Protecting Your Reputation in the Age of Access

The Scenario

A patron dining at a reputable restaurant chain one evening notices something moving in his plate. He whips out his smartphone and records. It’s a lizard. Before the patron calls for the restaurant staff to report the matter, he uploads the video onto Facebook. By the time the patron speaks to the staff and they work out the means to placate the patron, the video has gone viral, thanks to his friends who share it. By the time the patron gets home, someone has grabbed the video and uploaded it onto YouTube. Before dawn, the incident about the lizard is on numerous blogs and forums. Before the next evening, the incident is reported in a small tabloid or a fringe news website. The word spreads well beyond the street, the city, the state and the country where the lizard was found in a plate.

The Age of Access

The internet is global. It is borderless and it has no limits. Actions on computing or mobile devices are instant, with a tap or a click. Instant too, is the visibility of that action. And then the instant reactions follow. The adage that “no man is an island” applies more so to the internet than anything else we know, because through the web, we truly realise, how we are all interconnected.

The restaurant company, or rather its Public Relations team, has no head-start or reaction time. Comments, captions, pictures or videos posted on Social Media travel faster than news reporters in their news vans.

We live in a world today, where your local newspaper or news channels works to keep up with viral videos and online postings. We live in a world today, in which we have access. And that access will only continue to rapidly grow, for a long time ahead.

Today, most of us in the first world own smartphones with data plans. We have applications on those phones granting us access to platforms such as Facebook (the user population of which now exceeds the population of the world’s most populous country), Twitter, LinkedIn and the good old email.  We also have applications like Tango, WhatsApp and Viber with which we can instantly communicate information around the globe without an additional cost, which can then be instantly forwarded, potentially leading to viral circulation.

Viral circulation of content is something that you can plan and strategically trigger deliberately, with an intended advantageous purpose. That is what Viral Marketing is about. Content going viral however, is not something that necessarily needs to be planned or deliberately initiated. Consider for illustration that I upload something on to my Social Media profile that is visible to my contacts. They share what they see. Their contacts see what they have shared from me and share it too. And then it keeps going, as if it has a life of its own. That is how it works.

Reputation

In business, your reputation is money. This is simply because your Brand Equity, the value of your name and the perception of it in your consumers’ minds, relies upon that reputation. A reputation for class, quality, value or reliability associated with your logo or brand name takes perhaps years to build. A single incident in the age of access can damage that reputation in days if not hours. And that is the reality of the present times we live in. As we get ever more interconnected and the means of communication become ever more rapid, it may take mere minutes and then seconds, for your reputation to diminish.

The future is about wearables and live logging, with high quality audio and video with instant mass-streaming. We’ve already had a preview of such products in the form of the HMD device from Google called Glass. With such products in consumers’ hands, you can expect information to be mass disseminated with a mere sliding motion of a finger.

The Public Relations Challenge

In the old days, managing reputation or the image of your company or business, was about managing interaction with a professional and organised community that controlled the media. That community was of journalists, editors, television channels and news publishers. That was before the internet put media into the hands of the masses, or in other words, in the hands of the society at large, thus giving birth to Social Media.

The masses in the old days were dependent on the news providers or suppliers for information, including opinions and commentary. Today, virtually every citizen has access to channels and tools to supply and disseminate their own information. This would include their own opinions and commentary, which may very well be sentiment laden.

When dissemination of information was in the hands of a limited professional and organised community, organisations had to some degree, the power to control and influence that information with favourable spins. Now that the power to disseminate information is in the hands of practically anyone with access to the internet, the means to control or influence that information have diminished.

Companies may through their Public Relations teams or external agencies enlist influencers amongst their targeted consumer groups to stimulate favourable opinions, memes, vibes and hypes. However, even the best efforts of such influencers to drown out opposing opinions or voices may not suffice to protect your reputation and brand value. In the age of access, consumers are more informed, and therefore more intelligent. They recognise and know your strategies. And a known strategy, is not very useful.

The Solution

The solution to the Public Relations challenge in the age of access lies beyond communication, marketing, branding and public relations itself, or rather, before any of them. The solution, lies with the business processes and the people running those processes. What affects brand equity or reputation after all, is not communication itself, but rather, whatever it is, that is communicated.

The best way to protect your reputation in the age of access, is to maintain it with a culture of diligence. That culture of diligence can be built by hiring and retaining people who will practice diligence as their shared value. If nothing goes wrong, at least not badly enough to damage your reputation, your reputation cannot be damaged. After all, most adverse impacts upon that costly and precious reputation result from human factors, be they errors or lapses.

While a lizard sneaking into a restaurant kitchen and then crawling into food may be something that can happen anywhere to anyone, but a person who thinks about that possibility and then acts on that thought competently can at least minimise the chances of that happening at your restaurant.

To begin with, you need to hire conscientious thinkers who can think systematically about the work process that they are a part of. Then, you have to enable and empower them. You have to listen to them and you have to trust them. If there are loopholes in the processes, you should be able to trust your employees, to see those loopholes and plug them.

This article was originally written by Harish Shah for and was first published in the Oct-Dec 2015 issue of The Singapore Marketer, a marketing trade magazine in Singapore published by the Marketing Institute of Singapore. There may be grammatical differences herein from the version printed in The Singapore Marketer resulting from editing on the submitted version by the publisher. Herein is the original submitted version before and without the editing.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Marketing and Branding.