Protecting Your Reputation in an Age of Socially Amplified Judgement

Admittedly calling this an Age of Socially Amplified Judgement is controversial. Of course, everyone should feel empowered and safe enough to call out inappropriate behaviour. But maybe, we can agree that not all inappropriate behaviour should lead to demands for resignations, product boycotts, or removal of people from communication platforms. Sometimes demanding an apology might suffice.

The court of public opinion is swift and lacks the due process of justice systems. 34% of respondents to a survey thought cancelling is good for society and gets companies and individuals to recognize bad behaviour. However. 30%, while admitting its effectiveness, thought cancelling is overused and too many companies and individuals are being cancelled. In their judgement, some businesses and individuals are being wrongly punished and publicly shamed in a way that could cause them significant financial harm.

We need to acknowledge that, for various reasons, good businesses and good people can make honest mistakes.

"That is not activism, that is not bringing about change. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws." - Barack Obama

Cancel Culture is Here to Stay

For major corporations, embarrassing mistakes can still have high reputational costs. The Balenciaga scandal was the result of a marketing campaign, but instead of promoting their products, it led to the creation of some jaw-dropping Twitter hashtags, including #balenciagapedos and #balenciagagroomers .

Missteps aren't limited to Marketing.

for example, although it seems to happen fairly often, the mishandling of personal data can lead to swift repudiation and retribution.

Never Say Never

Every leader looks at their organisation, full of people they know and trust, and feels a reputational blunder on the scale of Balenciaga is very unlikely.

Even when businesses try to affirm that their values align with the general public, it can expose them to reputational risks.

Urban Outfitters Case Study

Many businesses in sympathy with the #BlackLivesMatter movement wanted to position themselves as allies. Urban Outfitters followed suit, but it backfired when they were called for past associations with cultural appropriation .

Do Better

There is no "complete" standard answer to how to do better. The answer depends on your values, history, and culture. However, here are some tips.

1. Build Respect Into Your Ways of Working
2. Detect Incident Quickly
3. Have an Incident Response Team and Plan

Build Respect Into Your Ways of Working

Regardless of the business function (e.g., Data Security, Marketing, Customer Service), building respect into your business is a must. You need to have clear guidelines for what is unacceptable. The no-go zones.

Establish process controls, tests, and checklists to help your organisation to catch issues. Judgement is necessary to prevent checks and balances from reducing your organisational agility. Building respect and consideration into your everyday ways of working will not only show your employees that you practise what you preach and catch mistakes before they cause incidents, but they will also support you if an incident ever occurs.

Detect Incidents Quickly

Establish monitoring for early detection so that you can get in front of them before their impact escalates.

Monitoring could include maintaining a list of high-risk keywords periodically scanned across all existing site content that triggers a review.

Social monitoring helps you monitor competitors, it can help you to double down on a campaign that is performing well. It can also help you to detect a trending social commentary that might be deleterious to your brand.

Have an Incident Response Team and Plan

A Porter Novelli study shows that 87 per cent of consumers believe companies need to take accountability for their actions, words, and statements. Just as many, 88 per cent, are willing to forgive a company for making a mistake if it acknowledges its mistake and shows a genuine effort to change.

There are risks everywhere. Whether it's a data breach, a marketing campaign that badly misses the mark, a poor choice of words in a public forum, or an unknown unknown .

You can't eliminate all risks, but you can be prepared for an incident when it occurs by having a detailed plan, an Incident Control Center, a pre-selected Incident Commander, a Cross-functional Incident Response Team (including internal and external communications specialists), a well-maintained list of key stakeholders, and playbooks for likelier risks.

The Porter Novelli study also found that consumers expect enterprises to take specific actions to show contrition and an effort to address the root cause:

• 43% Make a public statement of apology
• 41% Clarify the situation? (e.g., why a statement or action was made)
• 40% Create programs and policies internally to address? the change needed
• 33% Fire the person responsible for making the offensive statement or policy
• 20% Change branding and or external representation
• 17% Donate to an associated nonprofit

Conclusion

While the term "Cancel Culture" is new the behaviours are not. Most millennials and Gen-Z have no idea Nestlé was boycotted from 1977 to 1984 because of concerns about baby formula marketing practices in developing countries.

The difference is that in the 1970s, activists had to organise the Infant Formula Action Coalition. In contrast, today, social platforms have made it easier and faster for unhappy consumers to find each other, amplify their discontent with a brand, and cause reputational and financial harm to careless businesses.

While social platforms give everyone a voice, the potential to become viral, and they empower agents of positive change. On the other hand, some influencers care more about being viral than they care about virtue.

It's exciting and a bit scary too.

At a minimum, ensure someone in your enterprise has responsibility for managing enterprise cross-functional reputational risks and has the authority to bring about change.