
Employees Come First in a Crisis: The Internal Communications Playbook
Employees are the first audience in a crisis, not the last. The playbook from Johnson & Johnson, JetBlue, Starbucks — and what Southwest got wrong in 2022.

Employees are the first audience in a crisis, not the last. The playbook from Johnson & Johnson, JetBlue, Starbucks — and what Southwest got wrong in 2022.

Things are still changing, even right now, which means marketers have to be flexible and focus on providing and maintaining business growth.

The old saying about how a lie can get around the world before the truth makes it out of bed never met the internet.

The pandemic did more for enterprise AI adoption in nine months than nine years of vendor conferences. What actually compounded — customer service, computer vision, back-office document work, marketing personalization. What did not — autonomous vehicles, Watson Health, facial recognition. And what GPT-3 signals.

What are going to be hot in public relations in 2021, what wont?

The 2020 piece argued that the pandemic was a good moment to start a tech business. The evidence has come in. The 2020 founder wave produced an outsized share of the companies now defining AI, remote-work, and consumer-tech categories. What held up, what changed, and the lessons that travel to the 2026 founder wave riding the AI shift.

There is nothing fair and equitable about the so-called "cancel culture." Let's get that out of the way right from the start.

B2B public relations is not B2C with the volume turned down. Different audience, different cycle, different proof structure. And 62% of B2B buyers now research vendors inside AI engines first. The full working library — mapped.

Branding in 2026 is how AI engines retrieve a brand, not just how consumers remember it. What Glossier and Patagonia teach about identity consistency as a citation moat.