It used to be that PR practitioners would take the very best of what a company or organization did and focused on those attributes to drive opinion about that entity. Now groups with various agendas are increasingly cultivating, quite simply, propaganda, making up facts to suit their cause or to disparage a competitor's competing point of view. What has this propaganda masquerading as fact done to hurt not only our society and the way we consume content, but public discourse in general? Join “Can You Hear Me” Podcast hosts and communications experts Rob Johnson and Eileen Rochford as they take a critical look at this important topic. It could be the next major corporate threat that should have the attention of C-Suites everywhere.
Can you hear me now?
Episode 5: Dangers of Reputational Damage Caused by Disinformation
This is the Can You Hear Me podcast episode five, August 6, 2021, Episode 5 deals with propaganda masquerading as fact and the damage it could cause. It used to be that PR practitioners would take the very best of what a company or organization did and highlighted and focused on those attributes to drive opinion about that entity. Now groups are cultivating quite simply propaganda, making up facts to suit their cause or to disparage a competitor's competing point of view. What has this propaganda masquerading as fact done to hurt not only our society and the way we consume content but public discourse in general and corporations, companies and specific. Join Can you hear me podcast hosts and communication experts Rob Johnson and Eileen Rochford as they take a critical look at this important topic. It could be the next major corporate threat that should have the attention of C-suites everywhere.
Eileen Rochford [00:02:45] Welcome to Episode 5 of the Can You Hear Me podcast series. I'm Eileen Rochford, CEO of Marketing Strategy and Public Relations firm The Harbinger Group.
Rob Johnson [00:02:54] And I'm Rob Johnson, former Chicago TV news anchor, now president of my own communications consulting firm, aptly named Rob Johnson Communications. Very creative, I know. Today we're here to dissect the growing and troubling trend of propaganda that is masquerading that is being presented as fact and the harm that it's causing to our public discourse, along with the potential danger it could be posing to your company should it get in the crosshairs of this info-demic through either misinformation or disinformation?
Eileen Rochford [00:03:25] Ah, Yes. Well, let's start off with defining some of these concepts, just like we did in Episode two, when Harlan Loeb, the renowned, well-known corporate reputation expert, was our guest. I recently read a really interesting series of posts on LinkedIn by a woman named Tina Purnat, and I hope I'm pronouncing her name properly, who describes herself as health information or I'm sorry, informatician and info-demic expert. That's a new word to me.
Rob Johnson [00:03:56] informatician and info-demic were two new ones for me as well.
Eileen Rochford [00:03:59] Yeah, well, she defines following terms which I found very helpful. So hopefully it'll help our readers too.Info-demic is an overabundance of accurate and non-accurate information that makes it harder for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. Sounds familiar? There's a lot of that need right now. Indeed. Misinformation, that's the information that is false. But the person who is disseminating it believes that it's true. And disinformation is information that is blatantly false, and the person who is disseminating knows it's false.
Rob Johnson [00:04:35] We see this misinformation or disinformation Eileen frequently used in a political sense. I disagree with you. Therefore, I'm going to make my point by making up whatever facts I want to. We're seeing this manifests itself in the whole vaccine debate in our country. Much more severe Delta variant is spreading rapidly, as we know, according to health experts, because a substantial portion of the country will not and have not been vaccinated. This has become a political issue dividing Republicans and Democrats when it should be a health care issue driven by medical research In fact.
Eileen Rochford [00:05:08] Isn't that just so sad? It is stunning, especially now that it's affecting children. That's just sad.
Rob Johnson [00:05:15] It really is sad. And the thing is, when I was reading something, I think this morning and it was talking about a lot of people say well I'm not a vaccine person. And it was like, since when? Because, you know, historically we have gotten vaccines for lots of things. So most of the time in our country to make sure that we don't spread disease. We have we've gotten vaccinated for smallpox and polio and so many other things. And now it's like all for this particular thing I don't want to get vaccinated. And then that's when it's becoming a political issue when it should be a health care issue, as I just mentioned.
Eileen Rochford [00:05:56] Absolutely. My husband was telling me something really interesting on that same line that there are now two camps, those who will absolutely never consider being vaccinated, but there are also those who believed what they were being told, say, by politicians or by other influencers, family members, community, whatever it may be. And now they're seeing that the Delta variant is impacting people who even have been vaccinated or children or is affecting people who are friends of theirs. And they realize this isn't fake. It is a thing. And I want that vaccine now. But that slice of the population still may not be enough to get us to herd immunity, which is it's a crying shame. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. There's no other cause behind why those deep encampments were created other than, frankly, disinformation, in my opinion.
Rob Johnson [00:07:01] Disinformation and for some people, spreading disinformation for is irresponsible as it is, is good for business. And, you know, we can dive into that a little bit later. But it's really sad to see that Republicans think, not all Republicans I don't want to speak for everybody, but a large portion of Republicans think a certain way. And a large portion of Democrats think another way. And if they feel like if you do this health care initiative, then you're either, being true to your politics or you're turning your back on what you believe in, which is just absolute nonsense, right. And that's and that's if people know this, we're not only going to talk about the vaccine here, but it's a great example of disinformation because and now it's really hurting the country again. Everybody all of a sudden like, hey, let's let it all hang out. Everybody's going to concerts and this and that. And, you know, I went back I was in the city a number of days this week and, you know, you got to put your mask on everywhere again. Right? I mean, that's it's sad.
Eileen Rochford [00:08:02] It's just to be responsible.
Rob Johnson [00:08:04] Right. So, you know, that's what they're requiring to show anyway, that we can get into this a little bit more, you know, later. But there's so many things to unpack this whole issue.
Eileen Rochford [00:08:14] Yeah, fundamentally, I think it's it's about trust and the kind of inability to discern, you know, the sources of the information that are sending you the messages. Right.
Rob Johnson [00:08:29] And I touched upon the media. Right. We touched upon the media. And I know that Tina has some ideas about the role they play in it, too.
Eileen Rochford [00:08:37] Absolutely. So she recently wrote that media plays this critical role in information dissemination, and it is influential in shaping attitudes and behaviors. Obviously, we all know that. Yes. But the information chosen for dissemination by the media and how that information is portrayed in media coverage can determine whether media amplifies or reduces the spread of information. That's very interesting.
Rob Johnson [00:09:08] I think it's one hundred percent true. And, you know, I'm a former member of the media. I don't want to really bite the hand that used to feed me. But as I kind of touched upon a second ago, for some media outlets, business is good when you sow the seeds of uncertainty and uncertainty that has at the very least contributed to the dueling theories about the efficacy of vaccines. So we're back to the vaccine. And I was reading somebody quoted on a former, he's still a journalist, but he's a former worker for one of the cable outlets who was asked, why is your old network spreading all this craziness? And he's like, it's ratings. And I know that sounds so based and so obvious, but it's when you're competing in a competitive landscape like that, you know, especially in cable, you've got to carve out your niche. You've got to be conservative. You've got to be liberal. You know, if you're down the middle, down the middle, people have tried that. It doesn't work. People tune in a lot of times to the cable outlets because they want their red meat, whatever they believe in. It's like, I want to tune in. I want to hear what I believe, and I want it to just, you know, make me believe it even more (validation-Eileen). And unfortunately, that's the way a lot of people consume their media now. So if you're not telling them what they want to hear, they're either going to they're not going to read you. They're going to flip the channel, whatever the case is. And that's and that's really sad, too, because people used to tune in back in the old days. Back in the old days, I sound like my grandfather. Back in the old days, they used to tune in for me to be informed. That's not the way people consume information anymore, sadly.
Eileen Rochford [00:10:55] I was shown something by my son recently that was pretty interesting. It was, now this isn't media, but it was a sampling of coverage by media around the world about Kim Jong-Un's haircut. Yeah. And how that became a meme. It became late-night talk show joke fodder, all those things. But the media picked up on something that was said by one media outlet that became the core of the repeated story. The original story point that they made was that this is THE haircut and no one in the country is allowed to have, I mean, men cannot have any other haircut. And that's how it was portrayed over and over. It was fascinating because they showed cuts from everything from BBC, NPR. It was hilarious. All of the outlets were restating that one fact. And that's an interesting example of how the media does play a massive role in shaping of perceptions whether that media outlet is left, right or, you know, purportedly neutral, they will pick up on a single thing and repeat it over and over. And then that becomes assumed fact, whether it actually is or not.
Rob Johnson [00:12:19] Right. You're talking it into existence.
Eileen Rochford [00:12:21] Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that is about discernment. Right. That ability to discern what's true, what's not is it's almost impossible because you're seeing something repeated so much that it becomes fact.
Rob Johnson [00:12:34] Well, I also don't want and I'm not sitting here trying to cover my rear, but, you know, I was talking about the cable outlets because they're the ones that have all that airtime of opinion. And I would say generally and local media certainly doesn't get it all right. And I was well aware of that when I worked in the business. And, well, it's very obvious to me now that I'm not in the business. But I will say this, there are checks and balances in those newsrooms. And so people say, oh, you're just spreading misinformation. I can assure you that at the local level because that's where I worked. So I'm not speaking about the national news desks. I'm not talking about the cables, even though I have a pretty good handle on kind of what they're doing, their checks and balances. You say this is fact. You say Kim Jong-Un's hair haircut is tied on the side and long on the top. You better go get a second opinion on it. And that's and that's the way things work there. And so I always try to remind people when they would say fake news, I'm like, no, not fake news. It's news that I don't happen to agree with. And we touched upon this in an earlier episode, so I don't want to go too deep into it. But it's they're pursuing the truth now. They're pursuing the truth through various prisms, you know, a lot of it. And I don't want to get too deep into it. But I do want to say that, you know, the only people to say, oh, you news people are biased. And I'd say we're really not. We're really you know, we're supposed to tell both sides of a story. I would say, and I said this to people before my former newsrooms, that the only bias that I could ever detect and the people I would and I would tell this to people all the time is a geographical bias. So if you live in Chicago, if you live three miles from your station and you come into a meeting to talk about editorial ideas or stories you want to cover, they're going to be shaped by your peer group, which is three miles away from you in the city, in the city, which is very liberal. Right. So naturally, you're going to have a different point of view maybe than somebody else is. Does that mean that you fomenting bias? Not necessarily. It may come off that way to other people, but I think it's unintentional. And I can tell you worked 20 years in Chicago newsrooms. Nobody ever said we had to cover the story this way because the boss has said so, or we have to cover a story this way because this is what we believe as an organization because there's no such thing. And so I just want people to understand that as we talk about this misinformation or disinformation and we talk about the role of the media, that people understand the difference between local cable and national, because I think you're marching to the beat of different drummers, honestly.
Eileen Rochford [00:15:16] You know, they're supporting evidence for that, Rob, which I think is pretty interesting, local, the trust levels rankings of local media are currently and have been for the past several years much higher than national news. So that's pretty interesting that you bring that up. And I mean, I appreciate that perspective because I personally find that I pay more attention to my local news than I do a lot of what's reported in the national news. I'm more skeptical of what I read in the National.
Rob Johnson [00:15:46] Listen, sometimes I just want to read articles because I don't really consume the news in the way that I used to because I don't do it anymore on a regular basis. So I read a lot more than I watch. And I don't want 30 minutes of drivel. I want to I want them to get to the point. And very few places do that. But I will say from a local news perspective, during the pandemic, there was a little bit of a renaissance in terms of being a source for information because this had never happened before. It was undefined and people were trying to figure out what's going on in my community. And so they were tuning into the news stations. I think they had a hard time monetizing it because there was also a financial specter of this that was ongoing as well. But in terms of having people paying attention to what you're doing and listen, when you're in the news business, no matter where you are, you want people to pay attention to what you're doing. You're trying to figure out stories. You can tell that the most people will buy into that will want to watch, they'll want to consume what you're selling. And I think that during the pandemic, to drive home your point that you just made, that was really true.
Eileen Rochford [00:16:53] Yeah, for sure. So let's talk about another aspect that misinformation or disinformation plays. They have a very concerning role when it comes to developing minds, right. As it relates to our younger generation. So recently as like two years ago, Stanford Graduate School of Education released some data, and it showed that high school students severely lack the skills to judge the reliability of information that they read online. And this is despite, you know, at the time there were some growing and continuing now efforts to teach critical analysis, as well as the crackdown on the presence of fake news and social media and elsewhere. So despite that effort that started four or five years ago when this data was captured, it still showed that they just lacked that ability. So this is really worrisome to me. I have two teenagers. I know you have one. And so I see it in my own teenage children at times and. Honestly, I have trouble with it myself. There are moments where I'll read something and just read the headline and not think to what's the source of that and did I just grab that on Twitter? And should I really go figure out where the heck did that come from before? I believe what it says because the headline spoke to me. Maybe it spoke to my ideals. Maybe it spoke to my own personal lens through which, you know, I tend to see things, which is a little more liberal. And I just believed it. Rather than looking beyond that headline to the source of the information, I think everybody does that.
Rob Johnson [00:18:35] And if you say you don't, it's not being true to yourself.
Eileen Rochford [00:18:37] I totally agree with that. But hence the impact on our emerging generation is profound. Like they've grown up in this world, unlike us, where we grew up in an era where to some degree, I think there was neutrality in news reporting, it tended to be more factual, more event-driven, less opinion-driven. We were taught. I attended journalism school. You attended journalism school. And we were both immersed in the skills that enable you to be as neutral, unbiased as possible in gathering facts and reporting facts. So the fact that it affects me and even affects you when we've had this level of training and years of living in a world that really wasn't like it is now and has been while my teenage years of growing up have been growing up, that's concerning. Right. So it even affects you and me. We came from different backgrounds, but I want to go ahead.
Rob Johnson [00:19:32] No, no, no, please.
Eileen Rochford [00:19:34] There's just this one example that I wanted to cite for you and me to kind of kick around. I don't know if you've seen this, but again, in my world and also just in what I've seen in kind of the peer sets of my kids, friends, my friends, children who may not be friends with my children, but who live elsewhere. I've seen this. But nationally it's documented that there's a rising number of young people who are who embrace concepts of socialism and even communism here in the US on a rising level. Right (That's frightening-Rob). So there are clear issues with the US government. Nobody is going to debate that. We all see things that need to be addressed here. We've witnessed so much in the last five to 10 years and beyond. That has to be corrected here in our own democracy. I don't think many people would really disagree with me on that either. But there's little evidence that I see and I'm paying attention to this to show that socialism or communism are truly or purely better options in terms of government. Right. It's just the problem is that these younger people are seeing so much information that includes the misinformation and the disinformation. So much of it's false, so much of it presented. It's leading them to believe. Otherwise, when it comes to those governmental principles and they're losing faith in democracy. As a viable government structure and in our democracy here in the US. It's just saddens me because so little of what they're reading is real, a lot of it's just highly calculated and presented. By people with an agenda, but as readers, they just they have no awareness that that's the case because, you know, how can you sift through all that? So. It causes this phenomenon causes major issues for us. On so many levels, but that's just one that I thought I'd throw out.
Rob Johnson [00:21:40] There is so much to unpack there, there is so much to unpack there. I'd like to go in order, though, and start with your teenagers and my teenager. And he would say, well, what do we believe? And I said, well, we don't believe anything. Jake, you're your own child, your own man. You're 16. You obviously need your parent's guidance. Still, you're not fully grown and that sort of thing still going through school and that sort of thing. But you are allowed to have your own opinion. And my household and it's not like this is what we do, but because I was, you know, on the news for so many years, I never registered with a political party. I was always independent, as always, kind of straight down the middle. I was always a pragmatist. And so when I saw, you know, I mean, personally, if I saw something that the Republicans did that was distasteful, I would be like, I don't like that. Or the Democrats might be doing something. But obviously, on the air, I wouldn't say anything because that's not my place to do that. But that's where I've always come from, that that sort of independent straight down the middle fence sitter guy. So that's where I've been my whole adult life. And so when my son comes to me and says, what should we believe on this or that? I said, Buddy, you need to develop your own opinions. However, because of the I'll be generous and say misinformation or less generous is disinformation that your friends are passing along on Snapchat and the other social channels where you spend your time. I want you to make sure you're fully informed before you develop an opinion about an issue because he's allowed to develop issues. I will guide him through the education process, make sure you're fully educated on it. Make sure you understand where the source is coming from. Make sure you understand, you know, the validity of what's being said. And then if you take a point of view that's maybe different than what your mom or I would believe in, I'm fine with that because you're at least you're informed you're making an informed decision. I don't want you to make a decision based on what one of your fellow 16 year old said, who is either super liberal or super conservative, you know, and then they're hearing it from their parents, and then they're parroting what they heard, which may not be fact at all. If you want to talk facts, we will talk facts. And we do. A lot of times I'm like, I want you to base your opinions on that fact. And if they don't if they're not in lockstep with maybe what I believe, personally, I'm fine with that because you have to do you have to kind of carve your own niche there as it relates to the communism and socialism thing. I grew up, I went to I grew up in St. Louis. I went to high school in Brussels, Belgium. My father worked for a company out of St. Louis at the time, Emerson Electric. So we were civilians living in Europe. And Belgium had a wonderful experience there. But it is a socialist country. And I got to see the downside of socialism, which is super high taxes on everybody. And the government services were, OK, I'm going to give you one example, like health care, health care when I was there and this is OK, we're talking thirty, thirty-five years ago. So I'm quoting outdated information. But the doctor didn't make much more than the person that was the garbage man. And I'm not demeaning people that that are in waste management at all. I'm just saying, when your life's on the line when it's your body that's going on the operating table, or if it's a serious health issue, you want to make sure that you have the very best, highest, highly trained, the whole thing. And that wasn't always the case there. And so I always tell people, young people, because I've heard it, you know, the little dribs and drabs in the past few years, socialism, that sounds pretty good. And I'm like, if you don't achieve anything in your life, listen, free health care, wiping away student debt. There's a lot of things that I know would help people, you know, start their professional careers with a little momentum. And I'm not saying those are bad ideas. What I'm saying is they point to those things is like, that's the greatest thing ever. If you're always going to if you're never going to achieve anything or advance in your career or whatever the case is, then and you live with your parents or a couple buddies or whatever the case is, and you're never going to have any money at all, then probably socialism sounds great the minute you achieve anything, the minute you want to buy a house, the minute you want to start a family and you put away investments or whatever the case may be, you're going to hate it. And I tell people that I've told people that all the time because I got to see it firsthand years ago. But I understand the concepts of it. Here's the other thing. We live in the social media world, right? And especially kids that are Gen Z and especially people that are millennials as well are glued to their phones. I think we would all agree with that. You know what happens if you live in a communist country? You don't get to share your opinion, or if you do, you run the risk of running afoul of the government and they may censor you. They may take it down. They may not let you express how you want to express your feelings. So there's a couple of examples right there. Oh, communism would be awesome. Yeah. And then all that time on your phone posting stuff on your preferred social channels, governments watching. And if they don't like what you say, they take it down. And if you keep doing it, you might get thrown in jail or something. I mean, this is there. There you go. There's communism. Have fun with it.
Eileen Rochford [00:27:16] Hmm. Yeah, I don't disagree. There's somehow it's been romanticized in the last five to ten years and a growing level. And folks who just have grown up here have no idea they are buying it, you know.
Rob Johnson [00:27:33] That's why this is so dangerous because I think people living the life they live here for as imperfect as it may be. And I'm not suggesting there's people that are struggling out there. And I know that the pandemic is only sort of magnified that. Yeah, but you're not going to you think communism or socialism, socialism is going to make it better? That is that is absurd. I think so. Just having seen it firsthand and having been to communist countries, you know, growing up, you know, during the Cold War, you know, and seeing lines, you know, seeing people lining up for groceries
Rob Johnson [00:28:09] Now, I'm not saying that's what's happening current events-wise, but I know it has that capability to do that. This is fascinating. We should probably pivot, though, a little bit, Eileen, and talk about the campaigns to mislead how they're actually can harm your company. I know a lot of people listening out here are business executives and C suite level leaders. And so how does all of this so we spend 20 plus minutes talking about these issues and giving our opinions on those issues. But now what's the relevance of what we're talking about to your company, to your company's brand and. Disinformation has absolutely moved into the corporate sector, so this is a really important topic. What if this sort of orchestrated attack were to happen to your company? How would you address it if it's happening to you in real-time? We all know the importance and value of social media as a company. If you get behind it and you're chasing social media, that storm, you're never going to catch up. But one of the biggest tools you have is social listening to sort of see what's being said out there.
Eileen Rochford [00:29:18] For sure and to further give depth and guidance to this. Here's a few of our definitions and key concepts, again, courtesy of Tina Pernot. I just found her series of 11 primers on this topic so informative that I want to share a little bit more of what she had on her label.
Rob Johnson [00:29:38] They were very, very good.
Eileen Rochford [00:29:39] So she defined socializing as an active process of attending to observing, interpreting and responding to a variety of stimuli through mediated electronic and social channels. Then she defined social monitoring as a related term and in literature is sometimes used interchangeably or defined separately, one definition is, quote, a process of ongoing systematic searches of social media websites for up to the minute information on news or live events. Social monitoring can help measure and respond to people's responses or their comments. And lastly, social network analysis SNA is the practice of representing networks of people as graphs and then exploring these graphs in the digital context, SNA is used to understand the interactions occurring online to identify social structures, influential entities, and patterns of information exchange. Fascinating stuff.
Rob Johnson [00:30:42] Why do you think this is so important right now? If you're sitting there talking about protecting your brand, keeping your pulse, your finger on the pulse of what's going on, why are these concepts so vital, do you think, Eileen?
Eileen Rochford [00:30:56] Well, according to EM 360, as a company, if you're trying to play catch up and get behind the social media storm, several things can happen to your company and none of them are good. Yeah, I think about that. None of them are absolutely bad.
Rob Johnson [00:31:11] The other one's worse. So let's just say we're already starting from there.
Eileen Rochford [00:31:15] That's just so hard. And none of this is good.
Rob Johnson [00:31:18] None of this is good. You know, you can also you can face irrevocable reputational damage. I mean, that's first and foremost. And I'm sure just the words reputational and damage in the same sentence make some of our listeners cringe right now. And they should if some third party spreads false news about your company, like being hacked, for example, it might send customers and supporters scurrying to distance themselves from your website or your app depending on what you have. And here's one every C Suite Executive can understand financial harm. That's the second thing that's terrifying. What if someone or a group of someones post bogus negative reviews of your company and its product or service? Or in the case of one company several years ago that I was reading up on, a rumor circulated a CEO died in a car crash. Fortunately, that wasn't true. Unfortunately, the company lost several billion dollars in valuation before the rumor was squashed. Now, did they get some of that money back that it did return? Yes, but just one news event like that or one bogus report of a news event. Like a CEO who's so vital to the guidance of a company and the way it runs. Look what it did financially.
Eileen Rochford [00:32:36] Yeah, there's so many examples of that, honestly. And we could go on and on. But if you're not paying attention, you won't know. And it could be. 12 hours out there before you have any idea that there's a reputational impact to your company so that the paying attention obviously is critically important, that recently we had a situation with the client where they were lumped into a report that was released that was horribly damaging. There were so many inaccuracies in that report, yet it came from such a credible source that. It was picked up everywhere, but the information that was in the report, those who shared it, those who reported on it, did not dig into it at all. They took it, the information in that report. As factual and didn't go beyond it to test it, there was no stress testing of that data whatsoever.
Rob Johnson [00:33:37] So what's frightening there, Eileen, is you're talking about a place with a good reputation, right, that put this out there and got so many things wrong and having some of these information sources be dubious. And you say, well, are you going to rely on them for your information? But when you're talking about one that's more credible and they get it wrong like that, that's frightening.
Eileen Rochford [00:33:59] Right. Right. Yeah, it's there's just such a rush to publish, you know, in some senses or rush to share to kind of grab the numbers and the traffic to your website. And I don't mean just by the media. Right. That's one piece of it. But just the rush to be a part of that attention means that there's very little digging into to make sure that it's factual. So companies don't have time. If they're not paying attention to know when things are hitting, then they're just you are frankly, you've lost already. Right. You're going to be very, very difficult to catch up in a situation like that.
Rob Johnson [00:34:36] Well, and that's and that's the point that we want to drive home to everybody. And I don't think that that people that are listening right now that may be in the C suites, we're telling them anything. We don't they don't know about the sort of catch-up portion, because if you're six, four, six, eight hours behind, you're only going to be playing catch up and you are not setting the terms for how things are going to be conveyed. And so you've already lost to a sense there. And I just want to touch upon one thing, as I've tried to express to various clients the value of having a crisis management plan in place already because people will say, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. And some of these places that are, you know, fairly well-heeled, I'll say, why don't we put a plan together? So we understand who's going to you know, who's going to respond, how they're going to respond, our cohesive message that we must come up with and the the people that are going to be making the decisions in this crisis situation. So when it happens, we don't go, oh, gosh, we need to get this person and that person and that person we already know. The people that are ready to triage that and so I can't say it with enough emphasis that having a crisis plan in place before the crisis hits is vital.
Eileen Rochford [00:35:52] And no doubt about it
Rob Johnson [00:35:54] Will help mitigate. It's not going to help you escape all the things we're talking about here that are frightening. We're talking about helping mitigate them to an extent, helping lessen the blow, as it were.
Eileen Rochford [00:36:08] An active reputation management is a big piece of that because, you know, you can put a plan in place and at least get the fundamentals down, as in who's your spokesperson? What core value-driven messaging do you have that's already in place that you can kind of lean into to develop new messaging that's relevant to the emerging situation, all of that? Yes, you can do that in advance. You can have your activation mechanisms in place so that you can communicate in the moment internally, no matter where people are in terms of access or meetings, etc. All of those things are important to establish upfront. But the ongoing active reputation management is, frankly, in my experience and in terms of the professional expertise that we give is way, way more important. And that's, you know, data-driven largely. So having the means to stay on top of that, pay attention, collect information, assess, determine how you're going to proceed. All of that is now equally important to having the fundamental structure in terms of a crisis plan on yourself or on your desk now.
Rob Johnson [00:37:27] So we were talking about reputational damage and financial harm a few minutes ago. But I'm kind of fascinated to hear what you think about somebody sitting where you sit as a CEO of a strategy group. What about this misinformation? How would it and how could it impact internally, your employees internally,your workers?
Eileen Rochford [00:37:50] So the impact, I think, to any company, but certainly a company like mine company, other consulting firms, frankly, any company in existence, you can work tirelessly to make sure that that the messages are cohesive and consistent and that you're up to date in terms of what you're sharing with employees in a developing situation. But if somebody were to get behind a targeted misinformation campaign that affects your company, then as a business owner or a CEO, you could face unrest within your employee ranks. And that could mean the end of your company. Right, if they believe what they're being fed from outside sources. So that that inaccurate information that's posted about your company, employees might believe it and they could start becoming a spreader of the information. Right. And it may even be innocently because they're so shocked by what they're reading, but all of those scenarios are very, very possible. So, you know, shoring up your brand reputation in advance of all that, and that's a 24/7 every damn day-active job that every company needs to take very seriously because that's your best inoculation.
Rob Johnson [00:39:09] And I'm glad you're saying this because we're talking about having a crisis plan, which is sort of a macro thing. But this reputational enhancement, this ongoing work that goes on on a daily basis is so key to what you do. It's so key to the credibility you have not only externally, which is so important, but internally with your rank and file. And it also speaks to issues related to trust. It speaks to issues related to being transparent. You know, I was consulting with a couple of companies right at the beginning of the pandemic. And it was, you know, how do we message this? How do we message this pandemic? We have so much uncertainty. And I would always say be transparent. You're not going to give them the game plan or I can give them the four-page document that has all the what-ifs and wherefores. But you can tell them, like if somebody says to you during the pandemic when it first started, what are the odds of us having layoffs? And as a smart business person, as a leader, I would tell people, well what are your plans or is that going to be your first line of defense? We're just going to lay people off. No, no, no, no. We're going to cost containment, various other things. And the last thing I want to do is have to lay anybody off. I'm like, why don't you tell them that in a nice way? Why don't you tell them, hey, listen, we're looking at cost containment all over the board. And the last resort we want to take is to have staff reductions. But because our company may be struggling right now, we have to look at that, too, instead of saying and one company which will go unnamed that told everybody two weeks before a bloodbath. Oh, hey, everybody, it's great. There's not going to be any staff reductions. Everybody's fine. Don't worry. And then two weeks later, they had a purge of several dozen people and it was awful. Yeah. And it's like, listen, just be transparent. Don't give them the keys. The king. Don't tell them everything that's going to happen. Of course, you're not going to do that, but people internally, employees are looking for a little bit of that transparency and honesty. And that's I think that's kind of an offshoot of what you were talking about a second ago, I think.
Eileen Rochford [00:41:21] No doubt, fundamental rule don't make promises that you can't keep. It's that simple.
Rob Johnson [00:41:27] Amen to that. Well, now, if you think if you're sitting here listening to this right now, do you think this is not going to happen to you or your company? You may want to think again because PWC recently warned companies against not only misinformation and disinformation, which we've already defined, but now information which PWC defined as a deliberate publication of private information for personal or corporate public interest, changing the context, the data at the time of legitimate content. It went on to call this a clear intent to harm, to harm a company, to harm its reputation and so on. And so this mal-information, that's something else to consider as well.
Eileen Rochford [00:42:06] Oh, and it's a growing threat. I mean, there's no doubt about it. I think that's the single greatest reason that companies need to take these types of threats, the potential for them. Their existence is very, very real and why it needs to be part of every company's active brand reputation work. As we've said, mal-information, honestly, is potentially the most damaging and can come from your competitors. Again, another client has a situation experience, a situation in the past where they were included in some very damaging information and it became clear that the source of that was a competitor. And that is not as uncommon as you may think. There are very many players who are doing that today in a cross-section of industries. It is not specific to any one and it can be so subtle that you have no idea where it originated from. So paying attention to what's being said about you in social and media, in the dark web, all those places has it's part of doing business today. You can't pretend otherwise. And that's it's just that's an absolute fact. So I'd like to give some guidance that I know you share here, Rob because you and I dabble in this every day with our clients, I think there are three things that we can tell our listeners straight away that you can and should be doing, frankly, in my opinion, must be doing at a minimum. I've got three and I know you can pile on here as well. Let's start with the first one, so. It's simple if you don't have a media monitoring tool set up, you need to get one today, there's just no way around it. Right. So a media monitoring that's earned media that's mentions from news publications, press releases of competitors, et cetera, et cetera. There are a million tools out there that you can look at. They are of varying costs. And for companies that can afford it, we most often at our company, at the Harbinger Group, we rely on Cision. That's the tried and true. And I'll be frank, it's not cheap. It's very expensive. Yeah, but it's the most comprehensive. It has real-time alerts, daily alerts, weekly digests. If you buy the right package, countless volumes of keyword search terms that are possible. So another tool to consider, which I think is a bit less expensive but still very robust that I would suggest folks look into is meltwater. That's another tried and true that honestly lots of folks in my network are turning to more and more recently. So it's worth looking at meltwater. Also, at a minimum, you got to have Google alerts, right? Like if you don't do anything else, please. Yeah. You don't want to be the person who's finding out that a situation is emerging because you've got the number one trade publication in your industry calling you for comment. OK, that's the last position you want to be in. So when it comes to media monitoring what you need to do, here's some basics. You just got to catalog the keywords about your company, your products, and toss in your competitors in there to be relevant to very smart, do some advance work, maybe even hire someone. If you don't have that expertise inside of your company who can help you figure out what are the terms that are most important to you, keywords that you used in search for search engine optimization. Some of that might apply here as well. So you may even have a body of work drawn to think about that. But you got to create your searches, plug them in, set them up to send you real time alerts. I get some text even, but email is another way to receive it. When the articles appear, you want to know when it happens. You don't want to find out about this at the end of your business day or the end of your week when you get to digest and then also be sure to activate the ability to track data. So mounting evidence of mentions over a period of time. If you get a spike, for example, that you get hundreds of mentions within a few hours, then you know, you have a very serious problem. So that's how you have to set up those tools to actively work for you.
Rob Johnson [00:46:44] Well, I'm glad that you gave some tools for people that have resources. Like Cision is like if you have the ability to use vision, that's incredible. It's a higher price point, but very thorough. Very good. But I'm glad you gave some other different ideas for people that may be at different points in their scale-up or, you know, with their bringing in revenue-wise, it would allow them to invest different amounts of money on something like this so they can jump in and do it.
Eileen Rochford [00:47:13] There's another aspect of this Rob, that we should mention, too, and it's social listing and we've touched on that a little earlier in our conversation. So tools that can help you do that social listing. So social monitoring will call it. Right. So that's mentions of your brands within social media. Another essential component, if you're going to do this, you've got to hit all three of the things we're going to talk about social monitoring. So there are tools out there as well. We use a variety of them depending on the client's needs because each of the tools I mentioned have different benefits to them and features. So HubSpot straight out of the gate, they actually do a pretty great job of social tensions, social mentioned monitoring. And I like the way that we receive alerts from HubSpot. Another tool we've utilized that I can recommend from personal experience is HootSuite. HootSuite actually for competitors mentions. I think they do a little bit better job. It's easier to stay on top of things. But the last one I recommend looking at anyway is Mention. Mention is also a pretty good social listening platform. These are all good places to start again. You've got to work the keywords, set up your alerts, pay attention to the data, don't ignore the emails that you get, even though you may get a lot, and make sure you will make sure that you have someone who's tasked with that as a priority responsibility so that they can raise the alarm right. When they're seeing things spike or come in that are of concern. And be sure to have a plan for how you're going to respond to anything that does emerge that is problematic. So, again, tapping some pre-approved language that's really core to your brand values, your brand identity, et cetera. Right. So you've got to think that through and have some language that you can at least build upon if a situation were to arise. I just want to flag one thing, though, with any of these social listening tools, social monitoring. LinkedIn there is because of the way that it's structured in the API, it's really hard to see anything that may come up on LinkedIn. You are going to have to monitor that independently. So that's just an aside. And lastly, I want to talk about a much more evolved, robust and honestly expensive aspect here. You need to consider potentially depending on your industry or corporate risk, intelligent platform. So if your company is larger and you're in a highly vulnerable industry, say financial services, these things are services to a website as personal, especially when it pertains to personal finance companies. I'll recommend one, and I know of this just because of the reports I've read about. I've not actually had to use this for a client, but I'll guide people to look into it. It's called Crisp. Crisp, it's a proven tool, and it uses from all the evaluations I've seen from different analysts out there, the use of artificial intelligence in Crisp is better than any other product in the industry. At Forrester is one that endorses Crisp. So here's what's different about it. And here's what's different about a corporate risk intelligence platform, intelligence platform. It scrapes the dark web and it serves up data that shows an increasing threat in real time. So the dark web, right. And not that retied is the dark web. It's not. But forums. Right. That are outside of social media are particularly are monitored particularly well by a tool like Crisp and there are some competitors, Crisp just hasn't had as much experience with them. But I'll say that again, if you're in a vulnerable industry or in a larger company where a lot's on the line, an investment in a tool that's a corporate risk intelligence platform, it's the same thing as buying cyber insurance, in my opinion. So why would you not?
Rob Johnson [00:51:23] And when you're talking about high risk industries like financial services, they can't afford to have a hiccup. They can't afford to have a bad day or a bad hour or a bad ten minutes. Yeah, especially as it relates to their reputation, as it relates to the financial harm that can come to them. And so you're like, OK, cyber insurance, that's good to have. But before you do that or in conjunction with that, you need to make sure that you have some of these tools that are able to help you see your blind spots. That's really what we're talking about, whether it's social listening or social monitoring or even the more advanced things that you're just talking about here, you know, the corporate risk intelligence platforms, this is vital because there's a lot of things, you know, as an executive, there's a lot of things you can't see. And you need to figure out what you need to see, how you need to see it, and which of these tools are going to help you be able to see through those weeds?
Eileen Rochford [00:52:25] Yeah, for sure. They're essential today. You can't get by without things like this. You must have them.
Rob Johnson [00:52:30] Well, Eileen, we could talk about this forever, but I'm sure our listeners are like, hey, I got to do something else now. So we should probably, you know, kind of leave it there right now. I really appreciate the thoughtful discussion today. And I hope that people out there that were giving you things that you can go and talk about with your other executives and talk about it in a thoughtful way and in a way that's collaborative and that is designed to solve problems. So with that, I'd like to thank you again for joining us for another edition of our communication-centric podcast. Can you hear me? I'm Rob Johnson, President of Rob Johnson Communications. I hope to spur conversations that you may want to have with others in your company about this
Eileen Rochford [00:53:14] I'm Eileen Rochford, CEO of the Harbinger Group. Coming up on the next episode of Can You Hear Me? We're going to talk about what CEOs should be doing to enhance corporate reputation. We touched on the need for that quite a bit as a component of reputation management. So 24/7 enhancements of corporate reputation will be what we explore the next time on Can You Hear Me? We hope you'll join us then. And thank you for joining us today.