Study On The Crisis Public Relations Strategy Of Multinational Companies In China Under Social Media Environment

With the development of social media,the spread of information has accelerated,and the scope of influence has also extended which has also increased the risk of crises and brought unprecedented challenges to crisis management.Since the reform and opening up,multinational companies have entered the Chinese market for more than 40 years,however they frequently encountered crisis in China market in recent years.On one hand,it is because of the poor internal management;on the other hand,the development of social media also intensified the occurrence of crisis.Although most multinational companies have sound crisis management mechanisms,under the social media environment,their performance in dealing with crises is not always satisfied.This paper studies the 30 crisis cases happened on multinational enterprises in China by comprehensively using the method of case analysis and in-depth interview.Firstly,summarize the overall crises situation,then explore the cause of each crisis event and categorize the crises.Secondly,evaluate their performance on dealing with the crisis base on the 5S principles which widely apply for crisis management.Thirdly,in-depth study four typical crisis cases,and explore how does the social media impact the multinational enterprises in dealing with crisis in China,and what are their short comes.Finally,give improvement advises base on previous analysis.Base on the study,finally the article puts forward that multinational companies in China should apply following crisis communication strategies: firstly,establish a sound public opinion monitoring platform which could keep up with the social media development,secondly,cultivate a professional Chinese based social media crisis management team to speed up crises response,thirdly,make good use of social media to interact with publics,fourthly,optimize key opinion leaders' influence to guide publics opinions,lastly,strengthen the sense of social responsibility to earn a positive company image,improve cultural adaptability to reduce public relationships friction.