One of the biggest UK financial groups, HBOS, got the media attention last week by claiming that its structures had been targeted by a precise Black PR campaign. The news broke out with the allegations that the low record share prices of the group are being triggered by false speculations, disclosing that the bank was about to collapse and had sought an emergency funding by the Bank of England. The sequel of the rumors caused almost 20% decline of HBOS’s shares and led to the wild gyration in other bank shares too. This forced the Bank of England to take an unusual step of publicity, denying that it would cancel staff holidays over Easter in order to convey emergency meetings to discuss the bank in crisis. The Bank of England also rubbished rumors ripping through the City as fantasy
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Black PR and rumors
It is a well-known truth that the juicy negative information is more likely to be spread faster than the positive one. The reasons for this are many, but overly they relay on two major factors – the lack of official information and the proportion of interest towards the related issues. This is linked to the psychological needs of the people to possess an exclusive information that it is not available to everyone else, which also gives people the authority to demonstrate more specific knowledge and understandings than the others.
Spreading rumors is also one of the favorite tools in destroying reputations because it is really difficult to detect the initial source of the speculation and you are not really accountable for the validity of the information, disseminated in the communication channels. This gives you the power to smear your opponents in many ways and to create a negative buzz in the desirable of you direction. The outcome will always be with a viral effect and will guarantee the chaos you need in order to inject the rest of the slander massages.
HBOS rumor is not unique by its nature, but has successfully proved that the professional Black PR campaigns are far away from the single usage of standard propaganda techniques. The purpose of the attack here was not to facilitate the job of the short
stock sellers as it was stated in numerous media outlets during the weekend, but to cause the destabilization of the British pound and the entire financial market. The result – just for a single day the pound’s trade-weighted index felt to 93.1- its lowest rate since January 1997.
I think that something else that helps in spreading the juicy negative information is that we’re more inclined to listen and share negative stuff than we are positive, and the fact that the negative stuff truly is juicy while the positive stuff refuting it is generally bland and something we’d expect them to say anyways even if the negative information is true.
It’s plain human nature to feel a little excited when someone else fails/has bad stuff affect them because it makes a little more room for us to succeed in our minds, even if we’re working in some field where we have no relation to the group that had bad stuff happen to them. The mental view that we subconsciously hold allows for only ‘N’ number of successful people and someone falling from their position makes room for us up there.
Rumors can be especially nasty to deal with since we’re also predisposed to not trust what a company says about themselves, which lends more credit to unofficial channels of information when it really should be the other way around until the company gives us a good reason not to trust them. This, in addition to the numerous ways they can quickly spread and difficulty in tracking down the original source does make them very effective, and does as you say “guarantee the chaos you need in order to inject the rest of the slander messages.”
Pretty nasty piece of work getting the pound’s trade-weighted index to a new decade low, even if it was just for a single day.