Chris Nelson on Crisis Management

Last week, the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) chapter at Ohio Northern University had guest speaker Chris Nelson speak on the topic of Crisis Management. This presentation was interesting mainly because I feel like we don't have people come to talk solely about crisis management. Nelson was first introduced by Hannah Bowen, a member of PRSSA, who gave a little bit of background on him. Nelson started off his presentation by talking about two major concepts that would be important to his speech. These concepts were experience and expectation. These goes hand in hand because people have certain expectations and if these experiences do not meet their expectations then people are not satisfied, whereas if they do meet these expectations people will be satisfied. The second point he made was that deeds > words. By this he meant that doing the right thing matters, more than just saying you'll do the right thing. Nelson gave three overarching points on how to handle crisis management. Nelson showed some interesting figures throughout his presentations, which had to do with the first of his points, reality. He stated that if you look at any five-year window, there is an event that knocked 20% off the stock market for a company, 80% of the time. This shows that crisis is steadily becoming more common, thus making crisis management even more important. This importance of crisis management only grows when it comes to a good reputation. The second point being response, and this goes back to deeds being greater than words. Companies must be able to contain the situation and define the problem first in order to properly respond. Then they must devise strategies to overcome the crisis as well anticipate possible future events and have a story frame. The last of the three points was readiness. Companies have to be ready to deal with these situations. They must assess their risks, know their stakeholders, build their team, have enough resources and finalize their plan in order to overcome a crisis. Nelson emphasized the importance of companies practicing these strategies in order to be best prepared as well as reassessing regularly and with every change that is made. Overall, I think this presentation was one of the most interesting ones, mainly because it wasn't a repeated presentation. While there are always differences between the people who come in because they don't all have the same job, but there are a lot of areas that overlap in public relations. Chris Nelson is super charismatic; he made the presentation more engaging by sharing stories of real public relations crisis that we all are familiar with and also throwing a little humor in there. Crisis management is something that everyone should learn about because at some point it will come in hand, even if you're not the public relations person for a company.

Comments

Popular Posts