We beat the competition. Not you.

By Jason Lim

The image is that of a sparkling Southwest Airlines plane flying through the gorgeous sky. Underneath, the copy says, “We beat the competition. Not you.” Funny. And pretty brutal. This was only one of the countless mock advertising memes that popped up on social media platforms in the aftermath of the disastrous action by the United Airlines in forcibly yanking the Vietnamese American doctor from its flight from Chicago to Louisville.

By now, everyone knows what happened, so I won’t recount what happened. Suffice it to say that it was pretty disturbing.

And with the times being what they are, much of this incident was captured through multiple smartphone cameras by fellow passengers and posted on social media almost immediately. From then on, it went through several phases of organic amplification until it went fully viral and entered the national and global news cycle. I found this incident and its near-term aftermath very interesting in light of the following points.

One, this is head-spinning fast. The Washington Post’s Abby Ohlheiser lays out this timeline in great detail in “The full timeline of how social media turned United into the biggest story in the country” published on April 11, 2017. The timeline shows that the video started going viral in less than 12 hours after the incident and became national news within 18 hours. That doesn’t give any corporation ― even if they have the best crisis management team in place ― much time to react, let alone react strategically. You can tell this from the gaffes that the UA CEO made in the immediate aftermath of the incident, seemingly defending their actions and characterizing the passenger as disruptive.

In short, UA was trying to shape the discourse to their advantage through its statements. Unfortunately for UA, the speed with which the incident was interpreted, socialized, and mainstreamed was just too fast for UA to change the direction of the narrative.

Which goes to my second interesting point: When a post goes viral, especially visuals, it gets posted with an interpretation. In other words, there is no objective, neutral posting of anything. It’s always editorialized from the perspective of the poster, albeit not always consciously so.

Of course, this is not a new discovery. We see this everyday in how FOX and MSNBC (plus other channels in between) advocate under the guise of objective news. However, this is also the case with posts that go viral and become big news. And it’s the editorializing that happens to resonate with people when it goes viral, not necessarily the footage. In this case, the subconscious editorializing was especially powerful because it cried out to our innate sense of fairness and fear that this doctor could have been any one of us. As such, when the narrative resonance of a story amplifies so quickly along an axis that you can’t control, it’s probably not prudent to try to shape it after the fact. As in UA’s case, it’s counterproductive. Perhaps you should just apologize and duck, hoping to get out of the way of the first wave before coming up for air.

The third point that I found especially interesting was how the Chinese reacted to this video. According to The LA Times, the post on Weibo drew 110 million readers and 72,000 comments in China overnight. It also ignited a UA boycott petition. Although direct causality can’t be proven, according to Fortune, “By early trading Tuesday, shares were down 4 percent.”

Bloomberg also weighed in. “Overnight, there were reports that the social media storm against United had spread to China. Chinese users speculated that the passenger was mistreated because he was Asian. And United's stock found itself down 4 percent in the morning. If it looks like a coincidence, keep watching -- because other global companies will also rise and fall with the perceptions of consumers in Asia.”

In today’s social media driven, transnational world, what happens in Vegas certainly doesn’t stay in Vegas. Who would have suspected that an incident that happened in Chicago on a local flight with a passenger that happened to be Asian would impact the bottom line of a U.S. based carrier because of Chinese negative public reaction? It makes you wonder how the U.S. and the world would have reacted to the L.A. Riots if it had happened today.

This poses an interesting dilemma to the corporate crisis management experts. It’s pretty apparent that today’s interconnected world represents a complex adaptive system in that any incident could lead to an emergent criticality that can’t be anticipated or even reacted to using any type of Standard Operating Procedure. By their very nature, emergent criticalities can’t be predicted or even tested for.

Then, how do you prepare for a crisis that you can’t get ready for? This question is not limited to brand management or corporate crisis management. It cuts across all fields that require strategic management, including national security and disaster preparedness. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the textbook on crisis management for the new world.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.