The events of the past week and a half serve as a good case study for how social network users and bloggers can bury a reputation, often without any real burden of truth. The first event involved The Guardian newspaper, micro-blogging site Twitter, oil traders Trafigura and their libel lawyers Carter-Ruck.
The Guardian explains:
Lawyers for oil traders Trafigura finally abandoned attempts to keep secret a scientific report about toxic waste dumping in west Africa, that was shown to the Guardian … The Minton report, commissioned in 2006 from the London-based firm’s scientific consultants, said that based on the “limited” information they had been given Trafigura’s oil waste, dumped cheaply the month before in a city in Ivory Coast, was potentially toxic, and “capable of causing severe human health effects”.
Despite the backdown, serious damage had already been done. Across Twitter and the blogosphere, people were digging into Trafigura, their lawyers and everyone involved in the alleged cover-up. The messaging around the trial and the report seeped out of the tight grasp of the stakeholders and proceeded to bounce around the web.
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger phrased it nicely:
“Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”
The second incident involved an inflammatory column by Daily Mail writer Jan Moir on the mysterious death of former Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. Given her position as a well-known columnist, having readers disagree with her views is part of the job description. However, again thanks to Twitter’s ability to spread news like wildfire, the inflammatory column became headline news.
In a ‘Comment is Free’ column, Charlie Brooker captured the general response to the off-colour column:
It has been 20 minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.
Given that Brooker is a well-read journalist in the UK, it’s fair to say both Moir and The Mail have lost complete control of the situation. And days later it’s still spiraling. Readers have reacted decisively, lodging 22,000 complaints with the Press Complaints Commission since Friday 16 October.
But what can you do? The internet enables lightning-fast communication on a global scale. Writing in the Financial Times, David Bowen of the web consultancy Bowen Craggs & Co., lists seven points to consider:
1. You have 48 hours to save your reputation.
2. The traditional method is no longer enough.
3. Understand these channels.
4. Corporate communications needs to be reconfigured to respond, fast.
5. Draw up a reputation management response plan, to complement crisis management.
6. Use all the weapons you can.
7. If you are drawn into trench warfare with your critics, consider carefully the best approach.
It’s difficult to determine what the impact will be on the reputations of the above mentioned until it the controversy dies down. From the looks of it, both incidents appear to have a few more days of life in them.
If either had a reputation management contingency plan in place, perhaps they could have prevented some of the damage. For others, it should serve as a case study in what can happen and how to stay ahead of the curve.
1. Flavio Gut | 20th October 2009 at 9:30 am
Great! Thanks for this article