Wikileaks and Anon: The Death of PR?

If the recent controversy surrounding Wikileaks has taught us anything, it is that the internet is a wild beast that is hard to control. Julian Assange rocked the boat of entire governments, the media, and the people whenever Wikileaks started releasing the 250,000 leaked U.S. embassy cables over the internet. Some very important questions concerning PR come up whenever you take a look at the issues that manifested itself in the Cablegate scandal, especially through Anonymous and Operation: Payback .

If you haven't been following the story, you can Google it to get caught up. It will help you understand what I am talking about. Anyways, right in the middle of all the action a few months ago, fastcompany.com's article entitled Prepare for the Next Round of Hacktivism, talked about the mindset of your average hacktivist, aka Anonymous. In this article, the author, E.B. Boyd, makes a statment about dealing with hacktivists that I'm sure nobody on this website wants to hear:

Don't bother with PR.

That sound you just heard was Edward Bernays rolling over in his grave.

You read that right. Don't bother with PR. Whenever Amazon, Paypal, Discover and Mastercard cut off their support for Wikileaks due to "policy" concerns, the hacktivists that lead Operation Payback were very motivated to defend what they considered to be an infringement on free speech. There was no negotiating or reasoning with them. As Anonymous plainly puts it:



We do not forgive.
We do not forget.

So if you should ever find yourself in the midst of a major crisis in your company that results in being on the receiving end of Anon's wrath, what are you going to do? Is it really impossible to reason with them? What's the next step? I think there is still hope, PR practitioners just have to change tactics a little bit. Obviously, the odds of you being in this type of situation is very slim, and if the company you work for is engaged in illegitimate practices to begin with, you shouldn't be working for them. But let's say that for some reason, your company made a legitimate decision that Anonymous didn't like, and they are DDoS'ing your company's website, and drawing negative publicity to your company. What should you do? Step one:



Believe it or not, there is good news. DDoS attacks do bring down the systems running your company's website, however, these attacks are temporary, lasting hours at the most, although there may be more than one. However, taking a pacifist approach will do you no good in communicating with Anonymous. If this should happen, depending on the situation, you have some channels of communication. Everything that I am about to mention has never been used by Public Relations practitioners before, so please take this with a grain of salt.

1. IRC
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and are used by Anonymous to coordinate their attacks. It is a lot like a chat room. If anyone here is daring enough to speak directly to Anon, this would be the best way to do it. First, you need to install an IRC client onto your computer, and then find the IRC channel that Anon is using at the time. They change IRC channels often, mostly because the ones they make get shut down, so you have to track down the channel that they are using first.

2. Torrents
Anonymous believes that ALL information should be free. So most of them are pirates. That means that they all use torrents to get whatever they want, from movies, to books, to music, to basically anything that can go on a hard drive. If you are not familiar with torrents, this should help explain how they work. You can make torrents work for you, though! This is a great way to communicate with Anon if you have a press release or video to distribute, just upload a torrent of that file to a tracker website, seed for a while, and then let the information spread itself.

So now that we have some channels in which to communicate with Anonymous, lets talk about some of the basic principles to follow when communicating your messages:

1. Don't try to stop them.
First off, that is just asking for trouble, because stuff like this will happen. Not only that, but it will only enrage them
further, respecting their power will go a long way.

2. Offer an olive branch.
Try to make amends with Anon, and see if there is any action that you can take to resolve the situation. Just talking to them is not going to help you out any, there needs to be actions to back up what you say. Of course that is a concept that goes along with any basic crisis PR campaign.

That is all for now, just remember, just keep a cool head, and everything will be alright.