Designing for Emotion: Forgiveness Chapter 6

I wanted to read this chapter because one of the biggest jobs that a PR professional may be faced with is crisis management. No matter how well you plan there will always be unexpected occurrences in the market. Being able to face dilemmas head on is key in gaining forgiveness from your audience.

I really enjoyed the author’s story of how Flickr handled a situation that went wrong with their servers. Rather than let the 3 hours of outage pass by, Flickr used this situation as an moment of opportunity to reach out to the fans in a unique way. This scenario reminds me that no matter what problem you are faced with, PR professionals have the ability to flip the script on a certain predicament and make it a positive. Its all about crafting a message and delivering it through an impact full design.  Like the author says, “Emotional design is your insurance to maintain audience trust when things aren’t going your way”

The only thing that I can kind of disagree with the author about in this chapter is when he says that the top priority in high-stress situations is to tame negative emotions a best we can. I would say that acknowledging one’s own fault and apologizing would be top priority. Although he did not say these directly in this statement I am sure that these two things are what would fall into that category of taming negative emotions.