In this week’s Borkowski Media Trends we apply Meltwater data to Justin Timberlake’s DWI crisis to demonstrate two home truths about the new conditions.
Negative publicity unfolds at mind-boggling speed and in uncontrollable volumes. BUT.. #PR Crises flare out quickly in the modern news cycle
Meme culture can accelerate this process by diluting negative publicity
“In the past week, 81% of non-neutral mentions of Timberlake in the media have been negative – that’s over 100,000 stories and significant social media posts. But it’s not all bad; crises these days don’t last long – overall mentions of Timberlake spiked at 132,000 on Wednesday but, as of Friday, have already dropped 93% to below 10,000.
And the comedy is undoubtedly distracting from the negativity; nine of the top 10 most shared links about Timberlake in the last week have been memes – with only the first significant share of his mugshot treating his arrest as anything more than a joke. If that doesn’t illustrate the trivial nature of the crisis, there’s also the small matter that the ‘ROFL’ emoji has been used in conjunction with Timberlake’s name over 2,000 more times than ‘DWI’ since the arrest.
While instructive, it’s important to note that it would have been very hard, if not impossible, for Timberlake to engineer a situation where a meme distracts the general public from his reputation crisis. Possibly the only major public figures who have done that successfully in recent times have been Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – and neither of them was able to swim against the serious undercurrent of their reputational issues forever. But it does show any errant celebrity worried about a career-ending scandal that the modern news cycle is short-lasting and easily distracted by frivolity...there's hope for us all.”
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#PR, #CrisisCommunications #Reputation #celebrity #reputation #riskmanagement #crisismanagement
