(With an eyeball-grabbing headline like that, I’d better bring the stick, right?)

I’ll guess that most of you who know me would bet that this post will be about the lack of social media utilization by communicators as why the headlines have been filled with “communications disasters” in the last year plus. But you’d be wrong. Many of those disasters had a social media component in the response, some of them significant. (You can get into the tactical part of those responses and question if they could have been done better, but that’s not a fault I would call pervasive.)

I would argue that most of those so-called “communications disasters” are little more than operational disasters masquerading as communications failures. Look at the list of Top Ten Crises of 2011 pulled together by the Holmes Report:

• TEPCO
• News Corp
• Penn State
• Blackberry
• Dow Chemical
• Netflix
• Sony
• HP
• Qantas
• European Central Bank

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that there wasn’t significant public relations complicity in some of these situations. But each of them were operational disasters dropped into the laps of the communications team who were told, “Deal with this,” or worse, “Don’t say a word.” And now they’ve been excoriated by an outfit like the Holmes Report. I’m willing to bet that next year’s list will include the unfolding Komen/Planned Parenthood disaster. The Komen PR team will likely get strung up for being obstinate and non-communicative, for authorizing statements that ran counter to reality and for generally bungling the reputation of one of the country’s most reputable brands.

The thing is, I think that’s generally unfair. Taking the Komen situation as my example, I’m willing to bet that the decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood was made without the input of the PR team. And frankly, there’s no way to gussy up that pig, lipstick or no. In fact, at the time the decision was made (late last year), Komen was in the middle of a corporate restructuring that caused them to lay off their Senior Communications Advisor, John Hammarley.

The organization was in such turmoil at the time that Komen hired former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to supervise a search for a new Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations. During the interviews, Fleischer specifically asked about the candidates' feelings on the Planned Parenthood situation. In short, at a time when the Communications Department was undergoing significant change and losing institutional knowledge and relationships, the leadership was preparing for the upcoming disaster. I think it goes without saying that the leadership was directing this process, and building a Communications Department to fit their plans. (That the new Senior VP and restructured Department did a poor job is simply an expected outcome of the piss-poor strategy.) (And just between you and me, I wonder about the restructuring going on at the same time that the leadership was pressing to institute a policy that no PR team could cover; a coincidence?)

So the greatest (ongoing) failure of communicators? Continuing to allow major policy decisions to be made without their input. Cowing to leadership that seems set upon steering the agency/corporation into the rocks. Would you blame the helmsman who followed Admiral Farragut’s order to “Damn the torpedoes,” if ultimately the gambit failed?

And I’m not the only person who sees this failure. Smart folks who do this type of thinking for real see it, too. Gerald Baron. Richard Edelman. Bill Salvin (I took Bill’s point in this post as communicators need to be brought into the loop—fully—as soon after a crisis occurs as possible, in order to help guide policy and craft both operational and PR response).

Maybe this way of conducting PR/PI/PA makes sense in a world of old media, where you had hours to craft a response and bring in your PR team to lipstick up your pig before tomorrow’s edition. In today’s 24/7 media (I’ve taken to calling it a 10-second media landscape, as that’s the longest it takes to write and publish a tweet), every second that your PIO doesn’t know what’s going on, your organization falls further behind the curve. Every interview they give that’s full of holding statements damages your credibility. Bill Salvin demonstrates what that delay means anymore:

I first realized this was going to be a problem back in 2009 when US Airways ditched into the Hudson River. People started tweeting about it immediately. We watched the plane floating down the river on one side of the screen as US Airways President Doug Parker used a template to “confirm there has been an incident.” The statement was delivered 96 minutes after the plane hit the river. It seemed it took forever to get that statement and that was three years ago.

Bringing your PR team or PIO into planning meeting after it happens means you’re already behind the eight ball. Having them as a key planning partner before it happens ensures your organization is leaning forward and might get a chance to smear some lipstick on before the cameras go on (or maybe even convince leadership not to put a pig out there in the first place).