by Quentin Langley
It was one of the most powerful scenes in movie history – and memorably parodied in Life of Brian. To avoid the terrible punishment of crucifixion, all the rebel slaves had to do was identify their leader, Spartacus. But just as Kirk Douglas stands to identify himself as Spartacus, so do two others, closely followed by more, until every member of captured rebel army is yelling “I am Spartacus”.
Your reputation is part of a conversation now – but a conversation that is not limited to a few drunks gathered around a bar. This conversation is worldwide. You do have legal recourse. If someone infringes your intellectual property or defames your reputation, you can take legal action. If you can find Spartacus. And if the attempt to find him doesn’t blow the story to a hundred times its previous size.
Just like Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Greenpeace doesn’t hide its role in leading these conversations. But, as Nestlé found, getting Greenpeace to take down its illegal material doesn’t always help. The parody of the Kit Kat advert, in which the office worker bites into an orangutan’s finger, infringed Nestlé’s copyright, and YouTube dutifully removed it. But other versions were rapidly posted, and the story moved on to debating Nestlé’s heavy-handed tactics. The story was bigger than ever. This was a crowd now, and you can’t sue a crowd. But if you anger it, you can turn it into a mob.
The old rules have changed. Tactics which worked only two or three years ago don’t work any more.
Just as you can’t sue a crowd, you can’t ban a conversation. All you can do is join in. If you are part of the old mindset, if the slogan “no-one ever got fired for buying IBM” would have worked on you, then maybe you are not nimble enough for the new rules. Because there is no doubt that joining in the conversation has risks. But standing aloof or, worse, trying to shut it down, is going to be worse.
This is brandjacking. When there is a conversation taking place about your brand, and you are not part of it, you have lost ownership of your reputation. But this only formalises a reality which has always existed. Your reputation is not simply what you say it is. Your reputation has only ever existed in other people’s minds. This is the territory on which the battles for your reputation are going to be fought – and it is asymmetrical warfare.
Terence Fane-Saunders of Chelgate has always argued that the key rule in crisis management is to be the source of your own story. If you are in the news, you need to be telling the story, not leaving it to others. It remains good advice, but in the realm of web 2.0, it conflicts with another of the old rules in public relations: keep a tight control over who can speak for your organisation. The only practical way to engage with social media is to encourage the whole organisation to tweet and Facebook. The message will be confused, but it will be much more credible.
In the old days, your reputational army engaged with other armies – your competitors, say, or unions. Those armies are still out there, and Greenpeace is the largest of them all. It turns over Eu200 million a year, almost all of it spent on its core business, which is campaigning. There are not many businesses which can spend even a tenth of that on PR. The majority of businesses cannot even match one percent of Greenpeace’s campaigning budget.
But social media – for all the engagement of goliaths such as Greenpeace – is the territory of guerilla warfare. You can’t defeat or even engage with your critics if they simply melt into the rest of the population.
Greenpeace did not anticipate that its palm oil campaign would lead to Nestlé folding quite so quickly. Nestlé has been resisting the campaigns of its critics – on baby formula, for example – for decades. And yet this campaign was over in weeks.
There are differences, of course. Palm oil is only one, fairly minor, ingredient in a Kit Kat. But if even Nestlé will fold in weeks, and even Greenpeace does not fully understand the power that it is wielding , then the battle for the control of reputation has changed fundamentally during the course of 2010.
Of course, Marcus Crassus had the whole of Spartacus’s army crucified. That option was never really open to Nestlé.
It was one of the most powerful scenes in movie history – and memorably parodied in Life of Brian. To avoid the terrible punishment of crucifixion, all the rebel slaves had to do was identify their leader, Spartacus. But just as Kirk Douglas stands to identify himself as Spartacus, so do two others, closely followed by more, until every member of captured rebel army is yelling “I am Spartacus”.
Your reputation is part of a conversation now – but a conversation that is not limited to a few drunks gathered around a bar. This conversation is worldwide. You do have legal recourse. If someone infringes your intellectual property or defames your reputation, you can take legal action. If you can find Spartacus. And if the attempt to find him doesn’t blow the story to a hundred times its previous size.
Just like Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Greenpeace doesn’t hide its role in leading these conversations. But, as Nestlé found, getting Greenpeace to take down its illegal material doesn’t always help. The parody of the Kit Kat advert, in which the office worker bites into an orangutan’s finger, infringed Nestlé’s copyright, and YouTube dutifully removed it. But other versions were rapidly posted, and the story moved on to debating Nestlé’s heavy-handed tactics. The story was bigger than ever. This was a crowd now, and you can’t sue a crowd. But if you anger it, you can turn it into a mob.
The old rules have changed. Tactics which worked only two or three years ago don’t work any more.
Just as you can’t sue a crowd, you can’t ban a conversation. All you can do is join in. If you are part of the old mindset, if the slogan “no-one ever got fired for buying IBM” would have worked on you, then maybe you are not nimble enough for the new rules. Because there is no doubt that joining in the conversation has risks. But standing aloof or, worse, trying to shut it down, is going to be worse.
This is brandjacking. When there is a conversation taking place about your brand, and you are not part of it, you have lost ownership of your reputation. But this only formalises a reality which has always existed. Your reputation is not simply what you say it is. Your reputation has only ever existed in other people’s minds. This is the territory on which the battles for your reputation are going to be fought – and it is asymmetrical warfare.
Terence Fane-Saunders of Chelgate has always argued that the key rule in crisis management is to be the source of your own story. If you are in the news, you need to be telling the story, not leaving it to others. It remains good advice, but in the realm of web 2.0, it conflicts with another of the old rules in public relations: keep a tight control over who can speak for your organisation. The only practical way to engage with social media is to encourage the whole organisation to tweet and Facebook. The message will be confused, but it will be much more credible.
In the old days, your reputational army engaged with other armies – your competitors, say, or unions. Those armies are still out there, and Greenpeace is the largest of them all. It turns over Eu200 million a year, almost all of it spent on its core business, which is campaigning. There are not many businesses which can spend even a tenth of that on PR. The majority of businesses cannot even match one percent of Greenpeace’s campaigning budget.
But social media – for all the engagement of goliaths such as Greenpeace – is the territory of guerilla warfare. You can’t defeat or even engage with your critics if they simply melt into the rest of the population.
Greenpeace did not anticipate that its palm oil campaign would lead to Nestlé folding quite so quickly. Nestlé has been resisting the campaigns of its critics – on baby formula, for example – for decades. And yet this campaign was over in weeks.
There are differences, of course. Palm oil is only one, fairly minor, ingredient in a Kit Kat. But if even Nestlé will fold in weeks, and even Greenpeace does not fully understand the power that it is wielding , then the battle for the control of reputation has changed fundamentally during the course of 2010.
Of course, Marcus Crassus had the whole of Spartacus’s army crucified. That option was never really open to Nestlé.
An interesting and accurate assessment of the inability of brands to foce their version of the conversation on the masses, but I'd add that it was ever so, what's different with the Societal Web ( see http://www.societal-web.com ) that we now have is not that people are suddenly taking an alternative view, but that they have reach and authority when the do so.
Brands can ignore them or engage and the balance is difficult to get right, or impossible.
So, what brands must do is optimise their engagement, and the best results probably come form dealing and correcting, rapidly, what they do that is wrong, acknowledging mistakes, and supporting change based on consumer needs and opinions. At the same time they need to beware of being pushed into inappropriate action by a vociferous vocal minority.
In the example above the question is one of a public opinion being educated that palm oil is bad and a product that uses some. It probably doesn't matter if they take care to source it responsibly and sustainably and ensure that there is no (further) impact on wildlife, so the possible actions they can take are to either use a different product, or, guarantee an area of habitat that protects more than the space required for their consumption. Both probably have a cost.
The key is to be seen to be listening and caring without being a push over.
Posted by: WilliamBuist | 08/14/2010 at 03:00 PM