Wednesday afternoon a client's community manager texted me a screenshot of a tweet she was about to send. It was an apology. A real one, for a real shipping failure, on behalf of a company with a legal department. She wanted to know if the second sentence sounded too defensive.
She has been out of school for fourteen months.
Nobody had told her she was doing crisis communications. It was not in the job description she signed. She was hired to build a content calendar, schedule posts, and grow engagement, and instead she was standing in the only channel where the angriest customers of a four hundred person company can reach a human being in public, in real time, in front of everyone.
This is not rare. This is the default.
The most exposed communications surface a brand owns is almost always staffed by its most junior employee and governed by its least documented process.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The org chart puts social under marketing, marketing puts it under content, and content hires for tone and turnaround speed. All reasonable. None of it accounts for the fact that the same account posting a product photo at ten in the morning is the one absorbing a safety complaint four minutes later.
Here is the part that gets lost. Junior does not mean bad. She is usually better at the actual writing than anyone above her, which is why she got the account. What she lacks is not skill. It is cover: permission to pause, the phone number of someone who can clear a sentence, and a manager who has thought about what happens on a Saturday.
Three fixes, none of them expensive.
One. Write the escalation path down and put a name and a phone number next to every tier. Not a department. A person. If she has to guess who wakes up legal on a weekend, you do not have a process, you have a hope.
Two. Pre-approve holding language. Six sentences that acknowledge, commit to a timeline, and say nothing else. Wendy's and Merriam-Webster get all the credit for improvisation, but the accounts that survive a bad week are the ones with a boring paragraph already written and already cleared.
Three. Give her explicit authority to say nothing. The pressure to respond inside eleven minutes comes from a dashboard, not from customers. An hour of silence while facts get confirmed has never cost a brand what a confident wrong answer costs.
This is not rare. This is the default.
Truffles and Barnaby have no position on escalation tiers. They sat on the notebook I was drafting this in, which is the extent of their involvement. The community manager texted at seven to say the apology landed fine, and she sounded surprised. She should not have been the one finding out alone.