Chris Lukach, APR, will lead the PRSA Certificate Program, “Navigating Today’s Reputation Risk Management,” beginning on Aug. 22. Visit the PRSA website for more details on the program.
I want to tell you a social media story — a true one, and one that rather articulates a shifting reality affecting the practice of reputation management.
Like the parents of most grade-school-age children, I belong to the Facebook group run by my daughters’ school. Initially set up by the Parent Teachers Association, the group has an ambitious and lofty title — “Partners in Education.” As parents, we don’t believe ourselves to be just observers; we’re participants. We are right there, in lock-step with our teachers and administrators. “Partners.”
One day, I noticed a post in this Facebook group from one of my fellow “partner” parents. It read:
Just saw a letter in my inbox from the superintendent. I haven’t read it yet. Does anyone know what it says?
In just a few words, a casually cast-off sentiment encapsulates the increasingly fraught and complex field of reputation management.
It’s been nearly 10 years since Microsoft Research Canada published its often-cited study on our dwindling attention spans. (The study measured the average attention span as dipping down to about eight seconds from 12 seconds before the digital and mobile revolutions, a reduction of about one-third.) And while the study hasn’t been replicated since, one can guess our attention spans haven’t improved.
I don’t mean this as a tale of laziness. It’s not. Rather, it’s a tale of evolving stakeholder behavior and how even the most intensely invested stakeholders may not behave as we hope.
By virtue of her participation in this group and her relationship with the school, this parent identifies as an actively engaged and invested stakeholder. No ambivalence here. And, yet, rather than reading the Superintendent’s carefully crafted message (which, presumably, she could have done in seconds and on the very same device she used to post on Facebook), she sought to crowd-source her analysis of the superintendent’s message.
Data from Pew Research in 2023 suggest that about 50 percent of Americans get their news from social media “Sometimes” or “Often.” There’s nothing surprising about that. However, it is an impactful statistic when we consider why consumers engage in social media in the first place.
Ask yourself this: When was the last time you had your mind changed by what you read on social media? Not the last time you picked up a factoid or a nugget of information, but the last time you truly experienced opinion change. I logged on thinking X, now, thanks to a compelling post from my former high school classmate, I think Y. You’ll be hard-pressed to think of such an occasion.
The truth is, we use social media not for education but for validation. And with the ultimate goal of public relations being not to inform but to change opinions and attitudes, social media represents both a vastly limited communication channel, as well as a window into the frustrating realities of modern stakeholder communication.
Moreover, our social media interactions are steeped in cynicism, even more so when you factor in an unpleasant pandemic-era remnant: compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue, a phenomenon that comes about following overexposure to other people’s trauma, was first studied for its impact on service people, healthcare practitioners and first responders. We now know more about its lingering effects on, well, everyone. According to a TIME article on the impact of this phenomenon, compassion fatigue may present itself as “emotional numbness” or, by extension, a lack of empathy toward the people and organizations in which we have a stake.
So, what might that parent really have been asking?
Tell me what it said, and, maybe, while you’re at it, validate my preexisting and cynical thoughts about the competency of the people who run my child’s school.
Considering the weight of the issue the school was facing, we can imagine the Superintendent’s letter was carefully and precisely crafted. Maybe it took hours. Maybe the Superintendent brought in her team to tweak, edit and refine. Maybe she worked with her PR firm. In the end, her letter’s precision mattered little.
Diminishing attention spans, social media validation seeking and the lingering effects of compassion fatigue, which we as communicators are still just beginning to comprehend fully. These factors create a perfect storm of audience cynicism, distrust and indifference that redefines how we lead modern crisis communications and reputation management programs.
If we’re here to generate goodwill, shore up our reputation to withstand potential crises and highlight points of market differentiation, then we cannot depend on those communication channels with the widest reaches and most efficiency.
We must embrace back-to-basics, credibility-boosting and, yes, disruptive forms of communication. Handshaking, baby-kissing, surprise-phone-call-making touch points. Focus on disarming. Focus on showing humanity and vulnerability. Focus on the interpersonal, even if these tactics seem outwardly inefficient and even dated.
In a cluttered landscape of inattention and cynicism, intentional communicators are poised to make the deepest impact.
Chris Lukach, APR, is CEO of AKCG – Public Relations Counselors, a N.J.-based PR consultancy that builds, restores and protects its clients’ positive reputations.
[Illustration: dreamystudio]
