Battle ready: In this exclusive extract from their new book, Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington ask 'Is your communications team ready for brand vandals?'

Brand Vandals explores the dirtiest corner of brands' audiences – the people who are mobilising themselves to cause reputational damage in a war on the organisations that they dislike. The intenet allows them to wreak havoc, but it also forces a level of engagement and dialogue that organisations, public and private, have never had to contemplate before.  

Engagement isn’t an option – it’s a necessity. Brands will have to get to grips with media change, audience engagement and more agile communications. However they’ll need to be well prepared for the vandals too, with a smart approach to not only dealing with the threat of their deadliest reputation enemies, but turning their criticism and attempts at image sabotage into a positive.

Much has been written about the skills that corporate and government communications teams must possess in the internet age. The emergence of popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter has promoted a rush of digital teams or communicators to emerge who professed to have the skills to be able to tackle online reputation crises.

Perhaps many did, but the fact that the medium is digital is not the point. What it comes down to is that the internet has accelerated the need to respond quickly beyond all known recognition, forced complete transparency and lowered the bar of editorial entry to near-zero. It means communications teams do need some new skills to be able to deal with this changed media environment, but they also need to sharpen up their acts across the board too. There’s nowhere to hide, and no room for comfort.

Jonathan Copulsky, a principal at consulting firm Deloitte, one of its top experts on customer relationships and author of the book Brand Resilience, puts forward these fundamental requirements. “Clearly, communication teams need sensing capabilities so that they can detect online attacks in their early stages. These sensing capabilities need to combine technology enablers with human intelligence to help gauge severity and urgency of attacks, lest the team waste efforts and time chasing ghosts,” he says. “In addition, communication teams need to include invdividuals responsible for reaching out to and activating internal and external ambassadors, who can, in turn, help disseminate key messages through social platforms."

There's a long list of the skills required, as well as a large dose of common sense. Here though are the six skills that modern communications team should develop in order to effective. None are new, but all are fundamental, and need to be stretched beyond the bounds of the era of print and broadcast being the primary forms of media.

1. Organisational fitness

The way communication is orchestrated in order to tackle brand vandalism must be rooted in military- like procedures, so that everyone knows their place and there is a place for everything. Procedures, multiple paths of action mapped to foreseen circumstances, content production, revision and approval, and the people who need to come together to make it all happen must be corralled into one cohesive, progressive function.

Communication must be precision-engineered, with the assumption that there is no margin for error. Gaining the right level of organisation is something that can only be done by highly- organised people, and that’s the first fundamental skill of today’s communicator in tackling reputational threats.

2. Flexibility

Having ironed out any rough edges that existed, overcome weak spots and brought order where only limited process existed, there must also be recognition that the early warning system. It must also be inherently pliable, so that it can adapt quickly and with minimal effort to any change in immediate circumstance, as well as to evolve progressively as media continues to become more sophisticated and brand or commercial priorities change.

Adaptability, as in a lack of it, can be the biggest blind spot for brands needing to maintain constant vigilance. Like any arms race, the enemy will simply observe your defences at close quarters, study them, innovate and then try to hit you with something that you have no real answer for. You’ve simply got to keep building the wall higher and better.

3. Media savvy

You must also keep a permanent watch on the media environment: only by charting media change and understanding the implications of new technologies and new techniques will you have the level of protection that the brand really needs.

That will almost certainly include new, social two-way forms of media but also traditional media such as radio and television, and crucially, an understanding of the relationship between different media. Adaptability may be a consequence of good planning and organisation but again it takes people who are at heart adaptable beings to make things function that way.

4. Speed

The people running the system and involved in every aspect of the communication function have to be extremely agile. There are effective no deadlines, as it’s a case of as soon as is physically possible. We’re not robots though, and human beings can only move so fast in order to react. So the underlying support system and pre-approved plan needs to enable them to move as fast as they humanly can. All too often, the system, the tools and the bureaucracy slow people down, rather than giving them the ability to deliver at optimum speed.

5. Calmness

Which also depends on them not freaking out, getting distracted by irrelevant details, making errant decisions or undershooting on the intentions of the communication just because the pressure is on. It’s understandable, again because we’re just human, that the immediacy and transparency of the internet leaves brands and their guardians exposed, so communicators have to work under tangible pressure in order to do their jobs.

Sure, the people calling the biggest commercial shots out there have to live on their wits and show guts to make tough decisions. But the decisions and actions of communicators may have equally sweeping consequences, and the whole world may be watching you make them. Communicators today must stick to their guns when faced by the gravest of reputational challenges. While they’re hardly superheroes, they nevertheless must be strong in the face of internal panic and refuse to be drawn by detractors.

6. Wit and wisdom

Finally, communicators must be ingenious. Because even when faced with the most tortuous of sabotage incidents, they have an opportunity to gain cut- through and take the advantage for the brand. Doing so will require a team that is organised, adaptable, agile, calm and brave, but beyond that success can be driven through ingenuity.

The ability to disrupt and diffuse situations by knowing how the audience and the vandal are likely to react to your actions, then using collective brainpower and creative strategies to outmaneuver the opposition, is what can set one communications team apart from another, or from all the rest.

It’s all about being forewarned and having the capability to deal with a more sophisticated and more agile threat. Effectively, you need to be able to see their level of brainpower, and you can raise them by beating them at the game they’ve started. It is like reputational chess played on crack.

Steve Earl is European managing director, Zeno Group and Stephen Waddington is European Digital and Social Media Director, Ketchum. Their latest book, Brand Vandals: Reputation Wreckers and Building Better Defences: Corporate Reputation Risk and Response, is out now from Bloomsbury.