Research On Museum Crisis Communication Management

Under the background of the rapid development of new media platform in recent years, the museum crises have been disposed more to the public, it becomes increasingly urgent to carry out studies of museum crisis communication.To provide advices for the applications of Coombs’s Situational Crisis Communication Theory in Chinese organizations, this research analyzed a series of crises of the Palace Museum from2003to2013based on the theory by using content analysis and case study, to explore the possibility of positive interactions among the Palace Museum, the public media and the citizens.This research finds out that, during the crises in2011, the Palace Museum was facing difficult crisis situations, which was also changing variably, the crisis history was superimposed rapidly, while the reputation was damaged. The media were focusing on crisis types with high crisis responsibility, especially issues about property and finance, they attributed the crises mainly to poor management, security gaps and staff errors. And the citizens were holding negative attitude and turned their discussions from the crisis itself to the managers of the Palace Museum.Through a comparative look into the Palace Museum’s crises, the media’s reports and the citizens’ comments, the research reveals the reasons of the crisis communication failures, which includes three parts, wrong strategies on crisis communication, mismatches of news reports and the comments of citizens, and lack of communicating skills in new media platform.To solve the problems above, the study finally offers three advices. Firstly, improve professional crisis communication institutions and mechanisms, set full-time crisis communication positions. Secondly, develop effective and multiple channels for crisis communication, integrate information resources and media platforms, and keep an car to the public opinion. Thirdly, choose the right rhetoric strategies that are suitable for certain crisis situation. The text discourse of museum crisis communication should take the museum as both public service agency and cultural organization, and make good use of images to reconstruct the reality.