Ask A Crisis Communications Specialist

15:34Crisis Communications Specialist 3:okay, this is something I want to get involved with at the very beginning. But as time goes on, you realize that maybe they weren't as upfront as when they contracted your company. Do you find yourself in positions where you have to fire a client?

15:52Crisis Communications Specialist 2:Molly? Well, typically, and I'm sure this is the same with Evan and Amanda, it's not the person in crisis who calls me typically. I mean, certainly I've had one-offs like influencers or people online and they'll reach out to me. It's usually the comms person or the ops person, or it's someone inside who knows the problem. And they're afraid to usually say something to leadership or the person at the center of the crisis. They hire me to come in to deliver the bad news, to deliver the strategy because they can't do it. My job is often to triage the emotion coming from the person at the center of the crisis.

16:33Crisis Communications Specialist 2:And then we work from there. Amanda, what about you?

16:37Host of 1A:I have a whole series of questions that I will go through in that initial discussion before I decide whether I would work with an organization. And it comes from experience of working in-house and being lied to and finding myself doing things which actually, on reflection, were not the way it should have been done and were not what I would have done. So I think having experienced the bad behavior in previous work environments, I'm very attuned to making sure that I don't have to deal with that because I don't need to do that now. I work for lots of different people, so I don't have to put up with the bad behavior.

17:15But I think there's a lot of people working in-house in organizations that end up doing things and behaving in particular ways or taking a course of action that they actually don't want to do.

17:26Crisis Communications Specialist 3:So it sounds to me like you're saying you have a degree of autonomy now, so you can pull back when you feel ethical lines are being crossed. Yeah, absolutely. We got this from Stephen who says, I have an extreme distrust of this industry. Look at the Blake Lively situation. Maybe a genuine person or organization needs help overcoming social ineptitude, or maybe the unscrupulous need help looking better. At the end of the day, the public often has no way of telling the difference. Evan, your response to that?

17:58Crisis Communications Specialist 1:I think there are plenty of instances where I've gotten involved in matters where a person was being treated unfairly or a narrative was being presented to the public that wasn't fair and wasn't accurate. And the job was actually to reveal the truth. because what can happen, certainly in the era of cancel culture that we've been living through in the last number of years, is there's a rush to judgment by the public. And the public and online influencers can be judge, jury, and executioner. And a normal person can find themselves on the receiving end of terrible media coverage, allegations that in and of themselves are enough to tarnish their reputation permanently, destroy what people see when they look them up online.

18:43Crisis Communications Specialist 1:And so many times I feel a personal responsibility to empower individuals or organizations who haven't necessarily gotten a fair shake. And I think another aspect of crisis communications that people often don't think about is everyone's imagining or many people are imagining us as the firefighters. But there are instances also where we play the role of an arsonist, where there is a bad actor, a bad company, and there's a whistleblower, for instance, who needs to reveal that information. And so crisis communications practitioners aren't always just putting out fires. Sometimes they can be bringing scrutiny to the unscrupulous.

19:25Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Oh, that's interesting. Molly, do you have experience working on the other side of this equation where it's not about trying to quiet down a crisis or a scandal, but it's about bringing attention to something that the public needs to know?

19:39Crisis Communications Specialist 2:I shy away from that. And that also shows the line between the two types. I mean, that's when you fall into that publicist category where people are there to create people who want to be who want to create conflict. You know, there are clients out there who want to turn crisis into content. They, you know, they come to me for course correction. But when someone wants to be more volatile, they get more views and more clicks. That's an entirely different position altogether.

20:10Crisis Communications Specialist 3:We got this from Licia in St. Louis, who says, it seems like crises are based on money. Do crises apply to anything else, even when a person's or company's bottom line isn't directly at stake? Evan, I'll come to you first.

20:24Crisis Communications Specialist 1:Of course, I define it as anything with the potential to impact a crisis, as anything with the potential to impact a person's reputation or revenue. I wrote a book on cancel culture, and the reason I wrote the book was because I had a number of clients that we worked with whose reputations were completely destroyed. This wasn't about money. This was about their personal safety threatened, their health, individuals providing death threats showing up at their homes to take action against them because of a contortion of the facts and painting them in a bad light. So this is serious stuff. And yes, there can be financial consequences to being dragged through the mud, but it's also reputational people who don't want to have their legacy forever tarnished by false allegations that then get codified and turned into concrete by repeating it in the press and then ultimately online becoming permanently there as a record for people to look up.

21:27Crisis Communications Specialist 3:I want to circle back to the idea of cancel culture, but Molly, I want to come to you on this question of where to your mind, because there's lots of debate over this term, what people call cancel culture and the difference between accountability and people being sent death threats or people showing up at their house, right? Like there are some clear lines, I think we could all agree, like this is inappropriate. But how does accountability fit into this for you as you're representing clients?

22:00Crisis Communications Specialist 2:Everything comes down to accountability. We're not just dealing with public opinion anymore. We're dealing with public reaction in real time. And as someone who works with a lot of clients who are in the midst of a viral crisis, where instead of a 24-hour news cycle, we're dealing with a 24-minute outrage cycle. I tell them that the public is really looking for accountability here. Because when there is a sense of injustice somewhere, when someone wants to dig in on a story, they want to shame that person until the person just admits fault or admits what they did wrong. And that's another way of saying accountability.

22:37Crisis Communications Specialist 2:If they refuse to do that and they fight it, and if they fight it with silence or deflection or blame, there are parts of the public who will not let go. So that accountability piece, to me, is such an important part of the entire toolkit in crisis management response. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back with more in a moment.

22:58Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Stay with us.

23:04Crisis Communications Specialist 3:we got this message from emma who wants to know does your work ever involve conflict resolution or reconciliation processes between aggrieved parties if so what does that look like and how

23:15Host of 1A:does it go amanda um yeah i was gonna say not in my experience because you tend to be in quite a polarized environment and with a lot of these situations. So whilst you might be able to help certain people affected by what's happened, I wouldn't say it was necessarily conflict resolution, certainly from my experience.

23:36Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Well, I want to circle back to this idea of cancel culture, Evan, that you surfaced. And I'm curious to hear from you. Molly explained her position, but where is that line between inappropriate behavior on the part of, you know, the general public or individuals? And what is just plain old accountability?

23:58Crisis Communications Specialist 1:Well, in my view, accountability exists in our society and there are various ways by which individuals are held to account. They can be held to account by their bosses, by employment standards or employee handbooks. They can be held accountable based on the legal system. And there are a number of ways that people can be held to account. On the flip side, when you're doxing people and releasing their public information to encourage people to go to their homes, you're trying to tarnish and target them for reputational damage and outing them online and piling on, that to me is not helpful. And that's not about accountability.

24:41Crisis Communications Specialist 1:It's about mob justice, if you will. And so I I don't believe that the practice of cancel culture is necessary in order for there to be accountability. There has and always will be other ways to hold people accountable in this day and age.

24:57Crisis Communications Specialist 3:But if it happens, if something happens outside of, say, a work environment or it's not what they did wasn't illegal, it was just terrible behavior that happened in a community setting, than if people are saying, hey, you acted outside of the bounds of social norms. This isn't about canceling you. It's about, or again, I have that term cancel. It's like, what does that actually mean? But that's a conversation for another day. But how do you advise someone that this is what it looks like to repair the damage that you've done? Or do you only take on clients who you feel have been wrongly accused of something?

25:38Crisis Communications Specialist 1:Anyone can be accused in this day and age, and anyone can become the target of cancel culture. And I would argue it's actually private individuals who aren't necessarily running companies or senior executives. If you work in that capacity, you have a team of lawyers. You have folks like the people on this program with you. You've got advisors. whereas it's the everyday citizen who gets caught on video saying something intemperate or a comment that they make is misinterpreted and it goes out there on the internet and they're smeared. That is not appropriate in my view. And I also believe that all people are fallible.

26:17Crisis Communications Specialist 1:Nobody is perfect. And many people are in a rush to judgment and they're in a hurry to shine the spotlight on others, whereas there's not a single person who's walking the planet who hasn't done or said something at some point in his or her life that they'd like to take back. And so I would just caution against the rush to attack others because it feels very differently when you're on the receiving end.

26:40Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Molly, I'm hearing a little tension in your thinking around this and how Evan is describing his experience with his clients. Am I hearing that correctly? Because I hear you leaning into maybe a slightly different approach.

26:51Crisis Communications Specialist 2:Yeah. I mean, certainly cancel culture has changed significantly. And yes, it is a loosely defined term. But back in 2016, 2017, when we had Twitter and the mobilization of people getting behind an idea that something is wrong and people should be punished, there should be a consequence for actions. That's how we had Me Too. That's how we had these big movements. But since 2020, since the recent elections, now we have a lot of polarization out there. People are comfortable taking sides now. We don't see these mass cancellations happening nowadays. It's all about the crisis doesn't ruin a reputation, the response does.

27:33Crisis Communications Specialist 2:So if someone has a base, whether they're a party or a brand or an individual, an influencer, a celebrity, if they have a base, they can just double down on their position because they know they'll be supported. That's where I think culture has shifted so much, where a cancel culture really now is so polarized that it's not as effective as it used to be.

27:55Crisis Communications Specialist 3:I'm curious to hear from you, Amanda, how you think the power dynamic between people who are in high-profile positions, celebrities, influencers, how that shifted in the digital era when it feels like parasocial relationships have deepened. How do you think it changes the work you do?

28:16Host of 1A:I mean, I have to agree with Molly. I think that we've seen a number of situations in the UK with people being cancelled. But they've got a base where they can go and, you know, connect with their audience in lots of other ways. So it doesn't make sense anymore to try and approach it in that way. But I think what you've got is a big change from, you know, people who would, you know, journalists define the news. They decided what was the news. But actually now it's much more down to people. People decide what they think is of interest and they will share it. And the media are secondary to that a lot of the time.

28:56Host of 1A:So I think there's a big shift in what's deemed kind of newsworthy in different ways. But just to kind of go back to what Evan was just mentioning as well, I think there's a big issue as well about deciding what is of interest to people and not. And, you know, we've got to kind of take, I think, a completely different look at how we define situations and what we do then in response to some of those situations because of the nature of the polarisation, the social media and policing in the UK has a tendency to go, don't speculate on this, don't talk about this and try and bring out the positive kind of human behaviour.

29:41Host of 1A:but actually we're going to have to just find ways of dealing with the fact that people will do those things and they will potentially, you know, try and find somebody and out them or go to their workplace. And I'm advising clients in some cases about being really prepared for, you might need to alter your routes to work and your routes away from work because you may become targeted because something's happened.

30:05Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Well, several weeks ago, American Eagle put out a series of ads featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. It's part of a new campaign called Sidney Sweeney Has Great Genes.

30:14Crisis Communications Specialist 2:Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue.

30:24Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Sidney Sweeney Has Great Genes. Now the ad has earned over 5 million views on YouTube. Critics have accused American Eagle of promoting eugenics and white supremacy in the campaign. American Eagle has since doubled down on the ad, saying the campaign, quote, is and always was about the jeans, her jeans, her story. Jeans there, J-E-A-N-S. Now, the company's stock price soared 20 percent this week after President Trump praised the ad. But to all of your points, the conversation about this ad got a lot of traction online. And we got this from Carol in North Carolina, who says, What do you advise companies, organizations, or individuals to do before a crisis occurs in order to be better prepared?

31:06Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Any best practices? Molly, I'll come to you first.

31:11Crisis Communications Specialist 2:Well, starting off with this American Eagle ad, we are day 14 since this ad was launched. And this has been a driving news story since then. I think this American Eagle ad, and without much response from Sidney Sweeney at all, We've had one Instagram post from American Eagle. I think this is going to shift marketing drastically. You know, what they did is they created a debate online. They drove engagement. And then American Eagle is just riding it out until the dust settles. They get clicks, they get news coverage, and they get the cash. I think we're going to see a lot more brands try and follow this model.

31:52Crisis Communications Specialist 2:I mean, is that adage, all press is good press, true? Well, in the case of this ad, absolutely. There were so many winners in this ad, but also there were other people and other brands and celebrities who were dealing with their own issues, but they just tucked their stories right underneath the American Eagle ad and people haven't even been paying attention to it. This shift also is driven a lot by culture that's formed around the edges, not in the center. Like, you know, Gen Z and millennials, they're really sometimes determining what's important and what isn't important. To the average American Eagle customer, it's a big eh, but it's a marketing campaign that created outrage in certain groups.

32:36Crisis Communications Specialist 2:And that's what generated the dialogue, the news coverage, and also the click.

32:40Crisis Communications Specialist 3:Molly, I'll give you the last word here. How do you know what you've done actually worked?

32:45Crisis Communications Specialist 2:Every good plan involves evaluation. So certainly you would look at the sentiment there, but for me, it's giving them control. Once they feel like they're back in control of their own reputation and they can take a breath and feel calmer about it, then we know it's a win.

32:59Crisis Communications Specialist 3:That's crisis and reputation strategist Molly McPherson. Also with us today, Evan Neerman. He's the founder and CEO of the global crisis public relations firm Red Banyan and Amanda Coleman, a crisis communication strategist. Amanda, Evan, Molly, thanks for speaking with us. Today's producer was Lauren Hamilton. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening. We'll talk again tomorrow. This is 1A.