Managing a slow-burn PR crisis
Crisis management is a strategic approach an organization can take to handle unexpected and potentially harmful events or situations. These events can range from natural disasters and financial crises to technological failures. In this article, I will use Instagram’s beauty filter crisis as an example, uncovering the application of crisis management concepts and frameworks, especially in a slow-burn PR crisis.
Why Beauty Filter Crisis
I picked the Instagram filter incident as my case study to exercise the crisis management process because it’s not a traditional crisis. A typical crisis, like Boeing 737 max scandal, Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Recall, or Volkswagen Emissions Scandal, involves immediate financial and reputation loss for the company. Sometimes, even people’s lives are at stake. On the other hand, Meta’s Instagram beauty filter crisis is nothing like a life-or-death situation. The company did not make a willfully wrong decision. Nor did the incident lead to instant financial loss for the company. It is more of a protracted crisis that was raised from a social awareness movement. It is interesting to me to explore how effective a crisis management framework can be when applied to a situation that teeters on the boundary of what is traditionally defined as a crisis.
What is the Crisis?
The Instagram beauty filter crisis does not involve a specific date for the crisis’s burst. It is a slow-burn crisis with a general timeline spanning over a decade. It started in the 2010s when awareness about diversity in beauty standards increased. Up till 2018, there was lots of criticism about the negativity of beauty standards social media filters promoted, including increasing incidents reported by surgeons that their patients want to look like the version of themselves with the filter[1][2][3]. In 2018, an official research study was published by Boston Medical Center[4], stating the impact of photo-editing tools on body image and self-esteem. The criticism peaked around early 2019 when Instagram was one of the most criticized platforms, which led to a worse public image for some people. In 2019, Instagram banned those directly promoting cosmetic surgery, skin color changes, or extreme weight loss[5]. And yes, despite a ban being announced, plastic surgery filters are still available on the platform. It didn’t carry through. On October 24, 2023, a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. was filed by more than 30 US states[6]. This is still an ongoing crisis that has not been fully addressed.
How to Prevent it from Happening?
Post-Morton Exercise
I took a structured approach to learn the possible strategies a company can take to prevent the crisis from happening by doing a post-morton exercise. Post-morton analysis is an evaluation process conducted after a crisis has happened. It is an efficient way to learn from the past. There are countless frameworks out there. Each one has its pros and cons (I have added a framework list in the Resource section below if you’re interested in what kinds of frameworks are available). I picked Ishikawa’s fishbone diagram because it efficiently exposes the scope of the cause instead of rabbit-holing into one particular issue. This framework helps me to understand the intricacies of the beauty filter crisis.
Golden rules:
Learning from the causes revealed by the Fishbone diagram, I found some effective actions the company can take if they were to care about an incident like the beauty filter crisis and to improve preparedness and minimize similar risks in the future :
Keep in touch with research and customer feedback: The beauty filter crisis didn’t happen in one week. It happened over a decade ago, and numerous studies and articles about it have been published. Instagram took over 10 years to respond to the crisis and improve. We won’t know what the next new movement is or when it will happen, so keeping in touch with the current audience and hearing what they say will help a company be more ready to prevent a slow-burn crisis like this.
Empower stakeholders in the company: Meta has been operating in a rather hierarchical and authoritative way. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, makes all the company's decisions. Regardless of many other leadership’s proposals to improve teen mental health, court documents allege he personally rejected all of their proposals[7]. Hence, Instagram is not taking further action to improve the situation for teenagers. This stirred a negative reaction in the media in late 2023, which didn’t improve their standing in the crisis. If the other company leaders were able to have a say and execute those ideas for improvement, Meta might be on track to get out of the criticism on the subject.
Promoting ethical decision-making as a principle: Another reason that it took Instagram over 10 years to respond can be principle issues. Facilitating healthy social interactions or mental states is not their top priority; user engagement and profits are. With a history of being an “evil corporation,” it is not unreasonable to think the reason for inaction is a lack of financial incentives. Having “ethics” as one of the company’s principles can help to prevent or minimize the risks like this.
How to Manage Through the Crisis
I have developed a crisis management plan the company can refer to if the company were to seek to solve and improve for issues like the beauty filter crisis.
1. Forming a core Crisis Management Team
- Team composition: The team responding to the beauty filter crisis should contain a senior executive representative who takes public relations as one of the key responsibilities and representatives from the legal, product research, product development, customer support, and marketing teams. A smaller company that doesn’t have dedicated roles, as stated above, can interpret the above as a person with a job function that takes charge of the corresponding area.
- Responsibilities: Each representative should serve as a contact point to communicate the issue with the department and between the departments. They should also be the key person taking responsibility to ensure the team follows through with their plan and has the resources to do their job.
2. Situation Assessment
- Action: All the team should conduct an investigation and user research in their domain to understand the scope and impact of the crisis. This involves identifying the number of users affected, root causes for different impacts, the products involved, current public perception, and any potential legal implications.
- Outcome: A detailed, sharable report outlining the cause, effect, and potential future risks associated with the crisis.
3. Internal Communication Strategy
- The representatives should deliver the message to their department through all hands repetitively.
- The internal message should address: 1) The company acknowledges the situation and is working on the issue. 2) The incident itself and its impact. 3) This issue matters. It’s our priority. 4) The responsibilities employees should take to help
4. External Communication Strategy
- Immediate Public Statement: Acknowledge the issue through medias (marketing, PR, product, and legal team), and press(senior executive) if needed, express commitment to resolving it, and apologize for any harm caused.
- Regular Updates: The marketing team should take the lead by posting ongoing updates about the resolution process on all communication channels, emphasizing transparency and accountability. The product team should put the message on the products to ensure all users have access to the information they need.
- Direct Communication: The customer support team should directly with affected users, offering support and solutions to mitigate their concerns.
5. Technical Response
- The dev team should immediately identify and do something about the problematic technology. In this case, removal is hard as it may cause negative reaction among creators, which leads to a different PR issue. A temporary solution can be labeling the filters with warnings signs like “Caution: This content features cosmetic procedures that can alter one’s appearance. Remember, beauty comes in all shapes and sizes”.
- The research, product team, and legal team should work on a permanent solution that addresses the root cause of the crisis.
6. Legal and Regulatory Compliance
- The legal department should take the lead in understanding whether there are any regulatory implications and report back to the core crisis response team.
- If there are regulatory implications, what steps are needed to comply with or manage the damage?
7. Monitoring and Feedback
- Continuous Monitoring: The core response team should meet up regularly to monitor the issue and updates continuously.
- User Feedback: Establish a feedback loop with users to gather insights on their experiences and concerns, using this information to inform future product developments and policies.
- Internal Feedback: Talk to relevant teams, including advocacy groups and industry partners, to discuss updates, review changes, and gather insights.
- Public Reporting: Publish a detailed report on the incident, the company’s response, and future preventative measures, reinforcing a commitment to transparency and user well-being.
8. Evaluation and Adjustment
- Post-Crisis Review: After resolving the crisis, conduct a comprehensive review to evaluate the response’s effectiveness, identifying strengths and areas for improvement.
- Adjust Crisis Plan: Update the crisis response plan based on the lessons learned, ensuring the organization is better prepared for future adjacent incidents.
- Vetting similar features: The company should assess whether other features, like beauty filters, can cause similar issues for users and take preventive actions before future issues merge.
Conclusion
Above are some golden guidelines for preventing and managing a slow-burn PR crisis for tech companies. Just like most business case studies, the conclusion is always easier said than done. It takes years of experience and practice to build intuition and action that can properly carry a company through crises. My analysis and framework aren’t an ultimate solution but a theory, an initiation guideline to starting somewhere in any PR crisis, like the Instagram beauty filter crisis.
Resources:
Post-mortem frameworks:
- 5 Whys Analysis: This framework involves repeatedly asking the question “Why?” to peel back the layers of a problem and reach its root cause. It’s straightforward and doesn’t require statistical analysis, making it accessible for many teams.
- Fishbone (Ishikawa) Diagram: Used to identify, explore, and display the many potential causes of a problem. It helps categorize the root causes of an issue into broader sources and visualizes them in a diagram that resembles a fishbone.
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA): This systematic method evaluates and identifies potential failures within a product or process. FMEA assesses the severity, likelihood, and detectability of failures to prioritize the most significant ones for mitigation.
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA): RCA is a method of problem-solving that tries to identify the root causes of faults or problems. RCA can incorporate several tools and techniques within its process, including the 5 Whys and Fishbone Diagrams.
- After Action Review (AAR): Originating from the military, AAR is a structured review or debrief process for analyzing what happened, why it happened, and how it can be done better by the participants and those responsible for the project or event.
- Learning Review: Similar to AAR but more prevalent in fire and emergency services, Learning Reviews focus on understanding the reasons behind actions and decisions in complex situations without attributing blame.
- The Four Stages of Psychological Safety Framework: Although not a postmortem analysis tool per se, this framework can be essential in creating an environment where team members feel safe to contribute to the postmortem process without fear of blame or retribution.
References:
[1] Hobson, J. (2018, August 29). Snapchat dysmorphia: How the photo app is driving people to plastic surgery. WBUR. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/29/snapchat-dysmorphia-plastic-surgery
[2]Kato.B (2024, March 15). Selfie culture is driving people to get plastic surgery so they look ‘filtered’. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2024/03/15/lifestyle/selfie-culture-is-driving-people-to-get-plastic-surgery-so-they-look-filtered/
[3]Bever, L. (2018, August 6). Patients are desperate to resemble their doctored selfies. Plastic surgeons alarmed by ‘Snapchat dysmorphia’. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/06/patients-are-desperate-to-resemble-their-doctored-selfies-plastic-surgeons-alarmed-by-snapchat-dysmorphia/
[4] Boston Medical Center. (2018, August 2). New reality of beauty standards: How selfies and filters affect body image. BMC. https://www.bmc.org/news/press-releases/2018/08/02/new-reality-beauty-standards-how-selfies-and-filters-affect-body
[5] Sorto, G. (2019, September 19). Instagram to restrict cosmetic surgery and diet product posts. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/19/business/instagram-posts-cosmetic-surgery-diet-products-trnd/index.html
[6] Ryan-Mosley, T. (2023, October 30). Why Meta is getting sued over its beauty filters. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/30/1082628/why-meta-is-getting-sued-over-its-beauty-filters/
[7] Aarons, T., & Mekelburg, M. (2023, November 27). Zuckerberg vetoed policy that would protect girls, suit claims. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-27/zuckerberg-vetoed-policy-that-would-protect-girls-suit-claims?embedded-checkout=true
