Crisis communication professionals have to make sure that they construct messages that are concise, detailed, and visually relevant to the audiences that they wish to reach. Meaning, these messages have to be created in a way that gets the message out on what the organization in question wants them to do (ex. food safety issues), or where they can go to get further information about a pandemic (ex. H1N1). What is amazing to this day is that there is still confusion among specific audiences on what they need to do in a crisis or disaster situation, and how fear is a very powerful tool to use, but it can also get out of hand as well. A couple of current examples illustrate these points clearly – for example, the earthquake that hit Chile just a while ago showed that people were still getting confused about the alerts that were being disseminated about the event. Dr Vasily Titov, who directs the Noaa’s Center for Tsunami Research , was quoted in a BBC News article about this very situation by stating clearly that:
“We’re scientists and we’re really proud of our models and our accuracy but we realised after the Chilean tsunami that when we convey this information to the public there is a gap between what we are saying and what is understood.”
This is a huge issue that crisis communication professionals need to be aware of and address immediately. Even with the focus and continued awareness of the importance of crisis communications in business, government, and global activities, it still appears that we still have some work to do when it comes down to constructing effective and clear crisis communication messages. Researchers and professionals have to work together to make sure that we address this and make sure that we do spend the time and resources to address this key issue in the profession.
Another issue that comes out when communicating crisis communication messages is the use of fear appeal. You do want to motivate people to act and respond to the crisis communication message, but what happens if the fear overtakes the individual and another crisis emerges? Panic and fear are definitely motivating for people to act, but not in the way that the crisis communication professional would necessarily want them to act. This was apparent in the H1N1 crisis – people were very scared about whether or not they were going to get swine flu, and they rushed hospitals and other health clinics to get information. However, some of these resources were not prepared to address this new issue, and this came about due to the fact that the issue (ex. H1N1) was being portrayed in a way that created fear among the population. Peter Sandman wrote an interesting piece that discusses how one of the issues that crisis communication professionals can take away from this case is that they did not visually communicate the issues and threats of the swine flu. Meaning, people were either very fearful or they were not as motivated to get the vaccine. There needs to be a balance in the crisis communication message – we have to make sure that we give people enough information for them to act and respond, but at the same time discuss clearly what are the main concerns and consequences for these different actions. More research needs to be done in this area in crisis communications.
Hope you all are having a great day.
Best Wishes,
Karen
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