Monday, August 9, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Personal suicide will be dangerous to reputation of a company.
Nobody expected that he did suicide. Last January a vice president of Samsung Electronics took his own life. The media informed people that he was not satisfied with personnel shake-up. But, the news was hard to believe cause he had the best academic background, and always got swiftly promoted in a company. There was still doubt.
When an executive does suicide, a company is related to a lot of issues and suspicion. Then, how could a company handle with this matter? It could be divided into two cases according to whether or not it is connected with a company.
1. Related to a personal problem
For instance, an executive killed himself while he was in investigation regarding embezzlement. The company might be in trouble with this matter to be publicized. At this time, a company should explain a big picture that is surrounded by media. It is supposed to be background of his action. It should not be the cause of his suicide. That is the job of prosecutor, police, and his family. It could be caught up with another disgraceful issue.
2. Related to the company
Like the case of the vice president of Samsung Electronics, this kind of rumor would be expanded widely through the Internet. In this situation a company needs to actively face with the issue. First, they have to concern about the internal communication. If the employees in the company believe the rumor, it will be more seriously widespread to the outside. When the emotional matter happens, a company would better announce its formal opinion through the media online and offline. If they try to get rid of negative posts on the company website, that would get worse.
Conversation could be the best bet for this sort of problem. They have to listen to family and employees around the victim, and strive to settle misunderstanding between two parties in advance.
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Original Audio Content by June-Young Lee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Crisis can be an opportunity.
LG electronics proved this proposition last February. A child was dead in drum laundry machine made by LG electronics. The media reported this accident to the public next day. Three days later, LG announced that they started voluntary recall of a million of laundry models that cannot be opened inside. Also, it did campaign about the safe use of drum laundry washing machine while producing a video to inform users the risk and visiting kindergartens and elementary schools.
1. Safety
LG was not in charge of legal matters with this accident. It has been provided consumers with the guideline of a user book. Mostly companies do not try to take a responsibility if there is no legal problem. But, LG was different, and did put effort on preventing future accidents from consumers’ inattention. LG recognized the Europe has few accidents with drum washing machine because of the consumer safety use campaign.
2. Speed
In three days LG executive members did make a swift decision with this matter. Spending millions of dollars, they tried to recall all the faulty models. To save time, they communicate with each member in different cities through a video conference.
3. Speak
What if LG tried to be silent about this accident? Media might have reported that LG turned away from the responsibility. That would be harmful for LG electronics items in a market. But, LG actively confronted the problem.
4. Solution
There are two kinds of ways for a company to deal with the problem in a risky situation. One company tries to focus on defending the matter while the other one makes an effort for solution. The consumers are more interested in responsibility of a company than liability of one.
5. Social Media
LG utilized social media to cope with this matter. It asked people to participate in the campaign for the consumer safety use via its corporate blog and Twitter.
This recall done by LG was based on long- term results of its business and consumer safety.
