Secrets to building trust; how two banks went bust

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This podcast helps you find out how senior executives, just like you, are building value through marketing.  

 
00:14 
Dom Hawes 
Each episode gives you an insider's perspective.  

 
00:16 
Dom Hawes 
Of critical marketing issues, why our guests make the decision they make, how they structure their marketing departments, how they build and measure value, and also what they see coming down the road. This is a show about culture and society. Today we're going to talk a lot about reputation, social media, the threats and opportunities it brings.  

 
00:38 
Dom Hawes 
If you like, it is the S in your pest analysis. Now, we've covered the risks and opportunities social media brings companies like yours in episodes of this and other podcasts before, notably into the Echo Chamber on the Marketing Trek podcast. And I'm going to link that for you in the show notes. But today we are joined by Charlotte Lander director, social media, corporate affairs, brand and marketing at Standard Chartered Bank. Now, Charlotte was one of the co-authors of a peer reviewed paper in the Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing and has recently conducted analysis of social media's role in the sudden and dramatic demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse. And with this new evidence and analysis in mind, we are going to bring you fresh ideas and best practice for social media as a reputation management tool in the context of today's culture and societal norms.  

 
01:31 
Dom Hawes 
In the first half of today's show.  

 
01:33 
Dom Hawes 
We'Re going to hear about the two.  

 
01:34 
Dom Hawes 
Financial institutions I just mentioned and we're going to look at how social media impacted them at the time of crisis. We're also going to look at how one CEO used social channels to communicate with authenticity, passion and empathy during a.  

 
01:49 
Dom Hawes 
Fatality crisis that caused life changing upset to those affected.  

 
01:53 
Dom Hawes 
It's a tragic case, but this CEO helped those families through the crisis and we're going to hear his story a little bit later. Then in the second half of today's show, we're going to dig into practical advice and best practice. But before we do that, I'm always fascinated to hear what changes senior marketers have witnessed in how marketing actually gets done.  

 
02:13 
Dom Hawes 
Normally I hear about how it's all metrics now and short term performance based activity, which kind of, by the way, is sales. Nothing wrong with that.  

 
02:21 
Dom Hawes 
Of course, we're all in sales at the end of the day, even if  we're not deal closers, we all have our part to play. But I meet a lot of marketers who feel that if they're not closing, they're failing. Now, Charlotte is not one of those. I asked her how she'd seen marketing change over the years.  

 
02:39 
Charlotte Lander 
Over the last few years, everything's become much more digital and much more focused. I think there's been a shift from performance marketing to really people understanding the value of brand and trust and how you must connect the two sitting in social media. There's definitely been a higher demand from the business and I can see that with peers and other brands as well that getting much more active. Activating your senior leaders on social and that importance of visibility and your senior leader building trust for a brand has definitely been a large shift. There was a report out last month that now the majority of footsie 100 senior leaders are active on LinkedIn.  

 
03:23 
Dom Hawes 
Do you think they call it personal branding or do you think they avoid that?  

 
03:26 
Charlotte Lander 
I think they avoid that.  

 
03:27 
Dom Hawes 
But it is, right?  

 
03:28 
Charlotte Lander 
It is, yeah, it is. But I think they think probably more from a business sense, what is the value for the business, which I get.  

 
03:37 
Dom Hawes 
So when I'm talking about personal branding, I'm not talking about that cynically, I'm meaning that their personal brand is inextricably linked with the business and that familiarity is one of the ways that you build trust. And so the more familiar an audience is with that leader, the more they can build trust and the more they can benefit the business.  

 
03:55 
Charlotte Lander 
Absolutely. And people don't like trust. Fall in love with objects and your brand is an object until you can humanize it and give it humanlike qualities. And your senior leader is one of the best ways to put a face to the brand to start humanizing it.  

 
04:12 
Dom Hawes 
We're seeing quite a lot of that at the moment, where senior leaders are coming to us, asking us to help them with full leadership. Not just which topics are trending or which topics we think might be important in a year's time through our labs, but then also in helping them structure how they go about building that brand for the benefit of their business. So it's a very interesting area, I think.  

 
04:30 
Charlotte Lander 
Absolutely. And how you bring the purpose and the culture along with it, which you'll see that the higher results you get from social media content is that more purpose, value driven content over the thought leadership pieces.  

 
04:43 
Dom Hawes 
Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. And when we first got together I said brilliant, this is a podcast about reputation management, but it's about much more than that. I think this is a podcast about.  

 
04:53 
Dom Hawes 
Society and culture, and what we've just talked about now plays into that. Because if you go back 20 years, most senior leaders, okay, they might have wanted to be quoted in a trade magazine, but they wouldn't want to be seen to be actively promoting their thoughts, ideals, or anything, frankly, on what is now social media. And that's a really big culture change I think, that we've seen over the last few years. But we're going to talk about some very specific examples today.  

 
05:19 
Dom Hawes 
We're going to talk about Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse and we're going to talk about the disappearance of Indonesia Air Asia flight eight five one. And we're going to do those specifically because we have changed. Everything is more transparent, everything now is real time and part of marketing's role is to make sure that their leadership is prepared to actually lead when things start to go wrong. And you've done quite a lot of work into this area, haven't you, Shauna?  

 
05:43 
Charlotte Lander 
I have. And I think whenever you're looking at reputation or how know maybe should perform, you need to think of the most extreme examples, which these cases are.  

 
05:55 
Dom Hawes 
Let's dive into Silicon Valley bank. Now. You've given us the headline. They sent out a request for additional capital. Two days later it went wrong. Tell us the story from start to finish.  

 
06:06 
Charlotte Lander 
So the request went out, conversations started to run, and social media was the place that those conversations were happening. And that happened two days before traditional media started to pick up. Those conversations were happening between institution and retail investors. Journalists started to get involved and it was when that moved to depositors that the real problems started to happen.  

 
06:30 
Dom Hawes 
Back in the day, those conversations might have happened on Bloomberg or Know, a bulletin board or somewhere that wasn't in the public eye. Were these conversations happening on public social media channels like Twitter or X, whatever we call it now, and LinkedIn?  

 
06:44 
Charlotte Lander 
Yeah, they were absolutely happening in the public space. We know that they were also happening within WhatsApp part of one of the issues that were underlying for Silicon Valley Bank was a lack of diversity in depositors. They had a huge number of people in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. So whilst we know that WhatsApp also played a role, obviously you can't measure it. So we focused on what can you measure within social media. But those conversations were happening and they were happening publicly, which is what we've been able to track. I assume they've also happened privately. But again, in terms of measurement, that's difficult to quantify.  

 
07:19 
Dom Hawes 
And the leap from social media to mainstream media is a big one and a dangerous one, particularly if the journalists let's be blunt on social media, people have their personal agenda to drive in mainstream media. They have the sale of either advertising eyeballs or attraction of eyeballs or copies to sell. So they tend to be more sensationalist. They tend to look for angle that's going to shock, surprise, upset, disappoint or whatever. So that leap from social to mainstream media, was that the final death knell for the bank, or do you think that the momentum on social media was enough to bring it down anyway?  

 
07:55 
Charlotte Lander 
I think it was the momentum on social media, as I said, it started two days before and you can see that it continues to peak even when the media coverage is starting. We then enter a weekend and the media coverage declines. But actually those social media trends continue. And it was within that period that the conversation obviously among depositors trust was lost. And it's no longer Northern Rock situation that we saw with queues around the bank. People have the ability to withdraw from the palm of their hands.  

 
08:26 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, I mean, the speed of everything seems to have increased with digitization, particularly, I was about to say particularly since COVID But the ability to do all of this has been there from before then. But I think there's kind of a mentality shift now. We're talking about behavior earlier. One of the side effects of this digitization and increase in speed is we're more herd like now than we used to be, I think.  

 
08:45 
Charlotte Lander 
And I think it's that herd heuristic that obviously caused the run on the bank. And you can see that it's that sort of the speed of which this was communicated on social media. And I know we're going to talk about Credit Suisse, but in both instances of Silicon Valley and Credit Suisse, there was missed opportunities to counter the narrative. And I think a lot of brands, and I'm not saying it was in this particular case, but a lot of brands wait until it hits that tier one media to take it seriously. And what we're seeing with this example is actually there are certain criterias that get hit within social media, then you need to start taking this seriously.  

 
09:23 
Dom Hawes 
But to do that you need to be listening. And my experience certainly is maybe consumer brands are different, but certainly not a lot of B to B brands are doing social listening and they're just as vulnerable as consumer brands listening.  

 
09:34 
Charlotte Lander 
And having that early detection is absolutely vital. This would have changed a trigger in the velocity in terms of that conversation that should have been warning those brands early on that actually something is happening, do I need to pay attention to it and what do I need to start doing off the back of that?  

 
09:52 
Dom Hawes 
It seems to me there's a fundamental failure here in risk analysis as well, that most mature businesses I don't mean mature by big, I mean mature by not panicking about being startups. Once you have the time to actually consider business, rather than just do it, we'll go through a risk management process and part of that risk management should be what are the trigger events that could cause failure. And someone like an SVB or any financial institution I'm imagining should be going through some kind of risk analysis to say, hey, where are weak and how are we going to mitigate it? Maybe they hadn't analyzed that they had such a concentrated customer base and they hadn't necessarily identified that as a weakness. But once the run starts and if you don't have a trigger, if you.  

 
10:31 
Dom Hawes 
Don't have an early warning system, I mean, the inevitability of what happened probably could have been foreseen, potentially, yeah, but.  

 
10:38 
Charlotte Lander 
It is that speed. If you do not pre plan, if you do not look at what are those triggers because in some of these cases it's neutral facts that also spread. It doesn't necessarily need to be negative sentiment. So it's what are those triggers that start alerting your systems, that kick those frameworks in place?  

 
10:59 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, so I think what was really interesting, I'd assumed that there was a Pylon, which implies negativity in the posts. You're saying that wasn't the case, correct?  

 
11:07 
Charlotte Lander 
Yeah. The factual and neutral statements had as big an impact as negative sentiment. So it wasn't necessarily that people just piling onto the bandwagon and sharing negative news. Actually, there was a lot of truth in what they were saying and that spread as quickly as that negative commentary.  

 
11:24 
Dom Hawes 
Now let's move on to the case of Credit Suisse. Tell me the story of what happened to Credit Suisse.  

 
11:29 
Charlotte Lander 
The issues with Credit Suisse happened just weeks after Silicon Valley Bank. Now, the issues with the bank had been reported for well over a year, but the trigger came from a journalist that seemed to confirm the rumors surrounding the bank. And that journalist didn't even name the bank. The Tweet was a credible source, tells me a major international investment bank is on the brink. And that was enough to cement the idea that Credit Suisse was in trouble. And again, start those conversations online, which again led to obviously the eventual takeover of UBS.  

 
12:05 
Dom Hawes 
So in this instance, there's a tinderbox SVB's just gone down, everyone's nervous. I remember at the time, everyone thought the banking system was on another brink of collapse. There are plenty of people with memory of what happened last time. The banks nearly collapsed in eight nine. So there was a perfect environment and at that stage it wasn't named, but that was enough. And everyone knew. I guess the elephant in the room was that everyone knew which bank was being talked about.  

 
12:29 
Charlotte Lander 
Yes.  

 
12:30 
Dom Hawes 
And that lack of confidence, that lack of trust was enough.  

 
12:32 
Dom Hawes 
Okay. That's financial services sector. And really interesting, I think we're going to come back in the second half of the show to look at how  people can get themselves ready or set up to protect themselves against this kind of thing. But there's one other case that we want to look at too. Barring recent incidents, which I guess we're going to have to talk about too, it really plays to the importance of senior leadership being, firstly, social media savvy, but B, having a presence and having trust built on social media. And that is the disaster around the disappearance of Indonesia Air Asia flight eight five one. Talk to me about Tony Fernandez and just give us a feel for what happened and how he handled it.  

 
13:12 
Charlotte Lander 
Yeah, and I just first want to say why I picked this example, because I think when you think about reputational risk or what's the worst case scenario, the collapse of your business is definitely one of those the next is fatalities. And unfortunately, that's what happened in this instance. But Tony Fernandez is the CEO of AirAsia and until recently, earlier this year, he was also the major shareholder of QPR. He was very prolific on Twitter X and shared his views very candidly. So, in good times, what happened with the flight? It was a flight from Indonesia to Singapore that got into technical difficulties and unfortunately ended up in the Java Sea, killing all 162 people on board. Now, when you have a fatality in an airline business, that is a make or break situation, do people trust that you've got the situation in hand?  

 
14:09 
Charlotte Lander 
Will they fly with you again? And very quickly, what Tony did as the CEO was be very present. Within hours, he was talking to families of those impacted. He was making statements about getting to the bottom of what their commitment was in terms of finding out what had happened and doing everything that they can possible to help those families and friends.  

 
14:33 
Dom Hawes 
It's a horrendous event what happened to the families and the crew. So I'm not going to talk about Tony's recent LinkedIn forays maybe until the second half. We're going to put some space between that. But if you were going to look at those three cases in the round at this stage and say, this is the case we're presenting, what are the takeaways that listeners should be thinking about from those three events when they're thinking about reputation management, particularly given today's culture.  

 
15:03 
Charlotte Lander 
So it's having a credible and authentic leader front and know they can express emotions that a corporate brand can't. And we saw that in the AirAsia example, tony Fernandez actually got positive press coverage, whereas earlier in the year there was a Malaysia airline crash and they were criticized for being incompetent, miscommunication, not sharing the information that was so desperately needed at that time. That need for information, it's also the ability to share instant but factual updates. That speed is absolutely essential here, but you need to ensure that your facts are correct to stay credible, either as a business or as a senior leader. The speed at which you do things is hugely important. You've alluded it to it slightly, but the controversy in having kind of a big personality and big figures now, not everyone is going to be a Tony or an Elon.  

 
16:03 
Charlotte Lander 
So when you think about senior leaders, it is always really useful to have a plan about what they will and won't talk about. And in a crisis, actually, how do you involve the CEO in that situation? What are they comfortable with? What position will they take and what information do they need in order to do that? So having a plan in place is hugely beneficial.  

 
16:30 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, let's take a breather there for a minute or two and take stock. I was interested to hear Charlotte's opening observations when she said that she's seen a shift from performance marketing to understanding the value of brand. And I can see that might well be the case in financial services, which in the main is a mature industry where winning means churning customers away from an incumbent. Why? Well, A, because that's easier if you've built trust first and brands build trust. But also B, the more mature a market, the harder product differentiation is. So service becomes an important lever in competing. I'm not sure other markets have yet grasped the value of brand in B two B. It's a growing discussion and I was interested to see Wonderman Thompson announce more of a move into B 2 B.  

 
17:19 
Dom Hawes 
With a report listing the hundred most influential B2B brands in the world. Now, a few days later, of course, Wonderman Thompson, the last relic of JWT.  

 
17:28 
Dom Hawes 
One of the greatest ever names in advertising, became VML. And it's really sad to see such a great name become a TLA. A TLA is a three letter acronym. BGW. Anyhow wonderman thompson. Now, VML tells us that inspiring brands are five times more likely to be a buyer's first choice. I read the report. I didn't like it.  

 
17:50 
Dom Hawes 
I don't believe that statistic.  

 
17:51 
Dom Hawes 
But I do believe that brand marketing matters more than most think it does. Why? VML talks about inspiration, I get that. But to my mind, Charlotte is bang on the money. It's all about trust. Charlotte referenced a recent report that said the majority of FTSE hundred senior leaders are now active on LinkedIn. Why is that? Well, your brand, she said to them, is an object until you can humanize it and give it humanlike qualities. So why are those leaders active? Well, they're humanizing their brands. Why are they doing that? They're building trust. Why are they doing that? Because trust is the essential foundation upon which lasting relationships are built. You know, a corporation can cock up, actually, we all will at some stage. The winners, though, are those that have earned trust, and the losers are those who haven't. You need to build trust.  

 
18:49 
Dom Hawes 
You can advertise heavily to bring personality to your brand and try to build trust. That way, if you have a budget, do it. You can also build humanity into your business by giving people a voice. And the communication channel for that is social media.  

 
19:04 
Dom Hawes 
We covered those three cases in the first half and I'm going to mention at least one of them in the wrap up later. But for now, it's all very well saying businesses can build brand trust and.  

 
19:14 
Dom Hawes 
Authenticity through social media, but I wanted to find out how many of them are actually set up to do that. Here's how part two went.  

 
19:23 
Dom Hawes 
Charlotte, in your experience, how many companies have got dedicated social media, either strategy or communication teams these days?  

 
19:30 
Charlotte Lander 
When I've spoken to some of my peers, it's often wrapped into the wider marketing approach and they don't actually have a specific social media strategy. Yes, the two need to align, but social media is such a fast paced, moving environment. I think you do really need to have a clear strategy for each platform that you're going to use as a brand as well as how you listen within that social context.  

 
19:53 
Dom Hawes 
Social media as a service channel is not remotely new. We all know that Ryanair there are the kind of celebrities of social media service who've built kind of witty and very characterful reputations. The McKinsey recently published a paper, Social Media as a Service Differentiator, where they're talking about the basics of the workflow and basic preparedness. I'm not sure it was an earth shattering paper, but it is useful, I think, for businesses to take a more structured approach to service on social and I think you've got some specific views about that.  

 
20:23 
Charlotte Lander 
It was brand watch that sort of estimated that 67% of people now look to social media for issues resolution. And for me social care is hugely important in terms of how you continue to build the micro conversions of trust. So part of trust is how a brand makes somebody feel and if you are doing all you can in marketing and communications to make them feel one way and when they are a customer, your relationship managers or your customer care team are letting the side down. That's a huge problem for marketing teams, which is why I believe that McKinsey report tried to align the two, suggesting that they need to work in partnership or even have a social media team sat within the customer service team. And we're seeing that when you look at some brands have really invested heavily in their customer service approach.  

 
21:17 
Charlotte Lander 
You've mentioned Ryanair. If you think about innocent drinks, they're fun, they're allowing the brands to kind of the tone of voice, the emotion to come through in that way of communication. But potentially not enough brands are investing in the training and the skills needed for their customer service teams or their relationships managers to support those clients.  

 
21:38 
Dom Hawes 
On social media it's so important the way a company behaves, that is their brand, the way they behave and the way they interact with their customers. And I'm seeing maybe it's a factor in the downturn, but I'm seeing more and more businesses right now cutting their support. It's everywhere I look at the moment where there used to be companies who were good at service and support, particularly on social. Now you're communicating into an empty chamber. Talked about Ryanair being a good example. Easyjet is a dreadful example. Try and get service from Easyjet.  

 
22:07 
Dom Hawes 
We're a digital airline where you're not on digital channels.  

 
22:10 
Dom Hawes 
But that service side is really important to me. And you mentioned just before the break that CEOs, sorry, CEO, the leadership. It's important that leadership are seen to have a presence on social too. I know we've talked about briefly how that makes a difference when times are tough, but do you think there's a case maybe for the social media frontline being visited by senior leaders in good times as well?  

 
22:35 
Charlotte Lander 
Absolutely. I'm a huge believer in advocacy and the power of your senior leaders to share that thought. Leadership. The data backs it up. So Edelman's Trust Barometer is showing that the cycle of distrust is growing. But what's useful is that although who you trust is shrinking, you're much more likely to trust your friends, your colleagues, your co worker, but also your CEO, more so than journalists, more so than government. So it's really important that now people are focusing more on beliefs and values. They're investing based on them, they're joining organizations based on them, and they're buying based on those beliefs and values that your leadership is showcasing those values for an organization. And that's only going to become ever more important as we look to younger generations like Gen Z.  

 
23:29 
Dom Hawes 
We talked in part one about the speed with which existential crises in the case of SVB and Credit Suisse blew up. And it kind of means to me that every company probably needs to have a crisis plan in place. And the crisis plans that many companies have, a lot of companies will do it. Their communications teams will be putting them through crisis scenarios where they'll be giving them dummy interviews with journalists. This very studio is built partly for that purpose, to simulate an aggressive journalist interview. But it's not just journalists. In fact, it's not even journalists that most businesses need to worry about now.  

 
24:03 
Dom Hawes 
Because as we saw before, there's an iceberg thing going on. Social media is under the surface, the momentum builds there, and it's only when it breaks the surface that a lot of people become aware of it.  

 
24:13 
Dom Hawes 
So social media planning surely has to be part of a crisis playbook. Talk to me a little bit about how you think businesses should be preparing themselves.  

 
24:22 
Charlotte Lander 
It needs to be part of those wider crisis frameworks. But I think you need a specific playbook and framework for social media because it's the speed with which that information flows that you don't want to be caught on the hop. You need to pre plan a lot of that. So thinking about how you identify potential issues in social media, you're thinking language topics, how are you going to do that? How are you going to monitor and then review that as well within social media, what do you have access to, what do you don't? That evaluation is hugely valuable and can be played by that social media team to play into the expertise that you have within reputational risk or media or communications teams.  

 
25:06 
Charlotte Lander 
So absolutely you need that framework that takes you through from identification, evaluation, and then the continued monitoring of that situation in social media, even long after that situation potentially has resolved or sort of ebbed away, there's going to be some particular reputational risks that may rear its ugly head again. And how do you make sure that you are monitoring for that? It's also very important to have a playbook to understand when you should respond and how are you going to do that sort of a step by step of varying questions of if X happens yes or no, will I do this next particular step? Because there's really nuances by platform and also whether you're responding privately, whether that's offline.  

 
25:54 
Charlotte Lander 
If we're talking about relationship with journalists, a direct message, a public post in a particular channel, or a reply, each one brings with a different set of things to consider within that response. So it's really important to review that playbook in that context of social media.  

 
26:12 
Dom Hawes 
That playbook could end up very quickly because of the complication being a play tome or play series of volumes. I mean, how do you activate that kind of plan? Are there tools out there that allow you to share that kind of action plan and allow you quickly to respond?  

 
26:26 
Charlotte Lander 
Yeah, there are tools and agencies that run simulations specifically for social media. So if you have a quick Google, those ones will pop up perfect. But also speak to your in house reputational risk teams, your communications teams there's often run throughs of crisis scenarios that are happening within your organization. So how can social media play a role in that? Speak to teams will also think about what's the worst that can possibly happen in this situation to really kind of stress test that. And any playbook needs to have different levels of severity in terms of the actions that you take, but also the criteria that you set for those particular issues.  

 
27:07 
Dom Hawes 
Let's break the playbook down a little bit because it could get very big and very complicated and I just want to understand some of the fundamentals problem statements. Is that where things start?  

 
27:17 
Charlotte Lander 
That's where I always start. I like to think about what's the worst case scenario and then work backwards, but then also go out and think about what is it that we wouldn't want to be communicated. Now that kind of falls into two buckets that could fall into the bucket of proactive communications from a comms and marketing standpoint, yes, I don't want X being said about my brand, but that's because I've done all this positive work and that's what I want to be shared and that's how I'm going to proactively communicate that. And then the other side is actually I wouldn't want this to be said about the brand and I need to prepare for it and I need the content ready to go, but it's not something that I'm going to shout about right now.  

 
28:00 
Dom Hawes 
And we've talked then about frameworks. Describe to me a framework and how important defined escalation paths are within those.  

 
28:09 
Charlotte Lander 
So it's hugely important to have those defined escalation paths. First of all, within your framework, we've talked about the need to identify, to review, to sort of monitor, and then whether you respond or not, that's the framework. Yes, but within those you need an assessment criteria and you need to look at how credible or influential a particular source is. How credible is the content? Is there a velocity of change in that topic of conversation? What are going to be your triggers that place that particular message or messages into your categories? High, medium, low, suspicious, threatening, critical, whatever you want to name it. You need a sliding scale because within each one of those buckets, you're going to need to involve different stakeholders around the business and different people are going to be needing to be involved.  

 
29:07 
Charlotte Lander 
So, for example, if it's somebody that's very influential complaining about one of your products, is that okay for your customer service team to handle? Do they need help from comms and marketing? Or if it's a journalist, should media be involved? These are all starts questions that you need to be able to answer within that framework.  

 
29:26 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, you mentioned stakeholders. Now, a lot of marketers and communicators in business will know this, and they'll probably be chuckling to themselves, but sometimes getting stakeholders to come with you or getting their attention is really hard because they've also got day jobs. Who are the stakeholders that are essential at various different stages of a crisis, let's say?  

 
29:42 
Dom Hawes 
And how does the market leader bring the company's stakeholders with her before the event and get them to the table where they're prepared to think about readiness?  

 
29:49 
Charlotte Lander 
So the buy in is hugely important. And that's where it comes back to those problem statements, because usually if you have an area of the business where that problem statements apply to, they're usually more than happy actually to come on board and really kind of understand what might being said about the brand and what you need to do. And actually they want control over that messaging. So usually it's very easy to bring people with you if you explain the potential issues, as we've discussed today. Look at what's happening around you in terms of those other examples. What can we learn from cases such as the BP oil spill or the cases that we've talked about today that you need to bring through into your own business?  

 
30:27 
Charlotte Lander 
In terms of the stakeholders, there's usually a plethora that want to get involved and that's why that criteria and at each level is really important because not all of them are going to be needing to be involved at each level. So you're going to have some such as communications, marketing, media and PR, that most issues, you're likely to be kind of pulling them in. You're going to have that next layer of kind of security, whether that's cybersecurity, physical security that you're going to need to be involved, and how you work with those teams in terms of the listening piece, because they will usually have their own listening setups if you're not already aligned. So how do you coordinate that? Who's doing what and who's responsible for escalating?  

 
31:08 
Charlotte Lander 
And then as you start to get much more serious into issues, you start to think about teams such as legal and compliance? Is it going to be your treasury, your finance department? How senior do you need to go? And when do you need to start escalating to CEOs and board members within this framework?  

 
31:27 
Dom Hawes 
And just to be clear, this isn't just about crisis though, is it? Because the framework isn't just about handling the negative. Presumably the framework is also about how to project the positive.  

 
31:36 
Charlotte Lander 
Yeah, you can absolutely use it in that way as well. We know that social media is social. It's about that two way engagement. So when you're thinking about resource and time poor teams, what is it that will add the most value for them to respond and start a discussion on what is it that they have to respond to from a customer? Care issue and what is actually okay to be left in the ether of things that are out there, or that potentially, if you've got a really brilliant community, your brand advocates are going to respond on your behalf.  

 
32:08 
Dom Hawes 
I think it's time we talked about trust because you spent weeks and weeks writing a paper, a year getting it peer reviewed and probably months researching the thing in the first place. Trust is kind of everything, I guess. And in the days of measurement and.  

 
32:22 
Dom Hawes 
Metrics, how do you measure trust?  

 
32:25 
Charlotte Lander 
Measuring trust is really difficult. And this is why the paper came about, because actually, we know that it's important. But how do you quantify that? How do you think about what does trust mean? And trust means different things to different people. So first and foremost, you need to think, what does trust mean for my brand? And what are the kind of hallmarks for know in terms of when you're thinking about measurement? But Deloitte has a useful framework that has four levers of trust, and I believe it works because it aligns with how our brains work when it comes to building trust. So for somebody to trust you have to speak to two parts of their brain. You need to speak to the logical side in terms of capabilities. Can you deliver on that ask?  

 
33:16 
Charlotte Lander 
And you need to speak to their more emotive side, how you make them feel as a person. Do you make them feel special as a brand? Do they feel loved or at least supported? And are you useful to them?  

 
33:30 
Dom Hawes 
From the little I know about how a brain works, mine's pretty much only got one system, but most people have two. And to get through system one and into system two, you have to have.  

 
33:38 
Dom Hawes 
Trust in the first place, right?  

33:40 
Charlotte Lander 
Yes, absolutely.  

 
33:41 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, let's go through. You talked about trust drivers in the paper that you published. Are we going to be able to put a link to the paper?  

 
33:48 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, because I know in peer viewed.  

 
33:49 
Dom Hawes 
Journals, I went to subscribe thinking, this is very exciting, it's quite expensive.  

 
33:53 
Charlotte Lander 
I tell you what, I will publish our article on LinkedIn and I will send you.  

 
33:57 
Dom Hawes 
Will you send me a link? Brilliant.  

 
33:58 
Dom Hawes 
You can find that on unicorny.co.uk In it, you published a table that looked at trust drivers like those desired behaviors and possible success measures, or KPIs for each of them. I wonder if we can explore them one by one. I'm going to do the easier bit. I'm just going to say it and then maybe you could tell us a little bit about it.  

 
34:15 
Charlotte Lander 
Sure.  

 
34:15 
Dom Hawes 
Number one, humanity.  

 
34:17 
Charlotte Lander 
So this is you being genuinely caring for people's well being, and the behavior you want to drive is loyalty. So in social media, a measure for loyalty could be follower growth, because we know that people that follow you are much more likely to buy from you outside of social. It'll be things like customer lifetime value. Net promoter score. But what were trying to do in the paper is tie social media metrics to those wider kind of endpoints, which a lot of people find quite difficult to do.  

34:51 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, really hard. In fact, if you go and speak to many marketers, they talk about vanity metrics. And one of the things they talk about, of course, is likes. But within specific social media context, likes and follows are engagement measures.  

 
35:04 
Charlotte Lander 
Exactly. And you can think of them as micro conversions to trust.  

 
35:09 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
35:09 
Charlotte Lander 
Because you need to have lots of those micro conversions for people to trust you. You need to bring that overall experience. And as we talked about earlier, every touch point needs to be doing their part. So actually, social media, if you can see how it translates into those additional metrics, you can show that kind of journey and the path of how those actions on social media have then translated to much more business focused goals as an endpoint.  

 
35:39 
Dom Hawes 
And we did say were going to start talking a bit more about behavioral psychology, but it strikes me there are two big effects here that you get through nurturing that kind of engagement, mere exposure. And we know that mere exposure means that simply exposing a brand to people makes them more favorable towards it. And of course, recency those people that like and follow you, if you believe that recency is an important factor in helping build trust in you, those are two very big behavioral psychology effects that you can harness by doing this sort of stuff.  

 
36:07 
Charlotte Lander 
Yeah, absolutely. Being useful and helpful to somebody in a situation is hugely valuable. And there was an interesting study by Stanford University looking at the neural pathways of purchase, and what they found was actually when people see price, their reaction is pain.  

 
36:27 
Dom Hawes 
Okay?  

 
36:28 
Charlotte Lander 
And that's because your brain wasn't designed to purchase. Your brain was designed to keep you alive. And it sees money as a resource. So you need as a brand to make that person believe there is a bigger reward than that pain if they're going to buy from you and not your competitors.  

 
36:49 
Dom Hawes 
Wow, this is another show. But I think maybe that's got buyers remorse, has some of it. We'll come back to that as another show that's humanity.  

 
36:55 
Dom Hawes 
Talk to me about transparency.  

 
36:57 
Charlotte Lander 
So transparency is the openness and authentic way in which you communicate. It's how you kind of hold your hands up in that situation. The behavior that you were trying to align with there is advocacy. So within social media, we talked about senior leaders being active on the platform. They're not the only people that can be active on social media for the benefit of the brand. So actually, employee advocacy, there's a lot of metrics in there that you can then align to those advocacy pillars, whether that's people taking up the program within internally or the products of what's happened afterwards. So how many times are they sharing and what value is that providing to the business? What traffic is that driving? How long are those customers staying on that platform?  

 
37:42 
Dom Hawes 
Capability.  

 
37:43 
Charlotte Lander 
So capability is whether you can meet somebody's expectation, can you do what it says on the tin? And satisfaction ultimately is what you're aiming to achieve there. So, social media, again, you could look at things like post frequency, the average post reach, if you're pumping out content and it's not resonating, so this does link to that follower growth, it does link to the engagement metrics, the vanity metrics. If you're pumping out content and it's not working, why is that? Are people satisfied? Are they engaging with what you're sharing? Is it valuable for them?  

 
38:19 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah. Or has LinkedIn just changed the algorithm again and screwed everyone's metrics?  

 
38:24 
Charlotte Lander 
I mean, that could be it as well.  

38:25 
Dom Hawes 
It's mad, isn't it? What they're up to anyway? Talk to me about reliability.  

 
38:28 
Charlotte Lander 
So, reliability, that's your conversion point there. So from a social media point of view, that could be lead generation or it could be click through rate to website. And obviously then that onward tracking is needed to sort of signal that final business conversion. But that's why it's important, as I mentioned at the start, to define what trust means for you. And when you're thinking about measurement, how are you going to measure that within your remit and how do you tie that on whether that's within sales or brand teams, sort of remits within that wider piece.  

 
39:00 
Dom Hawes 
We know it's all about trust. And these are the four drivers in your paper that you looked at towards building trust. How could listeners use that table and the paper that you've published to help them create frameworks of their own?  

 
39:13 
Charlotte Lander 
For me, the biggest thing is how you measure and showcase your success. So this is deloitte's model within those levers. So go have a look at that paper and really think about your own metrics. How can you move away and shift people's mindsets, including your CFO, from this is vanity, this is what kids are doing. Anyone can do it on social media to actually this is a real business purpose and this is how social media is impacting positively on our business. And how do you tie that with external benchmarks in terms of what creates trust, how senior leaders now are expected to be on the platforms to start activating more of your leadership team.  

 
39:59 
Dom Hawes 
OMG, how good was that? Today's is another one of those podcasts where I learned buckets, and I hope you did too. Now, as usual, I'm going to summarize the main points in the show notes on this platform and in the extended.  

 
40:15 
Dom Hawes 
Show notes at Unicorny.co.uk And we are going to publish a blog on this topic@stateofdigital.com.  

 
40:23 
Dom Hawes 
You know what, I think we're also.  

 
40:25 
Dom Hawes 
Going to do a LinkedIn audio event, which is a live dial in so that you too can take part. We're going to give you details of that at the end of today's show, which kind of means in a couple of minutes.  

 
40:35 
Dom Hawes 
And you'll also find it literally everywhere you find information from us. The easiest way to keep up to date is to sign up to our mailing list, which you can do on Unicorny Co UK.  

 
40:44 
Dom Hawes 
Anyhow, before that, let's talk about today's show.  

 
40:48 
Dom Hawes 
In the first half, we looked at.  

 
40:49 
Dom Hawes 
The demise of two great financial institutions and the role that social media played. Now, I talked about risk registers, which for anyone who knows me, is very unlike me. I am the least cautious, least planned and most gung ho person, but even I understand the importance of assessing and planning to mitigate company killing risk. Charlotte talked to us about problem statements shortly after our midtime recap, and one good way to get those is to do a pre mortem exercise. Assemble a team of diverse thinkers and time machine yourselves five years into the future. Imagine your company just failed. List the reasons, then rank the reasons and you've got the raw material you need to start drafting problem statements. Now, I just covered a half day workshop in 30 seconds.  

 
41:43 
Dom Hawes 
It is a little bit more involved in that, obviously, but I hope you get the picture.  

 
41:47 
Dom Hawes 
Incidentally, I've worked with two excellent facilitators.  

 
41:50 
Dom Hawes 
In this area, so if you do want to do a pre mortem, drop me a line and I'll introduce you. I was surprised in our conversation to hear that Silicon Valley Bank didn't have a plan, or at least an effective one, to get ahead of social crises. I remember the shockwaves when they went down, so I was even more surprised to hear that other banks didn't immediately go into planning mode to update their own crisis management plans and their social media frameworks. It's mind boggling. We then talked about Tony Fernandez and how his social media savvy helped families in the worst possible situation deal with the shock and bereavement of the disappearance then death of their loved ones. He would or should have been a role model for senior Executive Social media presence.  

 
42:32 
Dom Hawes 
Until that is October 2023, when, for some reason, he thought it was a good idea to post a topless picture of himself mid massage, attending a management meeting, wait for it on LinkedIn. So his social media cred has taken a little dive, but in the big scheme of things, I can't unsee the photo.  

 
42:53 
Dom Hawes 
And you know what?  
It might well have been a little ill judged. We are talking today, of course, about culture and society, after all. But I'd rather back a leader who gets the big calls right and lacks judgment over the little things than the other way round. Ultimately, how you decide to build your.  

 
43:11 
Dom Hawes 
Brand'S humanity is up to you. You know, I've stopped talking to B2B brands the time being about being always on social. Ten years ago, I built a 24/7.  

 
43:21 
Dom Hawes 
Listening service for B2B. It was definitely too early then, it might even be too early now. But I am seeing more and more demand through our network for media savvy leaders that want to build trust. If that's you, maybe we should speak some more. Thank you for listening today. If you've enjoyed the show, please don't keep it to yourself.  

 
43:41 
Dom Hawes 
Post about it, shout about it, share it, rate it, review it, help us.  

 
43:45 
Dom Hawes 
To spread the word. Right, I'm off to the spa for a massage. No cameras allowed.