Behind every reputation, there is always a real person.
Francesca Caon, journalist and founder of the agency CAON Public Relations, deals with reputational crises every day: her clients' crises and the ones that fill the pages of the newspapers. Umbrellas for shitstorms, published by ROI Edizioni, grew out of a question she had carried with her for years: why do we no longer recognize that on the other side of a shitstorm there is always a human being?
THIS BOOK DOESN'T JUDGE THOSE WHO GOT IT WRONG. IT TRIES TO UNDERSTAND WHY WE, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN, ARE SO QUICK TO JUDGE.
Unlike the heat-of-the-moment takes you read on social media as a controversy erupts, "Umbrellas for shitstorms" steps back and looks calmly at the facts, because:
Through sixteen real cases, it shows you the pattern that repeats every time, not just the news story
It helps you tell legitimate criticism apart from a storm built on outrage
It gives you the perspective of someone who handles reputational crises every day, not of a mere spectator of the controversy
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In the book, Francesca Caon tells sixteen stories we all know at least in passing, from Enzo Tortora in the Eighties to Alfonso Signorini and Fabrizio Corona, by way of Chiara Ferragni, Jannik Sinner, Giorgia Meloni and Esselunga, and uses them to take apart, case by case, the psychological and media mechanisms that turn a single episode into a storm.
The tone is not that of a sterile manual: it's sharp, ironic, at times ruthless toward the protagonists of her own stories, because before being a PR professional, Francesca is also a spectator of this phenomenon. But behind every cutting story, the book always comes back to the same question: what happens to the real person once the storm dies down?
SIXTEEN TRUE STORIES TO LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THE PATTERN BEFORE IT SWEEPS YOU AWAY
Each chapter starts from a concrete case and uses it to expose a recurring mechanism: the halo effect that protects (or sinks) those who already have an established reputation, the way the public judges the person more than the facts, what happens when two opposite strategies, speaking out or disappearing, both fail. This isn't a book written to comfort those who have already been through a crisis. It's written for those who want to understand how the mechanism works before they find themselves caught in it.
BUY THE BOOK FOR €19 AND GET THE PRACTICAL SURVIVAL GUIDE TO SHITSTORMS FREE