As August comes to a close, Beyond the Boardroom wraps its editorial focus on Reputation by examining how executives navigate a crisis, and what it takes to protect a reputation when search, social media and AI can amplify, distort and ultimately define the story.
A reputation crisis once had a relatively recognisable anatomy. A story broke, the press called, a statement was prepared and eventually, the news cycle moved on. Today, the first sign of trouble might be a viral post, a manipulated image or a video that may not even be real. By the time a company establishes what happened, the story can already have crossed platforms, markets and languages, indexed by search engines and increasingly absorbed into the AI systems people use to understand the world.
That changes the rules of reputation management. Deepfakes have made verification part of crisis response; generative AI can turn scattered allegations and years of reporting into a single, seemingly definitive answer; and social media gives almost anyone the ability to set a narrative in motion. The challenge is no longer simply what to say when something goes wrong, but how to respond when the speed and shape of the story are no longer entirely yours to control.
Reputation after all, behaves like a currency. It can take decades to accumulate and hours to spend. And when a crisis hits, the question is who ultimately pays: the executive whose name suddenly dominates the search results, the company attached to it, or someone on the other side of the story? Occasionally, if the response is handled well enough, the calculation changes altogether.
In 2018, Dolce & Gabbana cancelled a major runway show in Shanghai following criticism of a series of promotional videos showing a Chinese model attempting to eat Italian dishes with chopsticks. The controversy escalated after screenshots of messages attributed to Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram account circulated online; Gabbana and the company said the account had been hacked. Chinese celebrities withdrew from the show, several retailers and e-commerce platforms stopped carrying the brand, and Domenico Dolce and Gabbana later appeared together in a video apologising to Chinese consumers.
In 2022, Balenciaga withdrew two advertising campaigns following widespread criticism. One showed children holding teddy-bear handbags wearing bondage-inspired accessories; imagery from another included documents from a US Supreme Court case concerning child sexual-abuse material. The house apologised and initially filed a lawsuit against parties involved in producing one of the campaigns before withdrawing the action. Creative director Demna subsequently issued a personal apology, while Kim Kardashian, who had an established relationship with the house, said publicly that she was re-evaluating that relationship.
Then there’s the personal leadership crisis, where the reputations of an executive and the company they lead can become difficult to separate. In July 2025, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company’s Chief People Officer became the subject of a viral video after the Coldplay concert “kiss cam” caught them on screen. The clip surpassed 100 million views, and the board accepted Byron’s resignation within days.
What Astronomer did next became a case study of its own. Rather than continue addressing the circumstances surrounding its former CEO, the company redirected attention towards the business. It released a self-aware video starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin’s ex-wife, as its “temporary spokesperson”. She fielded apparent questions about the controversy before pivoting each answer back to Astronomer and its work. The approach drew attention from PR strategists for the way it shifted the conversation: rather than trying to resolve the public debate around the incident, Astronomer gave audiences a different story about the company to engage with.
By the time a reputational crisis reaches the courts, the damage is often already being done. Investors have formed opinions. Employees are talking. Customers are searching. Journalists are calling. And increasingly, AI systems are summarising the story for people who never saw the original reporting.
We spoke with reputation strategists who work crises for a living about how one actually announces itself, and why the instinct to fight back is usually the first mistake.
The First Signs of a Crisis
A reputation crisis rarely arrives with a siren. More often, it begins small: an unusual spike in searches, a customer forwarding a post to an executive, an employee receiving questions from friends, or a journalist asking for comment.
Amaury Allard, Founder of Paris-based Elyseum Influence who spent time at the French President’s Office and at Roland Berger before starting his own agency, says the mistake is judging severity by volume. “Usually volume alone tells you nothing. What matters is who is amplifying it,” he says. “If it stays within a closed circle of accounts, it usually burns out.” The calculus changes the moment a journalist or a verified, high-reach account picks it up.
That is roughly what happened to one of Allard’s clients, a luxury retail company whose CEO went viral for the wrong reasons. French newspapers and social media quickly picked up the story. Allard’s team began by mapping the spread, tracing where it originated on X, who was amplifying it, and how sentiment was shifting hour by hour. The monitoring showed that, despite the noise, the story remained largely contained to France and had not spread to the US or China, where most of the company’s clients are based. The agency issued a single, standard press release and otherwise let the news cycle run its course. “Public attention on scandals fades quickly when you don’t feed it,” Allard says.
Once the story cooled, the rebuilding began: a long-form podcast let the CEO speak in his own words, while economic-press interviews restored his credibility with other executives. Months later, a lifestyle profile showed him in a more human light. “Silence during the peak of a crisis protects you,” Allard says. “Rebuilding trust means giving journalists something worth writing about, on your terms.”
Joe Szynkowski, Founder of The UpWrite Group, watches for those same signals from inside an organisation.”You’ll notice something has gone sideways when employees start chattering amongst themselves, getting outreach from friends or family asking what they’re seeing online,” he says. “The other tipoff: journalists start calling for comments.”
Scott Keever, Founder of Reputation Pros, frames it structurally. A real crisis is when the story spreads beyond its original audience, credible third parties repeat it, and it starts surfacing in search and stakeholder conversations. “If it is one angry post with no pickup, it may be noise. If journalists, employees, customers, investors, or search results start reinforcing it, it is no longer just noise.”
The First 24 Hours
Crisis advice tends to split into two camps: move immediately, before someone else defines the story or say nothing until you know what actually happened. Both can be right.
Szynkowski believes the first 24 hours should be dominated by fact-finding. What happened, what is known, what is not known, how far the story has travelled and which stakeholders need to hear from the company first. “The last thing you want is to spend precious time communicating with the wrong audiences early in a crisis,” he says. “Time is money, but it can also damage your reputation if it isn’t used correctly.”
The instinct to defend oneself can be particularly dangerous for founders and CEOs. “CEOs and founders usually have large egos, so going out with a defensive message track can also lead to further issues,” Szynkowski adds.
His preferred alternative is to remove the corporate armour and communicate like a person. He points to Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant’s direct message to customers following a food-safety issue linked to produce served at its restaurants. Tresvant acknowledged those affected, thanked customers for their support and committed the company to transparency and further action. “Look at his LinkedIn posts to customers. He didn’t use AI. He used authentic communications to show appreciation,” Szynkowski says.
The same principle can apply when the crisis is not one of a company’s making. Following Dolly Parton’s death in August 2026, Dollywood faced an immediate question over what the loss of its Founder and “Dreamer-in-Chief” would mean for the park she had helped build. Dollywood Parks & Resorts President Eugene Naughton addressed visitors directly, acknowledging the loss while assuring them that the park would continue and that Parton’s legacy would remain central to it. “He offered a beautiful mix of appreciation, hope, and confidence that the show will go on even without their ‘Dreamer in Chief’,” Szynkowski analyses. “Taking down your walls and communicating in a succinct, sincere way is always my coaching.”
Keever puts fact-finding ahead of any polished statement too, addressing who’s involved, what’s true, what’s still unknown, who has already seen the story, and what people will find when they search for the company. “The first 24 hours should be about containment, accuracy, internal alignment, and deciding whether silence, a holding statement, or a fuller response is appropriate.”
Allard is more aggressive about the clock. “Hour one is all about control. We work off a tight timeline. Fifteen minutes to activate the crisis team and confirm what we actually know. Twenty minutes to get a short holding statement out to media and key stakeholders. Sixty minutes to follow with something substantive, facts, actions underway, next steps.” His logic is blunt. Whoever tells the story first shapes how people read it. “Every minute we stay quiet past that first hour, someone else is writing the headline for us.”
The practical rule for CEOs: move immediately, internally. Respond externally only once you know what you’re responding to. That distinction prevents the most common crisis mistake, turning one problem into two.
Reputation is Now a Search Problem
The most consequential shift in reputation management is happening off social media entirely. A customer may never see the original post. An investor may never read the article that started the controversy. An employee candidate may never encounter the original accusation. But all three may Google the executive’s name. What they see there becomes the working version of reality.
Keever’s approach to one founder whose search results had become dominated by negative coverage after a public business dispute was built around three ideas: push down, promote, protect.
Push down means improving the search environment and, where justified, seeking removal of false or policy-violating material. Promote means building credible evidence of what the executive or company is doing now: stronger owned assets, current executive profiles, independent coverage, thought leadership and authoritative third-party references. Protect means continuing to monitor search results, reviews and emerging narratives rather than waiting for the next crisis.
AI has also introduced a more fundamental problem: before managing a crisis, companies may first have to establish whether it happened at all. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology identifies deepfakes and synthetic content as risks to information integrity, pointing to provenance tracking, metadata, watermarking, digital fingerprinting and human authentication as ways of helping determine where content originated and whether it has been manipulated. For reputation teams, verification is increasingly becoming part of the first response.
That also pushes some of the work much earlier. The emerging C2PA standard, developed to establish the origin and editing history of digital content, allows media to carry verifiable information about how it was created and altered. In practical terms, protecting reputation in the AI era increasingly means building the evidence before it is needed: maintaining authoritative sources of information, preserving original content and its provenance, and establishing how suspicious material will be authenticated before a convincing fake has the chance to become the accepted version of events.
Allard says this has changed the first question his team asks during a crisis. “Is this even real?”
“Old instinct said wait for a rumour to burn out,” he explains. “That instinct gets you buried now, because people still trust what they see on video, real or not. We spend far more time today on verification tools and fact-checking partners than we did three years ago.”
Keever describes AI as effectively a second search engine, but one that gives a much shorter answer. His research found that 68% of AI-generated evaluations of executives with negative coverage presented that coverage as the defining fact about them. A results page shows multiple sources. An AI answer gives you one paragraph. “That is why we now treat AI reputation management as its own workstream rather than a byproduct of SEO, and why deepfakes and synthetic content have made verification a bigger part of the job.”
Build the Insurance Before the Fire
The best crisis strategy is the one that looks unnecessary when everything is going well. Before a controversy arrives, a company can establish a strong digital footprint: accurate executive profiles, authoritative company pages, credible earned media, clear corporate messaging and monitoring systems capable of detecting unusual activity.
It can also decide in advance who has authority to speak, who approves statements, which stakeholders get contacted first, and which issues require lawyers before communications teams act.
Keever describes this as building the digital foundation before you need it. If the first page of search results already contains ten credible pieces of evidence about who you are, one negative article has to compete with ten other stories. If the first page is empty, the negative article effectively becomes your biography.
Old instinct said wait for a rumour to burn out. That instinct gets you buried now, because people still trust what they see on video, real or not. We spend far more time today on verification tools and fact-checking partners than we did three years ago – Amaury Allard
There is No Universal Apology
Global companies face another complication: the same response does not mean the same thing everywhere. In one market, silence may look like avoidance. In another, an immediate apology may look like an admission of liability.
A highly emotional statement may resonate with consumers but create unnecessary legal exposure. A carefully lawyered statement may protect the company legally while making it appear evasive. There is no universal crisis language. There is only language appropriate to a particular audience, jurisdiction and set of facts. That is why global reputation management is partly a communications discipline and partly an exercise in cultural and legal judgment.
How big a story becomes doesn’t define a reputational crisis. How far it can travel does. A single employee post or niche forum thread can become commercially significant if it reaches the right audience and picks up credible amplification. The task for a CEO isn’t to win every argument online, it’s to establish the facts quickly, identify the stakeholders who matter, avoid manufacturing a second story through an emotional response, and keep building credible evidence of who the company is beyond the incident.
Because the question is rarely whether people will encounter something negative. It’s what they encounter next, and increasingly, that’s the impression that decides whether they buy, invest, partner, or simply move on.