How Disinformation Is Threatening Your Brand
By: Brian Hubbard
Tags: Technology, Social Media, Marketing, Disinformation, Misinformation

How Disinformation Is Threatening Your Brand

When rumors about your brand become reality

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Fake news is old news. Since time immemorial, people have blurred the line between fact and fiction, exaggerating stories into new ones. From lunch-table gossip to water cooler chitchat, these kinds of tall tales and falsehoods have existed long before the internet.

Only now, the lies and misinformation have evolved to spread like a digital disease, but with greater speed and exposure. Today, online rumors are dangerous in their scope and effect, shifting politics on a global scale and, in some cases, threatening the lives of people in the real world.

To be clear, we’re talking about disinformation: misinformation but with intent to mislead. We’ve already seen how it affects elections and the healthcare industry, yet it’s still a relatively new phenomenon. We’re still learning how it transmits through digital spaces.

In a recent NPR piece on the topic, Emily Dreyfuss of the Harvard University Shorenstein Center’s ‘The Media Manipulation Casebook,’ reveals how a pandemic of disinformation propagates and takes root throughout the media ecosystem. Toward the end of the interview, she mentions how studies in social science have shown that the more frequently someone hears or is exposed to something, the more likely they are to believe it.

The immediacy and abundance of information we see every day has forced us to grapple with the power and reality of disinformation. Public discourse and even democracy are at the mercy of bad actors, hashtags, and the spread of uncontrollable narratives. The sheer quantity of false stories has led many to dangerously conflicting views of what’s real and what’s merely gossip.

For marketing and communications teams, disinformation can extend beyond the realms of politics, putting a hefty price on their efforts to manage brand identity. The cost of disinformation in 2019 alone came to an estimated total of $78b, according to the collaborative research of CHEQ, a cybersecurity company, and the University of Baltimore. With the guidance of economist and professor Roberto Cavazos, the project sought to put a number to the harm of fake news, marrying rigorous economic analysis and hard data.

The results are an uncomfortable look at what the future holds in terms of the economic impact of disinformation.

For organizations looking to protect their reputations, marketing and comms teams need to take stock of their earned media efforts. As the majority of people online aren’t held accountable to fact-checkers, your brand is always at risk. Most people don’t have the social capital or authority to influence opinion alone, but in groups, they can quickly disseminate a rumor regardless if it’s true.

While you have some control over your brand image with paid and owned media, a Nielsen study in Global Trust In Advertising showed 83% of respondents were more likely to trust the word of mouth recommendations from friends and family. The third greatest number of respondents, behind owned advertising on branded websites, said they trusted consumer opinions online — a not-insignificant 66%.

The organic conversations and shared experiences found on social media or review sites are fertile ground for a crisis. One bad review can inspire others, and companies must be quick to respond before the discussion spirals out of control. If you aren’t already monitoring this space with social listening software, now is the time to add one to your tech stack.

Organizations need to be proactive in their measurement of a crisis both by identifying where they’re the most vulnerable beforehand and recognizing new trends where disinformation can fester. Benchmarking topics that have demonstrated a threat to brand image in the past and closely tracking the ways new topics can draw you into a rotten narrative are just two ways to prepare your team in advance.

Just as well, there are powerful new tools on the market that can detect automation and the bot clusters that artificially drive user engagement, but for marketers on a budget, perhaps the best tool for combatting this developing threat is simply understanding your audience. Media monitoring and social listening platforms give you the data, but connecting the dots around the context of where your audience relates to current trends is where the real work comes in.

Understanding what your consumers want and expect from your business is an evergreen concept, but especially so in a time where transparency has such a high premium. Taking stock of how you’re managing your earned media is a start, but it’s just as important to clarify your brand’s message and purpose.

Are your company values clear?

Do they still align with your core market?

How do they relate to current trends in the industry?

These are a few of the questions you can ask yourself to reconfigure your brand’s position within the media landscape.

Authenticity and consistency are the keys. When disinformation seeks to deceive or misguide, remaining flexible but strong about your values is still a great defense. Don’t let the loud minority control the narrative around your brand. Fight back with a combination of strategy, technology, and time-tested marketing techniques.