Social Media Marketing: Foundations to Practice · Crisis Management on Social Media
Situational Crisis Communication Theory
SCCT gives crisis managers a structured, evidence-based way to match a response strategy to how much responsibility an organization actually bears. This chapter covers its core structure.
Situational Crisis Communication Theory, developed by W. Timothy Coombs and formally presented in 2007, provides a framework for classifying crisis situations and selecting an appropriate response strategy based on the level of responsibility the public is likely to attribute to the organization and the reputational threat that responsibility level implies [32].
Key Takeaways
- SCCT, developed by W. Timothy Coombs (2007), matches crisis response strategy to how much responsibility the public is likely to attribute to the organization.
- The three crisis types by attributed responsibility are victim (minimal), accidental (unintentional fault), and preventable (knowing, unacceptable risk).
- The four response strategy families are deny, diminish, bolster, and rebuild, each suited to different crisis types and responsibility levels.
- Informing and adjusting with accurate information should always be the first response, and mixing deny with diminish or rebuild erodes credibility.