What PR professionals need to know about social media-first crisis communications
Katie Delahaye Paine
CEO at Paine Publishing
April 17, 2026
When two TikTok influencers began investigating and comparing notes on allegations against Congressman Eric Swalwell, they didn’t start with the New York Times. They started with their followers. The Swalwell crisis began when an elementary school teacher Arielle Fodor, aka Mrs. Frazzled, (who rose to prominence with her hysterical posts, talking to the president as if he was a toddler), posted enthusiastically about her encounter with Swalwell. She immediately started getting comments from other women who warned her about Swalwell. Meanwhile, Cheyenne Hunt, a political organizer who had a friend who alleged she had been harassed by Swalwell was hearing similar stories. The two connected, and began investigateng the stories they were hearing from their followers. Eventually they decided that they needed to take their findings to mainstream media. What followed was a masterclass in how modern crises actually unfold — and a wake-up call for PR and communications professionals still prioritizing traditional media over social.
Why PR Professionals Need to Rethink Crisis Monitoring
The old assumptions about the “Marketing Funnel” are gone. Today people who are deciding to buy something or fix a problem start with a search on Google, Gemini or ChatGPT. Most often, the first thing that comes up is video content — and it’s seldom from the paywalled giants of cable news. It will probably be YouTube, Instagram or TikTok.
Unilever has already responded to this trend by shifting traditional advertising budgets entirely to influencers. So if your crisis monitoring strategy starts with The New York Times, you’re already behind.
The key questions communications professionals need to answer immediately in any crisis are:
- Who is actually talking about us — and on which platforms?
- Is the conversation growing or contained?
- Who are the most engaged voices, and can we reach them?
Can Reddit (or any Social Media platform) Predict a Crisis Before It Explodes and Maybe Help You Control It?
New academic research suggests yes. Researchers Jack LipeiTang from the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Alabama and Lichen Zhen from Abington College at The Pennsylvania State University studied the 2024 Boeing machinists’ strike — one of the most significant labor crises in recent memory — to test whether social media behavior could predict real-world crisis escalation.
Using a framework called STOPS (Situational Theory of Problem Solving), they used both surveys and social media to confirm their hypothesis. STOPS posits that there are three factors that predict whether someone will engage in a crisis:
- They feel a moral or emotional push to act
- They see the issue as personally relevant
- They believe they can make a difference
So the researchers analyzed over 633,000 Reddit posts and surveyed 268 active participants, including real Boeing employees and found a relationship between Reddit behaviors and actual attitudes. In other words did the people who expressed engagement on Reddit, actually take action or feel differently. Critically, the research tracked conversations across three stages of the crisis — walkout, negotiation, and resolution — enabling them to revealing the truly engaged publics who weren’t just reacting to headlines, but genuinely following and participating in the issue over time.
What This Means for Crisis Communications Strategy
Traditional crisis tools like pulse surveys are too slow for the social media era. The Boeing/Reddit research offers a faster framework:
- Start with social listening to identify who is posting and how actively
- Identify your most engaged publics — supporters and adversaries alike
- Engage directly — provide information, acknowledge concerns, offer solutions
The goal isn’t to monitor social media. It’s to use it as an early warning system and an engagement channel simultaneously.
The Bottom Line
From a California congressman to a Boeing strike, the pattern is the same: crises now ignite on social media, scale through influencers, and only then reach traditional press. PR professionals who build social-first crisis plans — backed by real-time listening tools and academic frameworks like STOPS — will be the ones who get ahead of the story instead of chasing it.
