For fashion houses, finding audacious ways to grab the attention of fans and consumers means trying to stand out in a crowded social media milieu. One of the most powerful tactics they can use is working with influencers. This is true for many brands, and it brings with it a specific risk: hatred directed at your valued personalities.
It’s one thing to be bold and risque. It’s quite another to have to deal with online harassment and hatred toward your influencers—both on your brand-owned social media pages, and on their own.
The growing problem with harmful content
Diverse and atypical-looking models are becoming mainstream for fashion brands, but in an incredibly polarized world, these types of influencers tend to attract more hate speech and general nastiness.
The sad truth is that models and other fashion influencers are more at risk of being trolled on social media. The fantasy of the glamorous, easy life most models seem to lead was tarnished by one model who boldly spoke out against ”the dark side of modeling.” Her complaints included a barrage of offensive, harassing direct messages and negative comments that have become an unfortunate fact of life for many models.
They can be subjected to racism, sexism, or misogyny. They can receive death threats or expletive-laden comments about their appearance, their faces are put on the bodies of extremists in photos, their physical safety is often threatened—and, in the worst cases, social media accounts pop up with the sole purpose of intimidating, demeaning, or harassing them.
With wider social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, brands are expected to show proactive support for their influencers by moderating comments, speaking out against the instigators, and removing hate speech when it appears.
Influencers also work in tandem with the fashion houses to create content for their own social media platforms, versus simply amplifying content. Where a brand used to carefully craft content and work with influencers to provide an extra layer of credibility, an influencer today has their own platform from which to create content around a brand’s campaigns.
This creates a secondary risk—one where a brand’s reputation is reliant on the health of the influencer’s community, or when they unintentionally say or do something that wreaks havoc or causes widespread controversy, or elicits calls for them to be canceled.
For the teams tasked with monitoring day-to-day brand presence across both owned social media pages and wider-web influencer domains, and protecting the safety and wellbeing of its influencers, it’s not an easy job. In an already hectic time, when nothing is as it once was, the front-line defenders of the brand are under a lot of pressure.
Brands cannot risk the distraction of harmful content
In the case of Fashion Week, when often the livestream was the show, social media, communications, and security teams had to be alert and ready. They were tasked not just with timely posting and keeping a watchful eye on potential threats, but with reviewing all the commentary as it flowed in on live posts in real-time.
Brands cannot risk harmful content distracting their hard-won consumers or the health and wellbeing of their influencers amidst their expensive-to-produce, never-before-executed digital creative efforts. In this type of situation, real-time monitoring and reporting cannot be over-valued.
Resolver’s Moderation for Brands ensures the safety of your influencers and provides your team the early-warning advantage over issues emerging online—giving your security, communications and talent management teams the ability to protect your brand ambassadors.