Is your organization ready for a skeleton in the closet? That is a question every CEO needs to consider.
What happens when there’s a ticking time bomb in an organization just waiting to detonate? That often happens when a long-buried and controversial issue in an executive’s past resurfaces. Such a crisis can cost an organization significant equity and reputational damage.
This danger is real, as digitalization of once-outdated public records is making old information from the past more readily available in online searches.
Combine that with the microscopic attention being paid to business leaders and founders, politicians, celebrities, and what once would remain a legal notice published long ago in a local newspaper now appears on the first page of a person’s Google results if the newspaper’s archive is digitized. Or, when past romantic and professional contacts suddenly go public with critical, sometimes reputationally fatal disclosures that may be biased or subjective, but still make career-destroying headlines.
All of this can raise the likelihood of reputational damage for an individual or organization. If you have something like this in your background, best to prepare a strategy for addressing it should it resurface in the future.
In today’s highly connected world, reputations can be attacked with just a few keystrokes. Misinformation can quickly spread, doing real damage to even the most respected businesses.
When an unfavorable incident goes viral, revenue and brand value can take a hit. Studies have suggested that on average more than 25% of a company’s market value is directly attributable to its reputation.
In response to these pressures, companies are striving to improve their capabilities for managing reputation risk by investing in brand monitoring tools and crisis management and scenario planning, among others.
Join Us: Free Thursday, April 25, 2019 RANE Webinar
In a free, Thursday, April 25 webinar, from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm ET, experts from the RANE (Risk Assistance Network + Exchange) Network will explore the evolving landscape around reputation diligence. We also will spotlight ways companies can mitigate the risks to their brand. You can learn more details about the webinar and register here.
I am pleased to be participating in this webinar with other specialists in the crisis, PR and reputation management fields, and look forward to sharing insider intel with you and your colleagues.
As sexual harassment claims increase, damage-control strategies long used for celebrities are no longer working, reports the Washington Post. Public relations experts are “struggling with the best way to protect celebrities’ image.” Diversion tactics are falling flat. And “in the current social-media atmosphere…even well-intentioned statements can be misinterpreted.”
A quick Google search of the issue indicates these reverberations are being felt in corporate America, too.
Video content is king in the search engine optimization (SEO) world. In the reputation and crisis management world, it is a critical communications tool. We asked Robert Weiss, president of MultiVision Digital, a business video content marketing agency in New York, what you need to know to utilize online video content to your best advantage.
Why is online video content an important tool for online reputation building and repair?
Reputation management is the process of populating or refreshing the first page of Google with relevant content that will resonate with the searching audience and thus achieve a high ranking. Over the past few years, online video content has become the content of choice for many people. They are seeking out video more and more because it gives them what they are looking for — an informative picture of you and your business. So when people go searching for your company’s name and/or an issue, you can have your informative and relevant content come up in the SERPs (search engine result pages) to provide the answers and information they are looking for. Google gives preference to the best content that provides answers to their customers’ questions.
How do you advise readers to plan their reputation management video content strategy?
If reputation or crisis management is your objective, plan to create many videos within a budget rather than just one video with a high production value. The first step in this approach is to stop thinking about video. Instead, think about your business. What questions are people asking about it? Who in your organization is working on interesting things to resolve your clients’ issues? Once you have these answers, create an online video production plan to best support those talking points. That way, when people search for your company, and the issue at hand, the video content that you have created, and you have control of, can outrank any new story that might get published.
What are essential steps for a video content marketing strategy?
Create video content that answers common questions your customers have. These might be about how your product works, or about the process that you go through to deliver your service. Create several bite-size snippets of video content that inform, educate and show how and why the people at your company do what they do. If addressing crisis management, the content should illustrate what you are doing to resolve the issue at hand. Be transparent. Allow your team working on these products or services, or on problem resolution, to tell their part of the story in a compelling way. Another approach is to create thought leadership videos to counteract any negative rankings. Educate and inform people on new ways to look at your products, services or operational process. Inspire them to say “wow, I didn’t know that” or “I have that problem and didn’t even know it.” Don’t sell. Inform and educate. Enlighten your audience while giving them insight into your organization. Thought leadership videos, in conjunction with other crisis management videos, go hand in hand in building up positive content that you have control of and downplaying any negative press.
What role can video play in social media?
Once you have an online video content marketing library, you can use video to respond to any social media post. Because social media plays such a critical role in crisis management resolution, instead of replying with impersonal text responses, you can give your consumer base a high-touch, personal feel for your organization and how you’re going about resolving the issue at hand, in real time. Showing people is more effective than telling them. This is what makes video critical to any type of crisis management situation. When you can present videos that show your side of the story — again, not one video, but many videos that cover many different aspects of the story — while highlighting the people on your team who are working to fix the problem, it goes a long way in managing the narrative. Further, because video gives the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time and can convey a story with emotion and conviction, these videos can also be used to follow up with those news outlets that are creating negative stories about you, to convince them that you’re doing the right thing in responding to the problem.
So how do you integrate online video content into a crisis management situation?
If you are in a position in which you need to create online video marketing content in response to some type of crisis management situation, the first thing to do is acknowledge the issue at hand. Be transparent about the issue. Let people know the steps you are taking to correct the problem. Make sure that you have ongoing video that updates the public on the progress of your undertaking and the people who are undertaking it. Providing the media with controlled stories in which the CEO shows, rather than just talks about, the company’s response to the crisis, helps to deflect the media’s attention away from the CEO and direct it toward how the company is fixing the problem… and will ultimately give a more positive impression to the media and to the general public.
What is the benefit to having a video content marketing strategy in place for crisis management?
We’ve all seen companies that have been hit hard by negative news. Add in social media complaints and protests to the mix and the company can quickly lose control of the message. This can impact sales, shareholder value and reputation for a long time. A sound video content marketing strategy has many business applications, from branding to thought leadership to lead generation to the sales process, but for crisis and reputation management, it allows a business to take control of the message. With online video content, you can show the public that you acknowledge the crisis, convince them that you are taking ownership of it, and keep them apprised of how you are managing the crisis, in real time. Unfortunately, too few organizations have a crisis response plan in place that includes the ability to move quickly on preparing such videos. So the best thing to do is to start creating online video content today and have the experience and resources in place to respond should any crisis occur at your organization.
Robert Weiss has more than 15 years’ experience in digital marketing and sales. His company, MultiVision Digital, located in New York City, has produced more than 560 business videos over the past six years for clients ranging from solo-entrepreneurs to global Fortune 500 companies across almost every industry. MultiVision Digital’s expertise includes concept and budget planning, producing (planning, scripting, storyboarding, talent and editing) and YouTube video marketing services. A graduate of Bryant University, he is also a USA Hockey Level 3 coach.This is the nineteenth in a series of interviews with experts whose work relates to online reputation management.
Last week, Dynamic Network Services Inc., a web-technology provider, suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted in some of the top sites on the internet being disrupted, including Twitter, Netflix, PayPal and Spotify. An investigation is ongoing. The Wall Street Journal’s “Crisis of the Week” column asked experts to assess Dyn’s crisis communications response.
Shannon Wilkinson, our CEO, was one. Her take:
Dyn has embraced the most important quality in responding to most every crisis: transparency. It very quickly informed the public about the attack, including with a blog post from its chief strategic officer that conveyed its desire to clearly explain both the attack and its ramifications.
“Dyn communicated through real-time alerts on Twitter and through its ‘status site,’ a platform dedicated to informing the public about site maintenance and ‘any incidents in progress.’ If you were among the many perplexed consumers who couldn’t access their favorite sites on Oct. 21, you could Google ‘Internet down?’ and find Dyn’s messages– as I did–on its status site. For many of us, it was our first introduction to Dyn. And it was a reassuring one.
“The blog post from Dyn’s chief strategy officer, Kyle York, played a vital role. Rather than apologize for the inconveniences the outage may have caused, York focused on educating the American public about the seriousness of the attack and its complex, unsettling causes. In the process he recast Dyn as the protagonist in our collective war against hackers, even as frontline troops protecting liberty. Dyn gets five stars for its exemplary crisis communications.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance section often reports on corporate crises. Its Crisis of the Week column is behind a paid firewall and comes out once weekly. If you are a communications professional and follow crisis management, it is well worth the cost to gain insight from the experts.
In this week’s Reputation Reboot advice column, a company asks for help removing an old article from their top search results. The article poses a negative perspective on a long-past crisis, and despite both a PR and online reputation management campaign, it won’t budge from the first page of Google results.
Negative employee reviews are a growing problem for many companies. According to a survey published today in The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance section:
A survey of 1,012 U.S. adults by Corporate Responsibility Magazine and Cielo Healthcare found 86% of women who responded said theywouldn’t join a company with a bad reputation, compared with 65% of men. And 92% of men and women said they would consider leaving their present jobs to join a company with an excellent reputation.
That makes this week’s Reputation Reboot topic a timely one. It addresses one of the most frequently asked questions we receive: how to improve employee reviews.
What are a few of the most common mistakes CEOs and top executives make that can lead to reputation damage to them and their organizations?
Ms. Wilkinson: Many CEOs…they don’t own a lot of real estate in their name online, and they have not been proactive in creating a strategy to publish information about them on the Internet. When that happens the world creates your profile online, or Internet bots do. Whatever information third parties publish about you–whether credible or not, whether quality or not–will fill out the top pages of the Google search in your name and you have no control over that. The longer that stays the more difficult it is to replace it with more relevant information.
Are these the same issues they were dealing with a few years ago? How has the reputation risk landscape changed?
Ms. Wilkinson: The reputation risk landscape has gone through three developments. The first, which CEOs noticed around 2005, was the first wave of proliferation of anonymous malicious commentary that appeared widely on the Internet and was often directed toward companies, toward CEOs. The second wave was the proliferation of consumer reviews online, particularly geared toward customer service and complaints. The third phase we’re in now is the lack of privacy online, the continual spills of confidential in-house memos and emails, and of course the hacking.
What are some best practices executives and organizations can take to make it less likely they will fall victim to reputation slip-ups?
Ms. Wilkinson: The first is to look at the company’s internal culture. A lot of negativity comes from employees so it’s a good time to look inside at the opportunities employees have, and to look at diversity and inclusion, particularly providing women with opportunities. This is really the hot seat CEOs face now. This is going to be an issue for every company—employees, consumers are looking at how equitable companies are at providing opportunities for women, minorities, the LGBT group.
What makes top executives susceptible to engaging on social media in a way that can cause them reputation headaches?
Ms. Wilkinson: Some lack an understanding of how many people use social media and how they use it. I think most CEOs don’t encounter issues because of what they say on social media, it’s what is said on social media in response to their actions, that is the bigger threat. They’re so scrutinized and it’s so easy for a comment to be taken out of context.
