Crisis Communication Paper

When organizations, agencies, or communities experience disaster, it is important for them to effectively communicate messages to the public or individuals affected. Knowing and understand the method or tool needed for carrying out crisis communication is essential and failure to choose the right means of communicating the messages could lead to another disaster or result in more casualties in the case of natural or man-made disaster. Traditional or legacy media such as television, radio, and news paper could be seen as a good means of communicating to the public, however media continuously change due to technology innovation. This improvement in technology continues to shape public interactions through social media especially in time of crisis.

Although, radio is a good means of communicating messages to the public on impending dangers of natural disaster such as hurricane, and television is also essential part of transmitting disasters messages to the public for past decades, however, it is crucial to integrate the use of social media into crisis decision making process and each agency, organization, and community leader need to develop social media policies to augment their crisis response ability. Also, even though social media, according to Lin et al (2016) permit greater situational awareness for emergency response, yet, there are still several challenges facing crisis management (Bullock et al., 2013; Lin et al.,

When such messages does not get to the public in a timely manner there is little to no hope of making such decision that is likely to impact life for a short or long-term. Since the medium through which to communicate messages to the public will continue to be modify over the period of time, it is then imperative for organizations, agencies, or communities to continue utilizing all forms of communications available to reach the public, especially the use of social media (MacLeod, 2014). Lin et al (2016) emphasized that emergency and crisis managers need to actively engage in online communication in time of crisis. When disasters occur, there are usually people from the community that witness the disaster and then turn to social media to disseminate messages regarding the disaster or crisis. For example, Haiti earthquake and cholera outbreak in 2010, hurricane Sandy in 2012, Joplin tornado in 2011, also industrial disaster such as British Petroleum (BP) oil crisis in 2010 etc this is why it is important for the crisis managers not to inactively disseminate crisis messages online, rather they should actively engage the public through the use of social media. In addition, engaging the public via social media would encourage the public to constantly follow emergency agencies, organizations, and communities’ offices on their social