Topic: Harmful Content

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.

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 In their view, many organizations’ approaches to risk mitigation looked “increasingly outdated,” adding that “in a world of accelerating challenges, static annual documents need to make room for continuous horizon-scanning for early indicators of change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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched every aspect of our lives in the past 12 months, including how much we use digital technology and social media. We have turned online to communicate, socialize, learn, and play—with our screen time, in many cases, exceeding our offline activities. 

Harmful content has always been a necessary evil when engaging directly with consumers. For most brands, it used to be like cosmic radiation from the sun; always there, spiking periodically, but not terribly hazardous at low doses. Then 2020 exploded, releasing Chernobyl-type levels of contamination that have decimated the growth strategies of social media managers.

In a move that has now made U.S. national news and gotten the attention of Congress, WallStreetBets, an online agenda-driven group, coordinated purchases that drove up the price of GameStop stock, some 2,000% in less than 30 days. They didn’t stop there, though. They also short squeezed AMC, BlackBerry, and Tootsie Roll, among others. 

In any other year, you may have just completed the annual social media audit or are preparing to have one done to assess the effectiveness of efforts on your social channels and identify opportunities for improvement. But if we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that we still have to plan for a future where the visibility ahead is limited by a dense fog of uncertainty.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or...will they?