Crisis Insider

While broad-ranging crisis tools sound like an ideal solution, some crisis pros say they’re years away. It will take time for tech to catch up with crisis needs.

In gest, but only partly, the last weeks of 2021 and first days of 2022 offer enough botched PR and PR crises to assemble a March Madness-style ranking.

Internal communication has become a critical part of how companies think about crisis. As we know, some of the best ways to limit damage from a crisis are planning and preparing. Thinking through potential crisis situations, creating a response plan and practicing regularly can help an organization reduce fallout from a crisis or reputation disaster, if not avoid it from happening in the first place.

In this month’s edition, we focus on RTO,  Bookcase Credibility, Zoombie and CBP.

We expected good things from 2021. Instead, it delivered large doses of frustrating virus protocols, political turmoil, mistrust, disinformation and reputation gaffes. Classic PR blunders generated headlines when leaders failed to learn from history. Here are a few cautionary tales as we look to 2022.

Some learnings emerged from our survey of nearly 300 communicators conducted in October and November 2021. The most newsworthy was what issues are concerning crisis pros. Besides COVID, they include: DEI, misinformation/disinformation, activism, cyber, natural disasters and employee/executive misconduct.

The holidays arrived early for crisis communication fans. There was no shortage of stories to peruse. All featured ghosts of crises past, whose protagonists we’ve covered in Crisis Insider.

This month’s dialogue takes a slight variation from our usual route. We won’t explore an operational topic, such as ‘What to do during a crisis when your CEO goes off-script.’ Instead, as it’s nearly 2022, we’ve asked two crisis communicators to consider 2021 trends and discuss what they believe 2022 will bring. Our dialoguers are Sonia Diaz, SVP, Balsera Communications and president, Hispanic Public Relations Association USA (HPRA) and Jenelle Eli, senior director, media relations + international communications, American Red Cross.

This month’s terms to know include Decentralized Autonomous Organization and WhatAboutism.

There used to be a belief that businesses could, and indeed should, stay away from the campaign trail. Sure, they donate to candidates and often have lots of lobbyists. But, it was not seen as their role to try and support or strengthen the democratic process itself. That all changed in 2020.