Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll look at three steps a business can take to protect themselves from disinformation.
Over the past three years, your two-person startup has gained enough traction to turn into a 500-employee business. Your life’s work is materializing in front of your eyes, and it’s only uphill from here. Out of nowhere, a YouTube channel starts gaining traction solely from discrediting your offerings, calling them low-quality knockoffs of a bigger brand.
You know full well the quality standards to which you adhere and that the person slandering you, possibly a disgruntled ex-employee, is doing it out of malicious intent to try and sabotage your business; but as a small to medium-sized business, you lack the robust defenses that corporations can afford to counter these claims. Left unchecked, this could terribly hurt your business. Now you’re put in a tight spot, and how you react next could either make or break your company.
Disinformation campaigns have been a thorn in the side of corporations and industries since the dawn of time; and social media has been a conduit for easy execution of such campaigns. Corporate-level disinformation campaigns are organized efforts to spread false or misleading information about a company with malicious intent. Anyone, from a disgruntled ex-employee to a wily competitor, can post something negative about your business on social media, and all you can do is watch helplessly as it snowballs into a full-fledged movement, newsworthy at times, and any firefighting efforts from your side could go unnoticed.
There is no specific way to predict how a disinformation campaign will start, however, your organization can put in place proactive strategies and robust response protocols to protect yourself from the spread of disinformation.
1. Critical-thinking staff
Before anything else, it is essential for an organization to have strong and clear-cut policies highlighting its stance on misinformation and disinformation. Once these policies are in place, employees must be mentored to think critically and should be trained on digital literacy and implementing evidence-based practice (EBP). Such individuals are more likely to identify and counter misinformation and disinformation.
2. Digital presence monitoring
It is important for a company to regularly monitor and manage its online presence, including social media, communication outlets, and news sources. Social media monitoring tools such as Zoho Social and Hootsuite are equipped with features that help you monitor what’s going out of your social channels, see the type of engagement you are getting, and view detailed reports on your overall social media performance. These tools can be beneficial for early detection and mitigation of such campaigns.
Encouraging your loyal customers and stakeholders to share factual information is an effective strategy to counter disinformation. These stakeholders could play a pivotal role in shifting the balance by crafting clear, concise, and factual counter messages or statements, which could be published through official social media accounts or press releases.
3. Open communication
Creating channels for open communication within your organization creates an environment of transparency and fosters a culture of trust, enabling stakeholders to clearly discern fact from fiction, greatly curtailing the spread of false narratives. It is by far the most important and crucial layer in your defense against disinformation.
An organization could create an internal platform where business leaders can clearly state critical updates such as revenue generation, product-related updates, company values, and updates in company policies. Critical updates regarding the company that are not confidential can be shared on news outlets and social media platforms. The values and ideology of the organization should reflect that of its business leaders, if compatible with the current social norms.
Consistency is key
Lastly, it is important for organizations to maintain ethical practices both for their internal and external operations that are consistent with the values expressed publicly. This last step is pivotal for a company to garner unanimous support from all its stakeholders in the fight against disinformation. Only those who benefit from a company, be it through its values and ideology or through the quality of its products and services, can be the ones who heed the call in the battle against disinformation.
