Fighting a smear campaign
Highly damaging comments about your brand, professional activities or your private life, whether founded or not, can impact significantly on your media presence, by influencing and dominating it; as a result, your brand image may be significantly undermined in the long term.
Beating the detractors by minimising the impact of media attacks launched against you means regarding PR crisis management as a veritable digital guerrilla warfare system. Traditional models have had their time. Rumours spread by third parties against brands and public figures occur regularly on the Internet and in the traditional media, and must be stopped by deploying powerful countermeasures and implementing PR crisis management strategies. For us, each mission is a public relations war, a cyberwar.
Companies and individuals find it extremely difficult to combat new types of smear campaign on the Internet. This is because they have not yet developed the tools and expertise needed to engage in an effective multi-channel fight in the extensive digital arena. PR agencies, law firms and economic intelligence firms are not yet able, alone, to develop manipulation and cyber-manipulation strategies. It is only by bringing together all of these experts and underpinning their work with high-level IT and research expertise that effective action can be taken.
The substantial fluctuation in the speed and the volume of information that needs to be processed in the event of an attack on a brand or an individual requires the simultaneous deployment of a range of structures and specialists who will be able to take action in various domains against the initiators of campaigns that use smear tactics and disinformation to destabilise their victims, engender a loss of turnover, and attempt to dishonour the person, etc. Hington Klarsey is able to take action across the globe and in all languages against the various forms of media attack.
Experience has shown that the most effective model in combating large-scale smear campaigns is as follows: just as the initiators of an attack are highly organised, any counter attack must be underpinned by cells of interfaced expertise and skill to allow action to be taken swiftly and effectively at a local level against the initiators of smear and disinformation campaigns. The use of legally distinct and separate entities to protect customers also allows Hington Klarsey to minimise the risk of attacks against its own interests and prevent complications in any premeditated action taken on behalf of its customers.
Beyond the basic need to protect a customer’s interests, the decision of whether or not to take on a particular case is based on the analysis of various models on the one hand, and observation by our surveillance agents (in real time) of the system being used to orchestrate the campaign on the other. Hington Klarsey adopts a realistic approach to this process: estimates of the potential costs incurred due to the damage to a customer’s reputation must be accurate and calculated in relation to the customer’s budget; this will determine whether further action will be taken.
Hington Klarsey has at its disposal a pool of highly-skilled experts which, together, are capable of acting effectively against most detractors. We provide an interface between PR agents, Journalists, Political advisors, IT experts, Researchers and Lawyers to inform, understand, anticipate and counter media attacks launched against its customers.