Reputation in a Post-Truth World
What would the impact on your business be if tomorrow morning a deepfake video of you announcing massive retrenchments and profit warnings went viral? My guess is a whole lot of stinky stuff hitting the fan. Sadly, however, this kind of reputation crisis is not impossible and also not improbable. Deepfake technology is becoming so mainstream that there are companies out there today offering to develop training courses for employees using fake footage of a company’s CEO.
The post-truth world that we live in has created a whole new myriad of risks, the greatest of which, in my opinion, is the distrust it has sown into the system. You literally can no longer believe your own eyes. So, where does this leave the practice of reputation management?
Determining who the heroes and villains are has become completely subjective, which means that companies and leaders need to work extra hard in every single one of their stakeholder engagements to instill their narrative in hearts and minds. Should the worst happen, the people on whom the business depends (employees, customers, investors, suppliers, etc) need to have a deep enough reservoir of truthiness to pull from when judging a piece of content to not automatically assume that it is real.
Truthiness, which was word of the year way back in 2006, was coined by satirist and TV talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who defined it as "truth that comes from the gut, not books". Little did he know then about how important the word would be today.
Of course it has all kinds of negative connotations – voters living in echo chambers and believing Russian bots, etc – but it also highlights how incredibly important the emotional connection you have with your stakeholder is. More than ever, reputation is everything. If they don’t implicitly buy in to your story, a damaging piece of fake news could do untold damage.
The only way to create this tacit trust is through purpose. If your business is really, truly, authentically a purpose-led business that is making a significant positive impact on the world either socially or environmentally (or both), and you have made the effort to share your story through meaningful stakeholder engagements, then you have far less to fear.
Purpose, sustainability and reputation management have to be approached strategically. It has to start with purpose. It has to make sense. And if done correctly, will not only save your bacon (or macon or soya burger), but will help you to create huge value – for all stakeholders.