The future of crisis comms and deepfakes

A convincing deepfake can reach employees and reporters long before anyone proves it’s fake. By then, the damage to trust may already be done.

During the preconference workshops at Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference in Austin, Lisa Burris, senior director of corporate communications at Elevance Health, said that crisis communicators face two distinct challenges.

“First, we must help establish what is actually happening, and second, understand what stakeholders believe is happening,” Burris told the audience. “They’re not always the same, but both influence trust, behavior and reputation.”

Burris added that impersonation and cyber incidents aren’t new things for communicators to handle. What’s changed is how convincing fabricated content has become and how easily one threat feeds another, like a cyberattack paired with a fake executive statement.

“Technology hasn’t replaced the fundamentals of crisis communication, but it’s intensified the consequences of getting it wrong,” she said. “Accuracy still matters. Empathy still matters. Transparency still matters. But our ability to deliver those fundamentals depends more than ever on how quickly we can verify information, mobilize the right people and make sound decisions under pressure.”

Check your crisis plan against a new mix of threats

Burris said that traditional approval processes for communicators weren’t built for how fast information now moves. The crisis response model she uses is designed to hold up when several threats hit at once in response to how multifaceted these types of hazards have become.

“Not every organization needs a new playbook,” she said. “But how does what you have today work in this new environment? We need to pressure test it.”

Burris also warned that delays from teams working off different information and timelines can be a bigger risk than the threat itself.

“The goal isn’t for communications to take over,” Burris said. “What you need to do is be integrated into the response command center from the beginning, so that stakeholder needs and reputational consequences inform the decisions being made. That means agreeing in advance on escalation triggers, roles, decision rights and approval processes.”

Watch what people do with the message

Burris said media coverage and share of voice are still valuable crisis metrics. But they can miss the bigger picture when a cyber incident disrupts operations and reputation at the same time.

“A rise in negative sentiment may be important,” Burris said. “But a surge in customer calls, employee confusion or people following fraudulent instructions could be much more urgent.”

Hilary Nemchik, vice president of external affairs at the U.S. Center for SafeSport, said that she works with a small team and doesn’t have the budget for a full data pipeline that feeds into dashboards. Instead, the team pulls web analytics and media data into spreadsheets and uses AI to help make sense of it.

“AI has supported us in organizing, formatting and summarizing data, with callbacks to make sure everything is accurate,” Nemchik said. “This allows us to spot trends and identify where audiences do and don’t understand aspects of our process. This analysis led to the creation of a new landing page to better explain our public-facing database in a way that answers the questions that emerge through our data.”

Prepare for the toughest calls in a crisis

Burris said deciding when to share a message in a crisis is one of the hardest choices that comms leaders make. If you move too fast, you risk sharing information that later proves wrong. If you wait for the perfectly polished statement from corporate, people who need guidance to protect their information may be left without it.

“We don’t have to know everything to communicate responsibly,” Burris said. “We do have to be clear about what we know and don’t know, and what we are doing. And if we’re confronting a deepfake or fabricated claim, we need credible verification processes, rather than simply asserting that something just isn’t real.”

Nemchik said that credibility is also built far beyond the first communicated response and is instead an ongoing and evolving process.

“Ultimately, organizations that answer questions clearly, demonstrate expertise and provide useful content are the ones who succeed at landing messages with audiences and meeting them where they’re at,” she said.

Stay tuned to Ragan.com for more from Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference in Austin this week.

Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.