DIDDY’S APOLOGY & WHAT’S NEXT FOR SOCIAL MEDIA CRISIS PR

ANALYZING DIDDY’S CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS

Diddy’s apology video after the footage leaked of him abusing Cassie showcases that he obviously has the best PR that money can buy. I want to talk about it from a communications perspective. I think that what he did is abhorrent and wrong, and I don't think that any PR can or should save him from whatever comes next, whatever the fallout is. With that said, we're going to talk about it specifically from a marketing and communications perspective. But I want to be really clear that I’m Team Cassie.

Part 1: THE AUDIENCE SPECTRUM

When you're in a crisis communications war room, you split your audience into three categories. It's a spectrum. On one side, you have your die-hard, loyal fans. No matter what you do, they will love you. They will stick by you. They're not going anywhere. Across the spectrum, you have the people who've made up their minds that they hate you. You are done. You will never win them back.

And then in the middle are the people who aren't 100% in one category or 100% in the other. These are the people who might be waffling, who might be devastated because they think that Diddy was wrong. But also, does this mean that I can never listen to a song produced by Bad Boy again? “What if I love Biggie?” “What if I want to listen to this?” “What if I want to listen to that?” “I don't know how I feel.” Or the people who are kind of like: “I think this was terrible, but do I think that one action defines a person?”

These are the groups that the PR team is breaking down right now: Is there anyone who is not 100% anti Diddy that they can sway over a little bit on the spectrum? And similarly, how can they take the people who were with Diddy but kind of like, God, I don't know, this is so terrible. How are they going to keep them locked in? That's what he's paying the PR team to do.

And there’s a through line here that I haven't seen before, and that's in the comments section.

Part 2: A New Commenting Strategy

Usually, when a celebrity is in the wrong, you'll see comments sort of fracture out into the different groups that I was talking about. The people who are against saying all the reasons why they're against you, and then calling all of the media that you're doing PR. (It is). The people who are waffling, struggling with it in the comment section, and then generally the fan base will say things like, “we support you,” “we could never hate you,” whatever the case may be.

Now, this is speculative. What some PR and communications people do is purposely buy up accounts, use bots, so on and so forth to shore up the positive comments. But here's what, to me, was super interesting about Diddy's positive comments. When I went through to look at the comment section, the ones that were really up high and promoted and well liked, they all had a thematic editorial through line. All of them used religious language and reference religion specifically with the exact same thesis that only God can judge.

You had comment after comment that said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” You had comment after comment that said, “who of us has not sinned?” “It's only for God to judge you or decide what comes next,” and so on and so forth.

This is purely speculative, but I will say that you want to talk about playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers. The idea that you would come up with a religious-themed content strategy to shift the narrative.

Because whenever a population is all experiencing something all at once, we have a collective moment in the popular psyche. It's human nature to look around and see how everyone else is responding. So this idea that you would shore up comments to shift the narrative, particularly in this situation, which otherwise there's no coming back from who Diddy is and what Diddy has done and what is on that video.

To me, it seems like a PR strategy because it is a push to think about the only way that we could push people to be able to, in their brains, process that they are against domestic violence. They are against what Diddy did to Cassie, but they can still play his music. What if we run it through this lens where you can be anti Diddy, you can be against what he did, but you can take it through this religiosity of, I think this was wrong, but I'm not going to stop following on Spotify, stop playing his music, stop buying Ciroc, whatever the case may be. I'm not going to stop supporting him because it's only for God to actually take actions against people who do wrongdoing.

To me, that is like a fourth dimension. That is a highly advanced chess move PR strategy. And let me be very clear. To me, it's predatory. When we talk about predatory marketing, I think that psychological sales are predatory. I think that whoever came up with this strategy is as, I almost want to use a really demeaning word, evil, as anyone who would engage with domestic violence.

So, first of all, we already know that whatever PR team he's working with is not values-driven. They're money-driven. Also, they are very good at their jobs to craft this strategy.

SPECULATING ON FURTHER STRATEGIES

Will it work? Only time will tell. To me, it feels kind of sick because I think that the whole thing was manipulated by a PR team. But when I talk about how good they are, it feels to me like if we pull back the curtain, I can imagine a whiteboard of every group going back to this idea that there are people in the middle that they thought they could pull to be sympathetic to Diddy.

So (hypothetically) the PR team asks: What is every narrative that would make people believe that someone had evolved? Number one, religion. You find God, you're a horrible person. You find God, you're a better person. Let's weave religion through the apology video and the comments. Number two, addiction. We all know that addicts do things when they are in a stage of addiction that they, once they are in recovery, it changes who they are. We know that addicts will hurt and steal from people they love when they're in the height of addiction. He dropped the word addiction just in the middle of his video. Number three, trauma. When they say hurt people, hurt people. People who've experienced trauma can be people who then commit trauma on others. When he talks about the fact that he went to therapy, I imagine this PR team crafting, what is every narrative where we would believe that a man who is the ultimate villain could pull through and not be a bad person. They hit on every single one of those themes in the apology that they coached for him.

Again, this is all speculative. But this is what came up for me watching the video. I would imagine that this PR team did a whole case study on R. Kelly and probably did a case study on the number of years that he was able to skirt accusations of everything that he did to these young girls versus when it all came down. I would imagine that they're trying to pull holes in exactly when popular sentiment changed and us it for Diddy.

Have you noticed this before in a celebrity apology? Would these strategies sway your opinion? Let me know.

Watch more: Influencer Haylee Bayley’s apology gone wrong

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**Editorial Note on photo: I chose not to feature a picture of Cassie, so there's not an additional search result threading her to these events. I chose not to feature Diddy because of his actions.