Enterprise Crisis Management Under The New Media Environment

Nowadays, individuals or enterprises all have a higher chance to encounter crises suddenly. Even worse, with the development of internet and mobile technology that boost the new media development, enterprise's risks of hitting by crises are even higher. The new media greatly accelerate the speed of spreading the impact of a crisis. The ability to handle crises well is even taken as touchstone of a'great enterprise'and a'must-learn lesson' from being large enterprise to being a great enterprise.This paper first introduces the research background, status, purpose and significance of crisis management. Then the literature review part summarizes the definition of new media, as well as the changes and challenges of crisis management it brings on. On top of the introduction, we also review the theories and strategies to handle different kinds of crises in different stages of a crisis lifecycle.Then this study analyses and compares two cases of enterprise crisis management of Baidu's 'Xue You Bing Ba' crisis and 'Wei Zexi' crisis in 2016. Media trends, propagation path and the points of interest of audience and media, the handling two crises and the results are compared and studied. Through the two cases we find that: the changes and speed of spreading of the crisis are greatly increased under the new media environment. Enterprises should set up their crisis strategy and establish a sound and effective crisis management system in advance to make preparation for a sudden attack of a crisis and also pay close attention to the potential risks. When a crisis dose occurs, enterprises should take a scientific approach to deal with it in order to reduce the impact of the crisis. In particular, enterprises should work carefully to make the initial identification of the crisis accurate. As correct identification is a good start to handle it. At the same time, enterprises should use of crisis 'denial' and 'evading responsibility' strategy with great care. These strategies tend to make the public think the enterprises in crisis as lacking of accountability. While enterprises could deal with the crisis by taking a four-step approach:apologizing, investigating the truth, telling the truth and correcting the problem to achieve better results.