Crises occur every day: a viral outbreak threatens public health, a corporation lays off thousands of workers, an oil spill threatens an ecosystem. Such crisis can be devastating, resulting in tragic and sometimes fatal outcomes for individuals, organizations, the organizations' stakeholders, and even entire industries. Author W. Timothy Coombs explains how crisis management can prevent or reduce the threats of a crisis, providing guidelines for how best to act and react in an emergency situation. Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding, Sixth Edition provides an integrated approach to crisis communication that spans various disciplines as well as the entire crisis management process. Drawing on firsthand experience in crisis management, author W. Timothy Coombs uses a three-staged approach to crisis management - pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis. A truly integrative and comprehensive text, this book explains how crisis management can prevent or reduce the threats of a crisis, providing 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 and draws upon recent work from management, public relations, organizational psychology, marketing, organizational communication, and computer-mediated communication research