Reputation Strategy Is Not Universal Vindication!!

When an allegation is made, particularly one which is false, defamatory or calculated to injure reputation, the instinct is often immediate. Respond, correct the record and vindicate one’s name. That instinct is understandable because a false statement feels like an attack upon truth itself and, accordingly, silence can feel uncomfortably close to surrender. However, reputation strategy is frequently weakened by the assumption that every allegation must be answered and every critic corrected.

The better question is more difficult.

Who are we trying to persuade?

Three audiences

In recent times, consequent upon a defamatory allegation made about me, I was annoyed and furious. As a lawyer, the natural instinct was to vindicate my good name, rights with which I was well acquainted and mechanisms in which I was equally well versed. My then Managing Partner offered a more useful way of thinking about reputation. It was a piece of counsel which, she told me, had in turn been given to her by a former manager.

She said that there are, broadly speaking, three categories of people.

The first

Those who know you sufficiently well that a rumour, without more, is unlikely to displace the view they have already formed.

The second

Those who are predisposed to accept the allegation and may continue to do so notwithstanding explanation, evidence or rebuttal.

The third

Those who do not know you sufficiently well to have formed a settled view, or who remain largely unaware of the controversy.

That tip ought not remain confined in that board room. It is particularly instructive in a commercial setting, especially for SMEs, founders, professionals and high profile individuals whose reputations may be concentrated among relatively small but important audiences. The distinction exposes a fundamental weakness in reactive communication because not every audience is equally capable of persuasion and, importantly, not every audience matters equally to the outcome. The first group may require little reassurance because its perception is already anchored in experience. The second may consume unlimited time, evidence and communication while remaining entirely unmoved. The third may be the most strategically important precisely because its perception remains capable of being influenced.

It follows that the purpose of a response should not be universal vindication. It should be the protection of the audience whose perception matters.

The critic is not the audience

That distinction has an important historical parallel. Theodore Roosevelt understood that criticism does not acquire strategic importance merely because it has been uttered. His famous observation that “it is not the critic who counts” is often read as a statement about courage, but in a reputational setting it contains a more useful discipline. The critic is not necessarily the audience, and the existence of criticism does not, without more, make the criticism strategically material. Roosevelt’s further observation that the occasion must demand the speech sharpens the point. A response should not be triggered merely because something capable of being answered has been said. The occasion must first justify the intervention.

Has the criticism crossed the threshold from irritation into consequence?

The materiality question

That is the materiality question. A criticism may be offensive, inaccurate or plainly unfair and yet remain commercially insignificant. Conversely, a seemingly minor allegation may become strategically important where it reaches an audience capable of altering its behaviour toward the organisation.

That is where reputation strategy becomes a matter of judgment rather than emotion. A person who has been wronged naturally wants the wrongdoer corrected. A business whose name has been attacked may feel compelled to rebut every point. A professional may feel that silence concedes ground. However, the strategic question is not whether the allegation deserves an answer in the abstract. It is whether an answer advances the position of the person or organisation thereafter.

Defence or distribution

This distinction is critical in the age of social media. A criticism with little traction may be seen by a few dozen people and disappear within hours. A corporate rebuttal, however, may elevate the same allegation into a formal controversy, expose it to customers who were previously unaware of it and create a permanent searchable record of a dispute which might otherwise have died a natural death.

What begins as reputation defence can therefore become reputation distribution. The response has not corrected the problem so much as enlarged the audience.

Diagnosis before response

That is why diagnosis must precede response. Hanlon’s Razor assists with the first stage. Do not attribute to malice that which may adequately be explained by incompetence, misunderstanding, frustration or poor judgment. A hostile social media post may indeed be part of a deliberate smear campaign, but it may equally be an angry customer, an impulsive rant, a misunderstanding or somebody whose principal objective is attention. Occam’s Razor adds a further discipline. Do not construct a more elaborate explanation than the evidence supports. Taken together, the two principles encourage restraint in diagnosis. They require us to resist the temptation to elevate every criticism into a campaign, every critic into an adversary and every adverse comment into a reputational crisis.

Thereafter comes the strategic process of elimination. That means eliminating explanations which the evidence does not support, identifying audiences which are commercially irrelevant and discarding responses which are likely to create more harm than benefit. Only then does the organisation arrive at the question which actually matters, namely what intervention, if any, best protects the position thereafter.

What happened, who is speaking, what credibility do they possess, who is listening and does that audience matter commercially. Is the allegation gaining traction. Is it capable of changing behaviour. Will a response correct the record or merely amplify the controversy. Will silence communicate confidence or create an information vacuum.

Those questions should precede deployment because response without diagnosis is merely reaction.

Legal entitlement and strategy

There is also a legal dimension. A defamatory allegation may give rise to a clear legal remedy. A business or individual may be perfectly entitled to demand removal, correction, an undertaking, damages or, where appropriate, commence proceedings. But legal entitlement and reputational strategy answer different questions.

The existence of a cause of action answers whether a remedy is available at law. It does not, however, answer whether deploying that remedy is strategically advantageous.

The legal question may be whether the statement is actionable. The strategic question is whether deploying the available remedy improves the position thereafter. A strongly worded solicitor’s letter may secure immediate removal, but it may equally be published by the recipient and become the next chapter in the controversy. Proceedings may ultimately vindicate reputation while ensuring that the allegation remains associated with the claimant for considerably longer than the original publication would otherwise have survived. None of that suggests that legal intervention should be avoided. It means that the existence of a remedy does not determine when, how or whether it should be deployed.

The response must serve an objective. That objective may be correction, reassurance, containment, deterrence, removal or vindication. In some circumstances, it may be the deliberate decision not to elevate something which does not yet matter. The important point is that communication should follow objective rather than emotion.

Why this matters for SMEs

This is particularly important for SMEs because reputation is often concentrated not merely in audience size but in stakeholder dependency. A smaller business may depend upon a relatively narrow customer base, one principal financier, a small number of suppliers, several key professional relationships or a local commercial community. A reputational issue which reaches one material stakeholder may therefore be more consequential than a much larger volume of irrelevant social media commentary. Reach alone is therefore an inadequate measure of reputational risk.

The proper question is not simply how many people have seen the allegation. It is who has seen it, what they are likely to conclude and what they may do thereafter.

The third audience

That is why the third audience is so important. Those who already know and trust the organisation may not require persuasion. Those determined to believe the worst may never be persuaded. The commercially significant battleground may instead be those who have not yet formed a settled view. Accordingly, the critic and the audience are not necessarily the same person. A business may not need to convince the individual who made the allegation. It may need to reassure the customer reading it, the employee wondering whether it is true, the regulator observing the response, the financier reassessing risk or the prospective client deciding whether the organisation remains trustworthy.

That is a very different communications objective. It also explains why restraint can sometimes be more powerful than rebuttal. There are circumstances in which a response merely gives an insignificant critic the institutional attention they were seeking. There are circumstances in which silence denies the allegation oxygen. There are equally circumstances in which silence itself becomes damaging because commercially important stakeholders reasonably expect an answer. The difficulty lies in knowing the difference.

That is why reputation strategy cannot be reduced to “respond quickly” or “never feed the trolls.” Both are slogans. Neither is strategy. Strategy requires objective, audience and consequence.

Rodney Jack BL

Founder, RJ Strategic Advisory

Rodney's background in law, business, cyber-risk and compliance informs RJSA's approach to governance, data risk, communications and crisis response. About the founder

RJ Strategic Advisory, Reputation Strategy and Crisis Communications

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