Crisp blog

CEOs are wrestling with a new form of risk outside their organization’s regular register. Agenda-driven actors and groups, intent on doing harm to brands via social media, are now commanding CEOs’ attention for the first time. How did these groups become top of mind with CEOs and what’s really at stake?

This week, WeProtect Global Alliance issued a stark warning: the current scale of online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) is continuing to increase beyond the capacity to respond. The Alliance’s 2021 Global Threat Assessment sounds the alarm on the distressing rise in the reach and complexity of CSEA around the world.

What is stakeholder capitalism? Stakeholder capitalism isn't a new idea. It's a principle that business leaders adopt to define their mission as creating long-term value not only for shareholders, but also for customers, suppliers, employees and communities. What is new, however, is stakeholders coordinating online and using social media to spread their views at scale is. And it’s a growing concern among corporate leaders.

For fashion houses, finding audacious ways to grab the attention of fans and consumers means trying to stand out in a crowded social media milieu. One of the most powerful tactics they can use is working with influencers. This is true for many brands, and it brings with it a specific risk: hatred directed at your valued personalities.

With environmental, social and governance (ESG) agendas increasingly in the spotlight, companies have been put on notice by an expanded horizon of stakeholder audiences.

Brand catastrophes—those memorable, monumental events that incur tens of millions to billions of dollars in combined costs and losses—have drawn most of the attention of risk and resiliency experts in the global business community. Until recently.

Whether your brand is at risk is not a question of “if”, but “when”. The corporate risk landscape has become a free-for-all where actors originate or accelerate their agendas online through digital chatter to manipulate consumer activism, socio-political divisiveness, social justice action and protests, market disruption and volatility, environmental crises, and the fallout of the global pandemic.

When the World Economic Forum (WEF) came out with their Global Risks Report 2021 earlier this year, it highlighted the need for a greater focus on improving risk readiness as a way for organizations to build resilience. In their view, many organizations’ approaches to risk mitigation looked “increasingly outdated,” adding that “in a world of accelerating challenges, static annual documents need to make room for continuous horizon-scanning for early indicators of change and associated timelines for action.”

Like two sides of the same coin, digital chatter is a vehicle for certain groups to intentionally or unintentionally harm a brand, and also a vital source of intelligence for communications leaders to stay ahead of issues and mitigate crises.

The UK Government just took another meaningful step toward addressing online abuse, drafting a Bill designed to deliver comprehensive legislation across a range of online harms and putting digital platforms on notice, especially social media sites.

Don’t like the weather? In some places they’ll tell you to wait five minutes and it’ll change. The risk landscape isn’t all that different. It changes constantly and the rising frequency of unknown risks makes it difficult to predict when a storm will hit.

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2021 Page Spring Seminar, the Page Society's largest annual event, which addressed topical and timely issues of critical importance to Chief Communications Officers and other senior communicators.