The Hindu Business Line : Crisis is perceptual

Intranets are custom-made for managing crises better, writes W. Timothy Coombs in Ongoing Crisis Communication (www.sagepublications.com) . "The beauty of an Intranet is the speed of accessing information for the CMT (crisis management team) and other employees."

CMT, for starters, is "a cross-functional group of people in the organisation who have been designated to handle any crises and is a core element of crisis preparation." Fine, but what is a crisis? It is perceptual, says the author. "A crisis is the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organisation's performance and generate negative outcomes."

Check, therefore, if you have a CMT and a CMP (crisis management plan) in your organisation. Also needed is a crisis control centre, where the team can meet and discuss the crisis, and collect information. "Collecting and analysing information is crucial during a crisis."

The CMT should be able to access information directly through computers, rather than through telephone calls. For example, "Motorola stores crisis-relevant information on its Intranet (e.g. financial and product information)."

A caveat is that it may not always be appropriate to use email and the Net to communicate crisis-relevant information to employees. A Web page can post updated information about the crisis, suggests Coombs. Think of creating a crisis dark site, he urges.

"A dark site is a section of a Web site or a completely separate Web site that has content but no active links. When a crisis hits, the CMT can activate the link, and the dark site becomes accessible."

The author reminds that in times of crisis, stakeholders increasingly use the Internet to get information quickly. "Unlike the news media, the Internet provides an organisation unlimited space to talk about the crisis... Major agencies, such as Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum, and Burson-Marsteller, feature the Internet in their discussions of crisis management client services."

Watch out for the MUM effect, cautions the author.

While a critical source of crisis-related information would be members of the organisation, it is not surprising to find the very same people withholding negative information completely, and thus blocking the flow of negative and unpleasant information in an organisation.

Vital literature, which is to be read during normal days!

Lab scenarios in a disc

Topics are about Multicast, VLANs, VTP, IP telephony support, site-to-site VPN, IOS firewall, and so on.

You can see and hear Kevin Wallace offering `more than five hours of personal video instruction on CCNP configuration tasks' in CCNP Video Mentor (www.ciscopress.com) . Packed in the DVD are `16 instructional videos', each presenting `a unique lab scenario, with both visual references and audio explanations of what you should expect to happen in a particular lab'.

Topics are about Multicast, VLANs, VTP, IP telephony support, site-to-site VPN, IOS firewall, and so on. An accompanying book serves as a support for the video. It has inputs such as: "When a web page is not loaded across the 128-kbps link, a tone is generated from extension 2222, and a solid uninterrupted tone is heard on extension R1. However, while the web page is loaded, the VoIP audio is completely starved by the data traffic... "

A product that makes it easier, for the learning-starved!

When ads become math equations

Use SEO (search engine optimisation) to make your site visible', guides the author, in case you are looking at a relevant target group.

Vikas Malhotra's Gold Sift (exchange4media.com) helps you in `leveraging your online and search engine marketing'. He speaks of three types of `reaching out' that Web-based ad campaigns aim at, viz. `the relevant target group', `an enormous amount of people', and `relevant people in a certain geographical region'.

Use SEO (search engine optimisation) to make your site `visible', guides the author, in case you are looking at a relevant target group; choose keywords strategically, therefore, to achieve a good SERP (search engine result page) performance.

For the mass-market seeker, PPC (pay per click) campaign may help. And for those who prefer `the organic way', instead, a whole chapter has many tips, such as how you can create a `crawler-friendly' page.

The author anticipates that in an era of `paid search market, and richer, more interactive and creative advertising facilitated by increased broadband penetration around the globe' advertisers will be able to `routinely and inexpensively embark on ad campaigns that hit exactly the right prospects and hardly anyone else'. He sees a shift of traditional ad spending towards the Internet. With time spent online continuing to grow, `the Internet has replaced the TV as the most sought-after medium across different demographics'.

Malhotra foresees that online advertising will become a pure mathematical equation and see the emergence of a new CPx (cost per variable). "Online advertising will be driven by more strategic quantitative analysis across segmented audiences... The new statistics will help advertisers and publishers to identify and influence audiences more efficiently and effectively."

The future belongs to behavioural targeting, opines the author. "Behavioural targeting monitors the behaviour of an individual as the person moves from one Web site to another. Advertisements are then generated to correlate with this behaviour."

Blogs are very popular among the online community, but are not fully recognised as a business tool, laments the author. "One of the most underrated but powerful aspects of blogs is their ability to provide feedback to the blogger through the comments system built into blogs. Feedback can be an incredibly useful tool in the product development cycle." Having a company blog demonstrates a willingness to be open, he suggests. "It indicates a desire to interact in the most open environments with customers, potential customers, and critics."

Online marketing is not a technical propaganda or buying Net connectivity, concludes Malhotra. "It is mainly about re-thinking your business; it is about re-visiting your vision; and about embracing the future in your development strategies."

Persuasive discussion that you'd love to double-click on.

Tailpiece

"He's so used to keeping files pending that... "

"Uh?"

"He always presses `send later', and never `send message'!"

dmurali@thehindu.co.in