The Blood Sport of Picking Off CEOs

Trust-Us-We-Care-style corporate advertising won’t be the antidote to the Quick Little Kill because it will only inflame a furious—and broke—public, which doesn’t want good capitalist manners, they want their money back.

When it comes to online damage control, there are both challenges and opportunities. Despite hucksterish “online reputation management” programs, reputations are much easier to destroy online than they are to repair. Think back a few weeks to the plummeting stock prices of Apple after the false Steve Jobs heart attack rumor and UAL when an out-of-date earnings report was somehow re-released. Sorry ‘bout that. Heh.

The internet is a lethal tool for the Quick Little Kill because of anonymity and the unfettered access afforded to motivated parties, the lack of gatekeepers and First Amendment legal protections, and the conviction that any attack on a capital enterprise is noble and any defense is corrupt.

While I reject the canard that “a crisis is an opportunity” (I doubt the accused witches in Salem were experiencing spiritual growth as they were pressed to death with huge slabs of granite) there are venues within which to hit back. Counterintuitively, many such efforts will be anchored in a concept that is universally sneered at for its futility: Preaching to the choir.

Martha Stewart rallied supporters during her legal troubles with a steady stream of online communications providing updates on everything from her status in prison to how her products were weathering the affair. Did it persuade me to cheer for her early release? No, but I wasn’t her audience.

Drug companies under fire are using corporate websites to speak to patient communities that want information directly relevant to their conditions versus the Quick Little Kills they’d read about in the Bugle. Does the world come to love the pharmaceutical behemoth? Nope, but that wasn’t on the table anyway.

I have counseled companies facing public anxiety over product contamination to post video footage of their manufacturing process online so consumers can see for themselves how safety controls are handled.

There are no ironclad rules to counter the Quick Little Kill, but I would advise dispensing with utopian fantasies about proselytizing to one’s natural enemies or an amorphous public that isn’t listening. The name of the game is damage control, not damage disappearance. And while communications venues, especially online, are expanding exponentially, those who may matter most encompass a much smaller universe.