Crises occur every day: an airplane crashes into a mountain; a corporation lays off thousands of workers; an oil spill threatens an ecosystem. Such crises can be devastating for individuals, organizations, the organizations' stakeholders, and even entire industries. Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding provides an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to the entire crisis communicaiton process. Drawing on his extensive firsthand experience, Dr. Timothy Coombs uses a three-staged approach to crisis management (precrisis, crisis, and postcrisis), explains how crisis management can prevent or reduce the threats of a crisis, and provides guidelines for how best to act and react in an emergency situation. The book includes new coverage of social media, social networking sites, and terrorist threats while drawing from recent works in management, public relations, organizational psychology, marketing, organizational communication, and computer-mediated communication research.