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Why Social Media Incidents Come Back to Haunt Your Brand
The work of PR, crisis and communications teams is tireless and not for the faint of heart, especially with the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation that can directly and indirectly impact a brand.
Hyper-connected, aligned and active agenda-driven groups (called “factions”) are consistently developing new tactics for spreading their perspectives and ideologies from fringe and non-mainstreram channels to the mainstream and are often the force behind trends and news headlines.
Not all factions are created equal, nor are the narratives they share. They exhibit differing degrees of influence — the extent to which their narratives are reposted and engaged by members of other factions, or by contrast, simply bounce around inside a “filter bubble” or “echo chamber.” Factions also have vastly different intents, sometimes allied with your brand and brand values, sometimes against you, and then sometimes just trying to use your brand to make their point.
How can consumer influence impact your brand? We wrote this handbook to help brands stay on top of highly-influential conversations online that are affecting buyer decision-making.
In general, some dedicated factions will try for months…even years…to spread their influence enough to affect mainstream opinions, ideas, and policies. In stable times, we see narratives from these groups reach the mainstream in 6-8 months. In times of crisis (such as a global pandemic), we are seeing them spread in 3-14 days (over 10x faster!).
But, the challenge for marketing professionals doesn’t end with trying to understand who may be co-opting their platform and what narrative may go viral next. In our team’s extensive experience in this work, we’ve seen that a 9 times out of 10, a faction that has successfully targeted a brand will target that brand again in the next 6 months. Once agenda-driven groups have success with a narrative, they often return to that narrative, or some variation of it, because it serves their ultimate goal — to garner the public’s attention and frame the public conversation about the social or political issue they care about.
The resurgent narrative is almost always driven both by the faction that produced the original false or misleading narrative and the factions that were influenced and helped amplify that narrative. Factions are experts at “newsjacking” — the practice of taking advantage of current events or news stories in such a way as to promote your agenda — and they will commonly adapt an effective narrative to the current news cycle, promoting it back into the headlines.
Given this, communications teams must be able to both better anticipate when a faction-driven narrative is emerging that has the potential to impact their brand, as well as effectively monitor the factions and narratives after a viral event to anticipate when the narrative may surge again.
Watch a recording of our webinar where we will walk through some of the most typical viral events we are seeing now, as well as new tactics communications experts are taking to prepare their teams and defend their brand.
How can you make your brand less vulnerable to viral stories and misinformation spreading online?
