If you’ve ever watched a movie that takes place in space (say, Star Wars or any of that ilk) you’ve experienced 2 things that make absolutely no sense in real Outer Space – but probably didn’t register as wrong with you at the time.
The first is sound. Every time there’s a battle between spaceships you hear lasers firing, explosions blasting, and engines booming. But sound requires a medium to travel through. Space is a vacuum. There would be no ‘pew pew pew! ka-booooom!‘ if it were a real space battle and not on film.
The second is a sense of there being a “down.”
When airplane battles first started being commonplace in wartime (WWI) it added a new dimension to the battle. Suddenly your opponent could be above, below, behind or anywhere else in relation to you. Pilots had to find new ways to battle effectively because the previous methods of warfare didn’t really allow your opponent to be *anywhere* in relation to you.
But there was one constant – down. The earth is always down. And that’s a pretty big constant. If you are in an airplane battle you have to know 2 things at all times: where the enemy is, and which way is down.
Fast forward to 20th century movie making. Time for the space battles. What did they use for the model? World War II battle footage. (It looks real to us because we, the audience, put a ‘down’ in the picture too. Bottom of the screen.)
To most of us here on Earth, it never really occurs to us that these films orient their ships, actors, and battles with a down. Unless of course one of them doesn’t – and then we notice. (The scene with the stewardess in 2001 walking up the wall comes to mind. It’s at 1:32 if you watch.)
So how does all this space talk relate to your brand? And what does this have to do with circling wagons?
It’s about assumptions.
The reason we have the metaphor of circling the wagons comes from a time when the only real attack could come from the same plane you were on. When westward-headed wagon trains in the middle of nowhere had no choice but to create a circle of the wagons and thereby create an artificial fort to defend themselves from attacks by Native Americans, robbers, brigands, and sometimes even just wildlife.
At that time? Danger just didn’t come from above. Sure, the occasional arrow made it over the top, but your main concern was keeping the guys on your level out.
But somehow that metaphor didn’t die out like it should’ve when warfare changed to include men in flying vehicles. Nor did it when it turned out that when you’re out in space there is no “down” just a 360° sphere of possible attack vectors.
It should’ve. There really should’ve been a new metaphor for each one of those realizations. But there weren’t.
Why?
Because businesses still weren’t acknowledging that serious attacks could come from any direction. There’s still a persistent mindset that your biggest threat is the guy on your level. That one guy with a blog? What can he do? And why should you be worried about Google – they’re huge, why would they want to steal your idea?
Look up, look down, look out, and look inward – the next big threat to your brand can be anywhere.
You have two good defenses: 1) Speed of response to the threat, and 2) tailoring a response to effectively combat the nature of your threat.
Speed is critical.
For some bizarre reason, we’re still pretending that there’s a “work week” that generally kludges around Monday-to-Friday, from 8 am to 5 pm. Sure no one actually works those hours. But there’s a pretense that says that “traditional business hours are these.” Only we now live in a 24-7-365 world. The only people who keep bankers hours? are bankers. And even they don’t. Because there’s financial exchanges that take place on the banks computers late at night that shift money from one continent to another.
Gone are the days where you gave up at night and went home and hit it hard the next day. Now we live in the world where there’s a team working on it round-the-clock and everyone is getting updates on their cellphones and getting on crisis calls at 2 am if that’s what it takes. Weekends are simply the days that public schools aren’t open.
So who in their right mind would think that the next attack on their brand will be scheduled at 9:30 am on Monday, and will arrive in the form of a polite glove-slap from a rival company? The next attack on your brand will occur Saturday at 11 pm – because that’s when people are hanging out on the Internet. That’s when they find something to be upset about. That’s when they share it like wildfire. Saturday. 11 pm. Never mind with time zone – it’s whichever one is least convenient for you.
If you are waiting until Monday morning at 8 a.m. to find out about it and to start to address it? You’re already too late.
Responses have to be tailored to the threat.
That just makes so much sense, doesn’t it? I mean, you want to have the response that will do the most to offset the damage and defuse the situation.
So, it takes some analysis: where’s the attack coming from? Is it one guy with a blog? Or is it a huge company coming after you? What is the nature of the attack? quality? reliability? character? First you have to figure out which direction it’s coming from, what’s being attacked and what an appropriate response is.
Does this mean you need some spin doctor sitting around waiting for an 11th hour text alerting him to spring into action and mobilize the legal department?
Hardly.
It does mean that you have to have at least one person who owns “social media crisis response.” That person has to be empowered to analyze the response as it comes it (this should more likely than not be coming in because you have a good listening/monitoring system set up) and make decisions on how to respond to it in the initial phases.
If you’re still back there living in “circle the wagons” mode – I guess you could call this your wagon master. But if you are? You’re going to need to know that s/he is way more than a wagonmaster. More like your battlemaster.
And if your battlemaster tells you that s/he’s missing your 9a status meeting because s/he was up all weekend trying to keep your brand from doing a nose-dive? Just go with it and be thankful that there’s someone out there who is willing to be awakened at 2 a.m. and not call you and everyone of your c-level execs into a crisis call. It’s better to have you represent him/her at the 9a status meeting with: “the attack came from this vector, it was of X nature, it was dealt with by A, B, and C. At this point, it’s no longer a story of interest to anyone in mainstream media or most of the internet media sources.”
Trust me, it’s much more fun when you handle it that way.
