CRISIS COMMUNICATION IN THE TIME OF SOCIAL MEDIA - modern leadership and conflict competency
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
Introduction
By now we all know those horrible media events where something really bad happens to a business or personal brand. We watch, with growing amusement or horror, as the implicated brand stumbles, misses opportunities, and when their well-intentioned efforts at crisis management just digs the hole they are in deeper and deeper. We reconsider our views of the brand, and we move on, thankful that it was not us in the firing line. This time, at least.
Social media has, for a number of years now, become the frontline of information management, risk control and brand protection in the political and corporate worlds. In recent years, however, the very way that media is consumed, as well as some changes in technology itself, have reshaped the way that crisis communication should be prepared for, presented and managed.
The audience has changed, and the expectations of that audience have changed. We understand much better at this stage how opinions are formed, shaped and steered, and how that should not be done. We understand, through a range of inter-related conflict field studies and research, the actual harm that is done by applying the incorrect strategies, even if those strategies were acknowledged best crisis communication practices only recently.
Crises are unavoidable, and they could actually be constructive events, opportunities that can be used in the best interests of a company or organization, or then to at least mitigate existing harm done. In this article we then consider a few of these new crisis management strategies, from the point of departure that the competent and effective study and application of such knowledge is a modern leadership responsibility.
Misinformation and disinformation
The distinction between these two modern communication methods are well-presented in the conventional and social media platforms, and I do not intend revisiting such current debates. We can take notice of such distinctions, and be aware of them in the event of certain attacks on our organization, as that distinction, and its contents, then does play a role in the design and execution of our best conflict strategies, but in the majority of modern crisis management and communication scenarios the distinction is overused and unnecessary.
Speed and reach
One of the most obvious changes in this level of conflict leadership is the blurred speed and reach that these events can have. A customer has filmed an event at your store, uploaded onto three or four of their social media platforms, and the boos and hisses are in their thousands before you get to hear about the event, or a version thereof. We will incorporate these realities into our strategies below.
A necessary change in leadership focus
As we will see, to be truly effective in meeting these rather inevitable modern events require an important management shift of priorities and preparation. Most of the skill and abilities needed are acquired well before the event happens. There is no time to instruct a few key people on the how and the why of these responses, and the battle is won or lost in the readiness and knowledge of those involved long before.
We also need to stop seeing it as a begrudged concession to fate, and more as a core leadership conflict competency requirement, not only focused on damage control, but also as opportunities to proactively share sense-making, align involved stakeholders, build (or rebuild) trust, and turning threats into opportunities. One of the required mind-shifts is to understand the fragmented attention spans and focus patterns we are dealing with, to understand algorithms and how they influence the flow of information, how polarized societies and groups hear what they want to hear, and how we should use the dynamics of identity conflicts to persuade and meet either a purely spontaneous and natural threat, or a manufactured and malign one, or a combination of the two.
These attacks are to be seen as modern commercial conflict, in order to gain access to the modern tools and strategies available to leadership responsibilities.
What has changed in the last year or two?
Generally, your target audience will now receive and consume their media information very differently. As a result of a complex confluence of factors, people widely distrust conventional media (the popular “MSM” label), and knowingly restrict their media intake to social media, where algorithms and manipulation will form silos and severe polarization patterns, all situations that require intricate and updated conflict knowledge to understand and effectively combat.
The speed and reach we referred to can now be complicated by artificial intelligence involvement, deep fakes and other AI methods and abilities, and our audience is far more disposed to instantaneous and emotional reaction, before possibly more informed and accurate information is received and disseminated. Once these narratives have taken hold of a public story, it becomes increasingly difficult and complex to change, as we will study below.
It is in the evolution of our audience that many of the modern strategic mistakes are made. Strategies and content that would have been adequate until very recently can now either be completely ineffective, or worse, exacerbate the problem. The public, customers, employees and other stakeholders now demand transparency, urgent attention, empathy and a high level of accountability from real or imagined offenders. The truth and rationality, as we may be seeing it, is but one relatively small component in these modern challenges. Internal crisis communication has become a tightrope walk done at full speed, in a fast-changing, extremely volatile environment, where everyone has a camera and a voice.
Remaining leadership errors
While there are no really exhaustive statistics on the increased levels of leadership conflict competency in this specialised arena, I get the sense from my consulting experience that there has been an important shift and understanding among South African businesses (and political organizations) of the sharply increased challenges and requirements, but that these changes are both significantly inadequate, aiming at outdated targets, employing outdated strategies, and then becoming fossilized as a job done, with no need for dynamic and ongoing high-level training.
In addition to this structural error, the following serious errors are also observed:
1. This is a responsibility that should either be outsourced to a high-level team, or preferably, be a dedicated in-house function. There can be no questions of availability or internal communication problems when the bell rings. In practice this is often tacked on to existing staff functions, where this extremely complex challenge often ends up as an additional expectation on the job description of someone with no, or minimal, training, and other duties.
2. Responses are delayed, reactive or avoided – it is remarkable to still hear senior management adopting, as a strategy, a wait-and-see approach to a breaking crisis. “Maybe it will blow over, maybe it is just a few likes and comments”. This is wishing as a conflict strategy, and just an awful response.
3. Responses are in corporate-speak. This is a reflexive mistake, born from training, habit or a misguided notion that presumably dense language will impress the hostile audience. It does not. This is not something to circle back on, it is not a jargon-swapping team session. It requires, and deserves, sincere language.
4. A perceived lack of empathy. This is often overlooked, and often difficult to incorporate into immediate strategies, especially where the complainant(s) seems to be objectively wrong. Facts matter, but land better if your audience is receptive to what you have to say. Timing and sequencing will always be necessary conflict leadership skills. In modern times, arguments should avoid appearing to be overly defensive.
5. Generalizing specific social media and communication dynamics. The timing, content, delivery and scale of communication will differ from X to TikTok to Facebook. Resist the urge to have a one-size-fits-all approach. Keep an eye on your traditional media skills and approaches. These are different worlds, requiring different solutions.
6. Keep an eye also on internal communication. Employees may have their own take or expectations of internal events. Disciplinary codes and policies on social media use only go so far, and then require live and in the moment management.
7. Be careful with delegation or incorrect assignment of roles. Too often a serious and very public event is handled in public and in the media focus by someone too junior, or simply someone that causes the public to wonder “Where is the CEO in a moment like this?” What may appear to you as effective task management may be received as indifference, or senior management seeking to avoid blame or attention. This is where leadership fails, or shines. 8. Poor, or non-existent, preparation. We briefly dealt with this earlier. The awareness of the problems and risks, and the catastrophic harm that can follow on these events, seem to be fairly well-understood. An informal survey shows that this understanding however translates to role assignments without updated content, a vague sense of urgency, no meaningful training, and a sense of “Let’s hope this does not happen to us, if it does we will see what can be done”. This is, in modern times, a serious dereliction of duty. A formal action plan, drawn guided by best practices, with trained staff and senior management, with resources in place, and updated regularly, should be a minimum requirement.
Modern strategies for effective conflict communication management
Making the mind-set shifts we spoke of earlier, and avoiding the errors above are good places to start, but a pro-active frame of management mind is what moves this from an exercise in complacency to a state of actual readiness.
The following are examples of industry best practices that we recommend, bearing in mind the nuances and tweaks necessary for every specific industry or environment:
(i) Preparation. 80% of the real work and value lie here. Get proper, comprehensive advice, integrate this into your specific working environment. Industry standards or ChatGPT answers will not suffice, and may not serve you well when time is against you and your team. Do case studies, role-model exercises, desktop exercises, build a living action plan, make those crucial appointments. Place pressure on the plan regularly. Build the entire system, right down to the confidential Whatsapp group, the available funds, who does what when, everything in place and within reach within seconds. Importantly, let everyone always know exactly what their roles are, as this may not be the same under crisis conditions than what may be the normal corporate structure.
(ii) Become comfortable with the correct mix of speed, accuracy and transparency. Work with messaging before you need it, debate what works, run tests on consumer / client realistic groups. The first message saying “We are aware of the incident at our Cape Town office, and we are investigating this as a top priority. We will keep everyone posted with developments.” buys time for further information and reflection, it confirms competency and care, and that the matter is not minimized. Keep that messaging coming, even if it is still inconclusive. Something like “We are still awaiting feedback from the police, and will share relevant information with the public as soon as we receive it” does the work that silence while waiting for that information does not. Even if nothing is happening, talk about it. Learn when to slow things down, when to speed them up.
(iii) Manage facts proactively, be clear on labelling misinformation, and correct it at the same time. Do not get involved in arguments about who is involved, motives and so on. Pure information, compared to incorrect information. Longer explanations and accountability can get managed on a different timescale.
(iv) Integrate AI systems into the team and plan and training. Be independently able to, in real time, read patterns, attacks and be able to anticipate direction. An important part of the strategy and challenge here in those breathless first few minutes and hours is to stop being reactive, and to take control of the narrative.
(v) Deliver consistent on empathy, integrity and value-driven expectations. This is not as cynical a process as it may sound. Do not find out in the trenches what sounds authentic and what does not. The problem is often not an absence of authenticity, but an inability to convincingly deliver it under pressure. You care, but cannot convince people of that. This must be a part of your training and preparation. An important part of the value-driven part of the message is also a question of proportion. If your first press release is a sentence on the victims and nine sentences on how these are not your values, and how great you have been these last few years, then you have the right idea and the wrong proportion, and this comes across as defensive, self-serving and an empathy failure.
(vi) Build your cross-functionality. This should be a part of your preparation, but it so often overlooked that it needs its own focus. These teams, even if they are somewhat trained and in place, are often seriously constrained by the practical realities of the specific challenge. A modern crisis like this can require product research, market knowledge, conflict, legal or other specialist input, media experts, and so on. Try to anticipate what a crisis in your business will entail and require, and build accordingly.
(vii) Effectively combine traditional media and social media. Where appropriate, see these as two different tools, with social media for speed and reach, and traditional media for nuance and in-depth treatment being a fair rule of thumb. Use multi-channels as necessary, and speak to tailored audiences. Again, reflection will show that this should be trained for.
(viii) Train for, and then implement a dynamic, minute-by-minute approach. Keep ahead of developing narratives, competing streams of information, developing attacks, opportunistic developments from competitors, and be careful to get too narrowly focused on just one aspect of a story. Be accurate but keep alert to sudden changes, missed angles, or dead-end avenues as far as explanations or narratives are concerned.
(ix) Be clear, in training and during delivery, on your approach to vulnerability. Old-school manuals would have cautioned against any admissions of error. Legal sleeps badly because of it. But modern audiences are often open to sincere apologies, reflection, attitudes of being better next time. Debate and design this around your business ethos, before it happens.
(x) Study, train in, and then execute top-end identity conflict knowledge and best practices. I have written extensively on this crucially important modern conflict dynamic, and the interested reader and team leader can rather obtain the necessary knowledge there. Briefly put, people already have predispositions that very subtly make them lean in the direction of certain identity markers and values. People believe what they want to, or need to, believe, in other words. The unspoken internal narrative runs “People like us believe things like this”, and efforts to persuade them differently, even with facts and evidence, end up not just ineffective, but counterproductive. Social media is a wonderful laboratory for this, unless you are the one making the mistakes. An event occurs, someone marks it as a “racist incident” or one showing misogyny, or evidence that capitalists do not care, or any such popular narrative. People who benefit from that silo, through belonging, through social media acceptance, reward of some sort, or any of the other identity conflict dynamics, will nearly automatically assume that to be the “truth”, and post accordingly. Efforts at short-circuiting that developing or runaway story through conventional arguments, denials, rational and evidence-based arguments only are making matters worse, as time spent in the comments sections of recent social media events involving school conflicts, retailers and well-known brands so clearly show. At least one senior member of your response team should be well-versed in identity conflicts, how this affects effective and persuasive messaging, and the levers and pulleys available to the actual media delivery decision makers.
(xi) Analyse events, and integrate this into redesign, retraining. Plough back hesitations, uncertainties, mistakes, missed opportunities, observations and so on into your new and even better Crisis Response Plan and Team.
Conclusion
I hope that your business life is never beset by these crises, but if they are, I hope that you are ready.
Notes
- Full references, further reading material, courses, coaching, study material, workshops / seminars, mediation and representation are available on request.
- A summary of Andre Vlok’s cv / bio can be accessed at
- https://www.conflict-conversations.co.za/conversations/2025-online-curriculum-vitae-andre-vlok
(Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.)
(c) Andre Vlok
June 2026
* Author’s note on the use of artificial intelligence in writing this article
I learned to draft, argue and write in the hard school of litigation. I enjoy and value the very human process of creating ideas, of testing my own knowledge and thoughts. It is a process that I need, for answering some of my professional and even personal questions, it is cathartic and inspiring. Other than the most basic research assistance I do not use any AI in the creation of my written work, this article included. It is a matter of pride, of preference, and of mental health. Whether that is a wise choice, I will leave to the reader to decide.