Author: Emma Monks

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched every aspect of our lives in the past 12 months, including how much we use digital technology and social media. We have turned online to communicate, socialize, learn, and play—with our screen time, in many cases, exceeding our offline activities. 

Harmful content has always been a necessary evil when engaging directly with consumers. For most brands, it used to be like cosmic radiation from the sun; always there, spiking periodically, but not terribly hazardous at low doses. Then 2020 exploded, releasing Chernobyl-type levels of contamination that have decimated the growth strategies of social media managers.

In a move that has now made U.S. national news and gotten the attention of Congress, WallStreetBets, an online agenda-driven group, coordinated purchases that drove up the price of GameStop stock, some 2,000% in less than 30 days. They didn’t stop there, though. They also short squeezed AMC, BlackBerry, and Tootsie Roll, among others. 

In any other year, you may have just completed the annual social media audit or are preparing to have one done to assess the effectiveness of efforts on your social channels and identify opportunities for improvement. But if we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that we still have to plan for a future where the visibility ahead is limited by a dense fog of uncertainty.

Now that the COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed globally, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A light that, while signaling a return to some sort of normalcy by year’s end, has put pharma companies in the public eye like no other time in recent memory. They are not only confronted with a complex environment of meticulous oversight of industry and government regulators but also a more complicated social media landscape.

For 400 American companies, the new year is starting off with a welcome accolade: they have been named to the Newsweek 2021 list of America’s Most Responsible Companies.

TikTok, the addictively simple video-sharing social media platform, was officially the most downloaded app of 2020. They beat out Facebook for the most downloads last year, which represents a three-spot jump for TikTok from 2019.

For leadership teams and boards, 2020 will be remembered as a time when chief communication officers stepped up and shined in the midst of turmoil and uncertainty. As brand communicators responded to the ever changing COVID-19 landscape, seamlessly pivoting strategy became the norm.

When a crisis is brewing, the public looks to the top of a company for leadership. When handled poorly or completely ignored by the leadership team, an issue can quickly become a full-blown crisis, resulting in boycotts, loss of sales—or worse.

With the first COVID-19 vaccines receiving emergency use approval for frontline healthcare workers and the most vulnerable, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a distant light, admittedly, but it gives us something to pin our hopes on as we look ahead to 2021.

Social media has always been a great opportunity for brands to boost customer loyalty, engage consumers, generate leads, enhance sales, build reputation—and grow their organizations. 

Show of hands. Who had a crisis management plan in place for dealing with every risk event that had the potential to pummel your enterprise in 2020?