The Sichuan earthquake is causing a lot of hand-wringing about what is/is not appropriate behavior for businesses and other organizations.

I saw a bit of this over the weekend at the law firm retreat I attended. This was an internal group meeting of all the attorneys in our Asia offices, slightly less than 300 folks. Since the idea was to get together, share ideas, and be positive about the future (this was a corporate-style event after all), there was some frivolity planned.

This ran into the reality of current events, and plans changed. In fact, the weekend began with a moment of silence, there were tie-ins with charitable events and opportunities to get involved in various relief efforts, and our invited speaker on Saturday, a government official, spent his allotted time talking about international relations, disaster relief, etc.

What's the most appropriate way to deal with this sort of thing? I don't know, it's all so awkward. You can't completely shut down all your PR, marketing functions, internal events, etc., but you certainly better be sensitive to what's going on around you. Organizations that are tone deaf could end up being verbally smacked around, either online by the public, or via their existing government relationships.

Having a splashy PR event during the next three days would definitely be a no no, for example.

Some interesting Twittering going on about this subject this morning. Jeremy Goldkorn posted this link on U.S. chattering about Beijing's mourning period. No surprises there.