Caught in the web

In a survey carried out this year by Deloitte, the heads of companies and top managers opened up about what scares them most. It may come as some surprise that it is not the collapse of the economy or the competition or even mistaken assumptions in their business models. According to global business managers, the loss of their reputation is their greatest fear. As many as 40 pct regarded this as the main strategic risk for their company.
As it turns out, it is the growth of social media that is mostly to blame for this. You might think I’m exaggerating, but In fact I’m not – and this is why. For example, when after fifteen years the sanitary and epidemiological authority discovered salmonellabacteria in Winiary’s instant mushroom soup brand, the news was soon all over the media and rapidly became the butt of many jokes. Such gags could be heard in cafés, in the corridors at work, and even at aunts’ birthday parties. I remember the oft repeated ‘Winary – good ideas, dangerous taste’ spoof of the ‘Winiary, good ideas, good taste’ advertising slogan. The joke would be accompanied by sniggers before it was eagerly passed along the grapevine to someone else. This method of transmitting jokes is as old as the hills and is probably the way it was done in mediaeval market squares. But from the point of view of businesses, which always have the potential to become the butt of jokes, the time when such malicious gossip and schadenfreude was passed mouth-to-mouth must now seem like an exceptionally kind and gentle age. Now, however, such gentility has been firmly consigned to the past. For example, at the recent Winter Olympics in Sochi a BBC reporter noticed two toilets in an unseparated cubicle in the biathlon centre in Sochi. He immediately published a photo of this on Twitter – an action so simple and requiring such little time that he probably didn’t even have to leave the toilet to do it. The effect was instantaneous. Moments later, someone in San Francisco was choking with laughter over their morning coffee, while at the same time somebody else was sending the comical image to everyone in a Japanese multinational, while someone else in Australia was sharing the photograph on their Facebook profile, adding the comment “LOL! This made my day!”. The internet went into a frenzy over the next few hours and days, as millions of shares and likes of the photo were added to the main social media.
Clearly, the old textbooks on crisis communication have to be thrown out of the window at this point. Not so long ago, such books claimed that a company has app. three hours to work out its stance on damaging publicity, because this used to be more or less the time that elapsed between TV news bulletins. Admittedly these are now rather outdated textbooks, because crisis reaction times have been shrinking for several years due to the development of TV and radio, as well as the increasingly shorter breaks between news bulletins. However, in today’s social media era, such an approach is pointless – there is no time for any reaction at all. Vultures, i.e. internet jokers who compete against each other in meme creation (humorous visualisations with captions), pounce upon each spectacular slip-up as if it was fresh carrion. For the joke to be funnier, it has to be produced and published as quickly as possible. The winner is the one who then receives the most likes and shares. From the point of view of a company being undermined by this type of black PR, such jokes are as dangerous as the Ebola virus – and much more contagious. “Nowadays you can have a reputation, built up over the years and decades, destroyed in little over a minute,” the PR experts warn us. If there is some kind of effective defence against this menace, the business world has yet to discover it and remains in a state of acute nervousness. I, for one, would give my right hand to anyone who comes up with an effective solution – but right now I’m using it to tweet a funny photo I’ve seen on Facebook about some company that’s been… ν