What happens when someone is engaged in a deliberate effort to harm your organization’s reputation and disrupt your operations?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Consultant Bray Wheeler, flip their nearly fifty years of combined experience around and talk about how they would conduct an offensive reputation management campaign against an organization.

Topics discussed include social media, protests, pre-operational surveillance, executive protection, event planning, and more.

Related Blog Posts & Episodes

* Crisis Communications 101: Good Response Tactics

* How to Avoid a Public Relations Crisis

* Your Reputation Command Center: The Need for a Rapid Response Process

* Your Reputation Command Center: Social Media Monitoring

* Episode #2:  The McDonald’s Radar Screen

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath.

Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler consultant at Bryghtpath.

Bryan Strawser: Like every episode, we do we’re almost always talking about how we can protect companies, how you can make your organization more resilient, how can you deal with disruptions, how can you detect and deal with threats that are coming at you? This episode is going to do something a little different and we’re going to talk about the other end of the equation and that is if Bray and I took all of our experience in dealing with the things we just talked about and we flipped it around and decided to come after your company, what does that offensive reputation management campaign start to look like? What if we decided that we were going to come after you as activists, what would we do?

Bray Wheeler: I think it’s important to preface to, as you said, that it’s offensive reputational campaigns, it’s not necessarily a violent attack that’s-

Bryan Strawser: Let’s talk about bombing your facility another day.

Bray Wheeler: It’s a different podcast.

Bryan Strawser: Just kidding, that’s not really the business we’re in.

Bray Wheeler: No.

Bryan Strawser: I’ll just start with something simple because I’ve been thinking about this particular one for I feel like decades and that is we’ve talked before in a couple of episodes about managing protests and how do you deal with people who want to protest at your location or get into your building and do some things.

Bryan Strawser: I remember almost every protest I ever dealt with, we knew it was coming because we had a good radar screen that showed us that this was going to happen, and 20 minutes before you were supposed to be there, we just locked the doors and we routed employees to a secured entrance and you could come protest and stand outside and press your face up into the glass all that you want, but you weren’t going to get in and disrupt the business.

Bryan Strawser: It’s not hard to make sure that doesn’t happen simply by having some operational security, getting your group of protesters together clandestinely, realizing you don’t need 200-300 people to make your point and get people into the lobby of a ...