Page 190 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

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Crisis Communication and the Net 171
tions that didn’t exist before. Perhaps most important, the internet
empowers and enlarges a company’s stakeholder base, including
interest and activist groups.
The internet is also a great ‘information and authority leveller’. On
the net everyone is an expert, their credibility isn’t scrutinized and
their resources are ‘virtually’ unlimited. While this may empower a
host of new ‘authorities’, it creates a challenge for PR people as the
sources of facts or rumours are anonymous and people’s identities are
easily cloaked. There’s a caption to a New Yorker Magazine cartoon
showing a dog sitting in front of a computer: ‘On the internet, no one
knows you’re a dog.’

New medium, new risks

Our networked society, where our personal lives and business enter-
prises depend on being ‘connected’, is creating a new generation of
risks that public affairs people couldn’t imagine until very recently.
Terms like ‘hacking’ and ‘denial of service attacks’ didn’t exist a decade
ago. Yet hackers who can shut down not just a website but a company’s
entire business enterprise represent a major new risk for today’s cor-
poration. Ask consumers what their major fear or concern about tech-
nology and big business is, and chances are they’ll answer ‘privacy’ or
‘identity theft’.
Internal e-mail and company data, usually innocuous, create new
challenges. The old adage that ‘anything on paper is public informa-
tion’ is amplified when employees are connected on the web eight
hours a day. What we assumed was ‘company-only’ is now fodder for
public debate. Even the company Christmas party innocently posted
on YouTube might raise the ire of stakeholders vital to a company’s
business interest.
Companies are also vulnerable to copycat sites that mimic customer-
facing corporate websites, posted by hackers or rouge stakeholder
groups who use this technique to discredit corporations or disrupt
their business. The ease with which outside groups can post and
promote disinformation, and the inability of companies to locate and
repudiate that information, create new challenges for PR managers in
the new web-enabled society.
Today bloggers are the new investigative reporters. Companies
don’t fear the camera crew at the front gate as much as a blogger
posting insider information, a whistle-blower’s allegations, non-attrib-
uted accusations, or the unleashing of unsubstantiated rumours.
Bloggers don’t operate under the same standards as print journalists