Crisis communication practitioners should differentiate the emerging public crises form traditional corporate crises and be fully aware the characteristics of public crises as the
conclusion discussed above. Facing more active publics in the digital age of the prevalent social media, it is pivotal to identify and segment publics based on the prototype of public crisis communication in order to increase the possibility of achieving communication goals with these publics.
Corporate actors, managers, and executives should acknowledge that publics approach corporations hoping to get organizational awareness of their concerns and proactive corrections to the problem. More and more cases happened globally prove the classic crisis management strategies (such as a refusal, rebuttal, bolstering, etc. illustrated in Benoit’ theory) would worsen the situation and trigger more counteractions from publics. Corporations should also explore the changing power relations and power dynamics with publics in daily practice to prevent the occurrence of public crises. Last but not least, corporations should update its crisis management team with experts with linguistics, technical communication, and computational science
backgrounds and develop a crisis response system focusing on public discourse and rhetorical situation analysis through the communication network model.
For crisis communication and management scholars and educators, it is high time to move from an organization standpoint to a networking vision about crisis conceptualization and theorization. With this networking vision, scholars and educators can then design more valid research and pedagogy that respond to the changing landscape of public relations, train
practitioners on the methods to fully examine the many complexities in the process and aftermath of crisis, and educate students in relevant majors a “public awareness” that always considers publics and their needs.
In Chinese language, crisis (wēi jī, 危机) is a concept of both risk and opportunity. It is
an expression of classic philosophy about how things are interdependent and mutually transform.
Crisis brings the kairos for making right decisions and changing for the better in business, personal life, and social development. The wisdom for making this happen is to closely examine the intricacies in crisis ecosystem and then take responsible moves.
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