Navigating Digital Storms: Essential Crisis Communication Strategies for the Social Media Age
Imagine a video on TikTok spreading like wildfire across South Africa. It takes a complaint from a customer and turns it into a huge boycott trend in just a few hours. As a PR student at the University of Johannesburg, I have learned about companies like Pick n Pay on what happened to them in 2025. When a service failure was shared on the media and it went viral (News24, 2025) . In today's world, companies need to handle problems quickly and honestly, and they need to know how to use technology to respond. The old ways of dealing with problems no longer work, as we learned from Coombs in 2019. This blog will share some ideas that come from real life examples and from what academics have learned. It will help people who work in relations, in South Africa to use social media in a responsible way and avoid problem. Why crises hit harder online ? Algorithms can really get people upset. They can take mistakes and turn them into huge problems that everyone talks about. In 2025 a ...