisors rather than creative behaviors. Even though good crisis management exists, if it is not repeatedly practiced in periodically, unpredicted crisis makes the organization embarrassed. Therefore, when the crisis happens, in order to rapidly overcome the crisis situations, repeating practices and interest of top managers are indispensable.
Reference : http://www.e911.com/monos/A001.html
Today, because of changes in technology and the makeup of the media, any corporate crisis is covered in a matter of hours by the national and internal media, and Webcast over the Internet-further hastened by an ever growing population of online “loggers” who document and critique companies’ every move. Thus, a more sophisticated media environment, as well as a new emphasis on technology in business, has created the need for a more sophisticated response to crises.
◎ What Is a Crisis?
Natural disasters cannot be avoided, but there are many crises- those caused by human error, negligence, or in some cases, malicious intent- planning could have prevented in the first place. In fact, most of the crises were human-induced crises rather than natural disasters. Such crises can be more devastating than natural disasters in terms of the costs they entail for companies in terms of both dollars and reputation.
All human-induced crises cannot be lumped together. One type includes cases in which the company is clearly at fault, for instance cases of negligence. In these cases, a falling stock price and rising legal tab are not the only aftereffects a company must weather; often the most serious impact is to the company’s reputation and the subsequent loss of trust with key stakeholders.
The second type of crisis includes cases in which the company becomes a victim, such as Barclays, Citibank, eBay, and other major corporations targeted by online information theft attempts. In all situations, however, constituencies will look to the organization’s response to the crisis before making a final judgment. Thus, to define crisis for organizations today is a bit more complicated than simply saying that it is an unpredictable, horrible event.
A crisis will be defined as follows:
A crisis is a major catastrophe that may occur either naturally or as a result of human error, intervention or even malicious intent. It can include tangible devastation, such as the destruction of lives or assets, or intangible devastation, such as the loss of an organization’s credibility or other reputation damage. The latter outcomes may be the result of management’s response to tangible devastation or the result of human error.
◎ Crisis Characteristics
While all crises are unique, they do share some common characteristics. These include (1) the element of surprise ; (2) insufficient information; (3) the quick pace of events; (4) intense scrutiny.
What makes this difficult for executives is that the element of surprise leads to a loss of control. It’s hard to think strategically when overwhelmed by unexpected outside events. In addition, the media frenzy that typically surrounds a crisis can prompt a siege mentality to ensue, causing management to adopt a short-term focus.
Part of the problem in dealing with crises is that organizations have tended not to understand or acknowledge how vulnerable they are until after a major crisis occurs. Lack of preparation can make crises even more severe and prolonged when they do happen.
◎ Crises from the Past 25 Years
These events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January of 1986 and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 have become etched in the public consciousness for a variety of reasons. First, people tend to remember and be moved by negative news more than positive news. Second, the human tragedy associated with a crisis strikes a psychological chord with most everyone. Finally, crises associated with major corporations stick in the public’s mind because many large organizations lack credibility in the first place.
● 1982: Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol Recall
In late September and early October of 1982, seven people died after taking Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide. However, many experts on crisis communication, marketing, and psychology have conjectured that it was Johnson & Johnson’s swift and caring response that was primarily responsible for turning this disaster into a triumph for the company. Despite losses exceeding $100million, Tylenol came back from the crisis stronger than ever within a matter of years.
What did Johnson & Johnson do? First, it did not simply react to what was happening. Instead, it took the offensive and removed the potentially deadly product from selves. Second, it leveraged the goodwill it had built up over the years with constituencies ranging from doctors to the media, and decided to try save the brand rather than come out with a new identity for the product. Third, the company reacted in a caring and humane way, rather than simply looking at the incident from a purely legal or financial perspective. What is most amazing is not that J&J handled this crisis so formidably, but that the perception of the company was actually strengthened by what happened.
● 1990: The Perrier Benzene Scare
Perrier Sparkling Water faced a contamination crisis of its own nearly 10 years after the Tylenol episode. Perrier’s actions during the 1990 benzene scare provide as many lessons in how not to handle a crisis as J&J’s did of how to handle one effectively. Without an official crisis plan of its own, Perrier relied on the media to communicate its story during the crisis, which proved to be a fatal decision. The press only served to expose the lack of internal communication and the lack of global coordination within the company.
The Perrier benzene crisis illustrates not only the consequences of having a reactive strategy to deal with crises, but also the problems of not having a coordinated and fact-based approach to crisis communication.
● 1993: Pepsi-Cola Syringe Crisis
In June 1993, a man reported that, after drinking half a can of Diet Pepsi the night before, he had discovered a syringe in the can the following morning when he shook out the rest of the contents into the sink. The CEO, Crgig E. Weatherup, did not let the surprise of the crisis overwhelm him when he was contracted at home by FDA Commissioner David Kessler and informed of the situation. Unlike Johnson & Johnson’s immediate recall of Tylenol from the selves, by the next morning Weatherup had decided not to recall the product- despite a flood of new reports to the FDA of dangerous objects found in Pepsi cans.
Pepsi’s highly visible work with the FDA in investing the crisis boosted its credibility in the public eye. Additionally, without an investigative reporting team of its own, Pepsi found that the government agency was invaluable to the company during the crisis. Pepsi-Cola did not stop there, however. To ensure that consumers knew that the tampering claims were false, Weatherup took out an ad to address the concerns of employees and customers.
● The New Millennium : The Online Face of Crises – Data Theft and Beyond
With personal computers and the Internet now integral parts of the fabric of business, organizations face new challenges and the potential for crises that they have not dealt with before. The “I Love You” virus unleashed in 2000 cost businesses across a range of industries an estimated total of $10 billion in damages. Companies of all kinds are also grappling with information security issues involving the theft or attempted theft of company and customer data.
◉ Hacking into Reputations
Today, the majority of online thieves are opting for more surreptitious tactics to steal confidential information. Viruses are now more commonly used to plant “Trojans” in personal or office computers-malicious software that steals sensitive information stored in a computer and relay it back to the criminal.
The proliferation of such online security threats has resulted in crisis situations for myriad companies worldwide that now must redouble their customers.
The most effective reactions have focused on clear, consistent communications disseminated to customers prior to and in the immediate wake of an online attack. Most importantly, communications should concentrate on consumer education.
Demonstrating genuine efforts to educate consumers and safeguard against threats is an important first step for a company to rebuild the trust many customers have lost in resent years, troubled by the potential threats of online transactions.
In the “new economy,” these phenomena, coupled with widespread public concern over information security, now have the power to affect a company’s bottom line substantially. Companies must recognize the increasing influence of the Internet on a growing number of its constituencies and must keep this dimension in mind planning for and handling crises.
◎ How to Prepare Crises
The first step in preparing for a crisis is understanding that any organization, no matter what industry of location it is in, can find itself involved in the kinds of crises discussed in the previous section. Obviously, some industries-the chemical industry; pharmaceuticals; mining; forest products; energy-related industries such as oil and gas and electric utilities; and online retailers- are more crisis-prone than others, but today, every organization is at risk.
Communications managers must follow these examples and prepare company management for the worst by using anecdotal information about what has happened to unprepared organizations in earlier crises. There are so many to choose from that managers should not be hard pressed to find crisis examples in virtually every industry from experiences over the last 25 years. Once the groundwork is laid for management to accept the notion that a crisis is a possibility, real preparation should take the following form.
● Assess the Risk for Your Organization
Publicly traded companies are at risk because of the nature of their relationship with a key constituency-shareholders. If a major catastrophe hits a company that trades on one of the stock exchanges, the likelihood of a sell-off in the stock is enormous. Such immediate financial consequences can threaten the organization’s image as a stable ongoing operation in addition to the damage the crisis itself inflicts.
While privately held companies do not have to worry about shareholders, they do have to worry about the loss of goodwill-which can affect sales-when a crisis hits. Often the owners of privately held companies become involved in communication during a crisis to lend their own credibility to the organization. So all organizations-public, private, and not-for-profit – are at some risk if a crisis actually occurs.
◉ Plan for Crisis
The person in charge of corporate communication should call a brainstorming session that includes the most senior managers in the organization as well as representatives from the areas that are most likely to be affected by a crisis. During the brainstorming session, participants should work together to develop ideas about potential crises. They should be encouraged to be as creative as possible during this stage.
◉ Determine Effect on Constituencies
Once the probability of risk has been assigned to potential crises, organizations need to determine which constituencies would be most affected by the crisis. Crisis communication experts spend too little time thinking about this question. Determining how to rank constituencies when a crisis actually happens is more difficult because so many other things are going on. But thinking about risk in terms of effect on constituencies in advance help the organization further refine which potential crises it should spend the most time and money preparing for.
● Set Communication Objectives for Potential Crises
Setting communication objectives for potential crises is difficult than figuring out how to deal with the crisis itself. Clearly, organizations must do both, but typically managers are more likely to focus on what kinds of things they will do during a crisis rather than action when the crisis involves more intangible things such as the loss of reputation rather than the loss of lives.
● Analyze Channel Choice
Once the ranking of constituencies is complete, the participants in a planning session should begin to think about what their communication objective will be for each constituency. Whether objective will be achieved often depends on the effectiveness of the communication channel the company selects to convey the message.
Perhaps the mass distribution of a memo would be too impersonal for a message to employees in a time of crisis. The company might consider personal or group meetings or a “town hall” gathering instead. The choice of communication channel often can reflect how sensitive a company is to its constituencies’ needs and emotions.
● Assign a Different Team to Each Crisis
Another important part of planning for communicating in a crisis is determining in advance who will be on what team for each crisis. Different problems require different kinds of expertise, and planners should consider who is best suited to deal with one type of crisis versus another.
But managers should avoid putting senior-level executives in charge of communications for all crises. Sometimes the person closet to the crisis is the one people want to hear from. Assigning different teams to handle different crises helps the organization put the best people in charge of handling the crisis and communications. It also allows the organization to get a cross-section of employees involved. The more involved managers are in planning and participating on a team in a crisis, the better equipped the organization will be as a whole.
● Plan for Centralization
Although organizations can employ either a centralized or decentralized approach to corporate communication for general purposes when it comes to crisis, the approach must be completely centralized. Planning for centralization can help strip away layers of bureaucracy, keep lines of communication open throughout the organization, and dissipate conflict, all of which are especially critical in a crisis.
● What to Include in a Formal Plan
Every communications consultant will suggest that you develop a detailed plan for use in a crisis. These are formal in the sense that they are typically printed up and passed around to the appropriate managers, who may have to sign a statement swearing that they have read and agree to the plan. This allows the organization to ensure that the plan has been acknowledged by the recipients, and permits questions and clarifications to be discussed in a noncrisis environment.
◉ A List of Whom to Notify in an Emergency
This list should contain the names and numbers of everyone on the crisis team as well as numbers to call externally such as the fire and police department. The list should be kept updated as people leave the company or change responsibilities.
◉ An Approach to Media Relations
Frank Corrado, the president of a firm that deals with crisis communications, suggests that the cardinal rule for communicating with all constituencies in a crisis should be “Tell It All, Tell It Fast!” Perhaps a friendly amendment to Corrado’s rule might be “Tell as much as you can, as soon as you can,” so that you do not jeopardize the credibility of the organization.
Generally, the person who has the best relationships with individual reporters is probably the right person to get involved with them during a crisis.
◉ A Strategy for Notifying Employees
Employees should be seen as analogous to families in a personal crisis. Employees finding out from the media about something that affects the organization can be likened to a family member hearing about a personal problem from an outsider.
◉ A Location to Serve as Crisis Headquarters
Gathering the appropriate technology(e.g., computers, fax machines, cell phones) as quickly as possible when a crisis hits is also important. This headquarters location should be shared ahead of time with all key internal and external constituencies. All information ideally should be centralized through this office. Other lines of communication should then flow through the headquarters for the duration of the crisis.
◉ A Description of the Plan.
Companies should have their crisis plans documented in writing. In addition to communication strategy, a crisis plan should address logical details as well, for example, how and where the families of victims should be accommodated in the case of an airline crash.
Following the development of an overall plan, all managers should receive training about what to do if and when a crisis strikes. Beyond managers, all employees should be versed in and trained regularly on the company’s emergency procedures and plans.
◎ Communicating during the Crisis
All the planning that an organization can muster will only partially prepare it for an actual crisis. The true measure of success is how it deals with a problem when it occurs.
Step 1: Get Control of the Situation
The first step is for the appropriate manager to get control of the situation as soon as possible. This involves defining the real problem with the use of reliable information and then setting measurable communication objectives for handling it.
When a crisis erupts, everyone in the organization should know who needs to be contacted, but in large organizations this is often unrealistic. Therefore, the corporate communication department can initially serve as a clearinghouse.
Step 2: Gather as Much Information as Possible
Understanding the problem at hand is the right place for communicators to begin dealing with a crisis. This often involves managing information coming from many sources.
Many corporations have been criticized for reacting too slowly during a crisis because they were trying desperately to gather information about the incident. If it is going to take longer than a couple of hours to get the right information, a company spokesperson should communicate this to the media and other key constituencies right away to make it clear that the company is not stonewalling.
Step 3: Set Up a Centralized Crisis Management Center
At the same time managers are getting in touch with the right people and gathering information, they also should be making arrangements for creating a crisis center. Organization also should provide a comfortable location for media to use during the crisis, including adequate computers or Internet hookups, phones, fax machines, and so on.
Step 4: Communicate Early and Often
The organization’s spokesperson needs to say whatever he or she can as soon as possible. Particularly if the crisis involves threat to lives and property, communicators should try shield constituencies from panic by allaying some of the probable fears that people will have about the situation.
Step 5: Understand the Media’s Mission in a Crisis
Members of the media work in an extremely competitive environment, which explains why they all want to get the story first. They are also more accustomed to a crisis environment in their work.
Step 6: Communicate Directly with Affected Constituents
Using the media to get information out is good, but it’s more important to communication with your employees, sales staff, organized leadership, site security, operators, and receptionists, as these will be the media’s best sources of information in the crisis. External constituencies need to be contacted as well. These include the other three key constituencies besides employees-customers, shareholders, and communities- as well as suppliers, emergency services, experts, and officials. All available technologies should be employed to communicate with them, including e-mail, voice mail, faxes, direct satellite broadcasts, and online services.
Step 7: Remember That Business Must Continue
To the managers involved, the crisis will most certainly be uppermost in their minds for the duration, but to others, the business must go on despite the crisis. In addition to finding suitable replacements ahead of time for those who are on the crisis on other parts of the business.
Step 8: Make Plans to Avoid Another Crisis Immediately
Postcrisis, corporate communications executives should work with other managers to ensure the organization will be even better prepared the next time it is faced with a crisis. Companies that have experienced crises are more likely to believe that such occurrences will happen again, and also will recognize that preparation is key to handling crises successfully.
◎ Conclusion
Today we know crises as pivotal times of instability where leadership and decision making can determine the ultimate outcome of the situation-for better or for worse. As we’ve seen, sometimes companies can emerge even more respected in the wake of a well-handled crisis.
B) My opinion
Crises always exist around individuals and organizations regardless place and time. However, the ability to handle crises is different from each person or organization. In this sense, it seems that developed countries usually have well-defined plan to handle crisis management. By contrast, developing countries do not have those plans. In addition, those countries also do not have consciousness of crises or disasters. Thus, once when crisis happens, the volume of damage is tremendously large and is difficult to overcome it because of the lack of crisis management plans.
Another important problem is a consistent concern of top management team within an organization. In fact, employees follow the direction of rules and order of supervisors rather than creative behaviors. Even though good crisis management exists, if it is not repeatedly practiced in periodically, unpredicted crisis makes the organization embarrassed. Therefore, when the crisis happens, in order to rapidly overcome the crisis situations, repeating practices and interest of top managers are indispensable.
Reference : http://www.e911.com/monos/A001.html
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