Collapse Messaging Chilean Miners Messaging

¶ … Collapse Messaging

Chilean miners messaging

Seeger (2006) summarizes best practice in crisis communication in a table showing how strategic planning leads to proactive strategies and then strategic response, underscored with the admonition "[c]ontinually evaluate and update crisis plans" (p. 236). Achieving these larger objectives requires forming partnerships, listening openly and honestly to public concerns, communicating compassion and controlling media messaging and providing "self-efficacy" for stakeholders, Seeger (2006) explains (p. 236). These frameworks help inform audience analysis in a crisis like the Chilean mine collapse of 2010. In order to analyze this audience, mine operator Minera San Esteban Primera management's perspective before the ultimate rescue of the 33 miners (Weik, 2010, n.p.) will be adopted circa the time when stakeholders began realizing rescue might be protracted and more difficult than first expected (Jones, 2010, n.p.).

The first step would be in fact to identify some of the different roles and people in the audience: the miners themselves; their direct family; but also peer workers at the company and also regulators, corporate stockholders and future investors, if the firm is going to survive the costly and high-profile global media event this disaster could foreseeably become at the time. Communicators would have to balance these varying and in some ways contradictory interests with compassion and self-efficacy but also proactively in order to manage an unpredictable and often inaccurate potential media presentation. The wrong messaging could not only generate permanently damaging public relations, but also affect the outcome of any investigation into liability or malfeasance that affected the disaster, which at this time would not necessarily be fully known. These would be some of the primary considerations to remember given the different roles and stakeholders in an agitated and emotionally intense audience.

Potential needs of the families of the miners would be that the company is sparing no expense or delay in achieving the most urgent rescue at the scene but also afterward. This would be enhanced by providing the families detailed information about practices and technologies, including credentials of other partners and consultants as well as attempting to build "self-efficacy" (Seeger, 2006, p. 236) through incorporating the families however possible. This could include just for example consultation and request for suggestions, even if the firm never deployed the results, as long as management could create a feeling of empowerment in bystanders keyed up with nervous energy worrying about the future of their relations. Describing to and including them in future support options after the urgent mine collapse itself would demonstrate there will be a period after the emergency, to which the firm has committed. Again, even if the firm only acted unilaterally, the families' perceptions they participated would be worth for example giving them credit for ideas the firm was going to implement anyway.

Employees would first need to believe their own safety was both important to the company and assured in their own sites of operations. One potential way to expand the context to include their safety would be to highlight existing precautions taken before the disaster, those in place in other locations and the future commitment to sustained maintenance and safety. Such records would likely come out in regulatory investigation afterward anyway, so taking proactive steps as per Seeger (2006) could reclaim messaging posing serious potential harm if left solely to media outside the firm. Some type of concrete action would underscore this commitment, for example cessation of operations pending immediate review and maintenance of safety precautions, and then publishing favorable review immediately where that showed positive compliance. As for the families, demonstrating commitment to support after the emergency could help workers focus on a potential successful resolution rather than the immediate crisis.