Keeping the Digital Mob From Stealing Your Brand
Whatever side of the aisle you sit on, few doubt social media is now a disruptive force in elections. Both political camps wrestled daily with ‘viral' memes and themes that threatened their candidate's "brand." Social media has also, more quietly, disrupted the entire business of marketing. Companies, just as much as politicians, want to manage their "brand." But digital platforms shift control away from the "top" and toward citizens and consumers.
One blog post, tweet, or Yelp review can ignite a digital wildfire impacting brand reputation-and revenue-that took years to grow. Even the most robust marketing teams can't compete toe-to-toe with the collective consumer voice or a viral story (true or not) or the intensity of a virtual attack mob. And what's worse, things have a way of "sticking" in the digital world and getting dredged up when new brand threats arise.
Once upon a time, in the days of lunchtime martinis and Mad Men, companies paid big bucks to shape a brand image. It was easier then to recover from mistakes or even get away with shoddy products or services for a time. Information moved at a slower pace. When incidents occurred, a corporation could essentially pay its way out of most bad publicity and quietly clean up the mess.
No longer.
An example: Coca-Cola poured millions of dollars into 2015 Super Bowl ads meant to "tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds ... across the internet," (see press release). The idea was to encourage Tweeters to post #MakeItHappy on negative Tweets, converting them automatically into cartoons. Gawker, noticing a white supremacist Tweet transformed to art, sought to reveal the campaign's poor planning. It created a "troll-bot" that hijacked the campaign, morphing it into a loud speaker for Hitler's Mein Kampf. Coca-Cola, having lost control of its brand, pulled the campaign.
This year, Hewlett Packard found itself the target of a digitally organized protest fomented by a pro-Palestine movement because HP does business, as do many global corporations, with Israel. In 2014, the J.M. Smucker Company inadvertently amplified a known threat to its brand reputation by deleting Facebook posts critical of its stance on GMOs. There's a lot more like this and more yet to come.
Social media and other web 2.0 tools - some of which are more discrete by virtue of being either un-indexed or buried in the dark web - enable a vocal group or even a motivated individual to organize, plan, and have a deep impact on powerful entities. Wikileaks is a prime example. Modern marketers (and political campaign managers) increasingly find themselves spending more time reacting to and triaging brand threats than building the brand.
So far the increased transparency that web 2.0 enables has mostly been a one-way street, benefiting the customer. While that's generally a good thing and has given new tools to legitimate consumer advocates, it's also enabled malicious actors who have adapted more rapidly than have the corporations. And ironically by playing alongside consumers (both legitimate or otherwise) trying to "beat them at their own game" on social media, corporate marketers often unwittingly cede too much power to the digital ‘mob'.
This is beginning to change. Companies increasingly have access to a class of powerful new technologies that can monitor open-source big data generated by social media and other web 2.0 activities. The new tools make it possible to preempt brand threats related to product performance, services, third party suppliers, customers, employees, and unexpected geographically remote events that get "localized" overnight by virtue of the web. Some tools also make it possible to anticipate, identify, and even diminish digital attacks from bad actors and pranksters.
These new digital tools are two-edged swords though. In the real world, using digital monitoring tools for brand protection intersects the operational and software domains of equally critical risk management and IT security. Small, nimble companies and start-ups tend to be the leaders in figuring out how to integrate all this, but the big dogs do have the resources to-in due course-tackle this cross-silo challenge. But in both technical and in social/brand terms, you can count on the fact that the inartful use of such tools will get you blowback both from internal operations and, once the digital ‘mob' notices, from consumers, too. In fact it's already happening.
The new reality is, shaping a brand in the digital universe today isn't just different, it's more complicated. It's just as much about building and safeguarding, as it is anticipating identifiable threats buried in the high-velocity and transparent digital ecosystems. Whether you're in the corporate or campaign world, the line between marketing, risk management, and IT security is getting ever more blurred. This is, in market analysis terms, an "unmet need" and you can be sure tech innovators will respond with even better digital products and tools. You can also be sure the human actors will not only misuse many of them, but that both consumers and bad actors will respond in unanticipated ways in the inevitable measure-counter-measure kind of "warfare" now underway.
Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it." That's even true over two hundred years later. And while trial-by-media was as prominent then as today, odds are Franklin could not have imagined the velocity much less power of trial-by-social-media.
