The first few weeks of January feel like a year. Within the last few days, we’ve seen major global events, from natural disasters to geo-political upheaval and significant announcements from Meta and Google.

Amid a chaotic start to 2025, one thing is abundantly clear: the pace of change is speeding up and, as communicators, we need to evolve quickly. When every day appears to bring a new crisis, it can be hard to maintain perspective. But there are positive opportunities for reputation managers, as we look to the months ahead.

Crisis management goes 360/365

As crisis management becomes more complex, taking it back to basics when it comes to being prepared is a given. But, let’s be clear – this doesn’t mean delivering templated risk management presentations and workshops focused on media relations. Social media is now the epicentre of crisis communications and internal comms, combined with internal comms, and the media remain important stakeholders to provide facts in a world of misinformation.

Ensuring that you’re taking a holistic approach to crisis management for clients, and not neglecting the uncomfortable truth that many crises stem from longer-term existing issues, must be explored in the preparation phase. Transparency is crucial to enable comms experts to do their job most effectively, and brands taking a bolder, proactive approach to owning mistakes is something we’re seeing more of.

There is a huge opportunity now for communications to be firmly planted at the heart of organisations – something that we have all wanted as an industry for a long time. Audiences expect transparency, empathy, and action and this is where PR plays a crucial role.

Canned apologies won’t cut it any longer; people want real solutions and accountability and it’s this that builds trust and reputation. It’s what you do that counts, not what you say – this classic crisis management rule is more important than ever.

Community becomes even more powerful

We are continuing to see a shift towards two types of audiences: those who still consume their news via established media outlets, and those who only get their information on social media via their own specific communities, or groups.

This week we’ve seen a significant announcement from Mark Zuckerberg that has triggered a huge discussion about freedom of speech and censorship. Many people instantly compared the move to X’s tone and space which has seen misinformation thrive. Removing professional fact checkers takes these platforms into unchartered territory that will impact far beyond the US.

The opportunity here for PR professionals is to refresh your approach to stakeholder mapping to understand who and where your influencers really are. Credible communities that share factually accurate content may change where and how they communicate now, which reconfirms how vital audience insight is.

Misinformation and monitoring

Misinformation creates an added layer of complexity in a crisis. Whilst tools are becoming more sophisticated, there’s no gold standard yet when it comes to tech stacks and smaller brands without huge budgets or expert knowledge will be increasingly limited in tackling this manually.

The surge in the use of AI has also led to deepfake content becoming more sophisticated than ever before and we can expect this trend to continue. This could mark a tipping point back to a renaissance of legacy media and old-school journalistic values, which are increasingly necessary to cut through the noise with facts.

Google’s announcement this week that it plans to build models capable of simulating the physical world uplevels the expectation for AI. This may prove useful in terms of crisis simulation, which AI is already being used for regularly. Despite where the future is headed, human interpretation and analysis remains essential when it comes to context and never more so than in a crisis.

The world is evolving but so can we. Crisis management in 2025 demands preparation, perspective, and technology combined with behavioural understanding that will enable us to confidently provide support across every industry. Regardless of which sector the brands that you represent operate in, crisis management is fundamentally all about human decisions, emotions and behaviours. As the world employs more artificial intelligence than ever before, being more human will truly come into its own.