The lady doth protest too much, methinks

The internet is brilliant. There's hardly a day that goes by when I don't check up on news, refresh a bit of my memory on some obscure band or go on a journey around the blog archipelago. Its development has undoubtedly brought about a democratisation of information and provided a platform for criticism and analysisthat is largely ignored by the traditional media.

The communications industry has been wrestling with these issues for a number of years. How do you protect brands from attack when setting up a critical website or blogis such a routine thing to do?

How hard should you rebuff them? If you do rebuff them, are you risking raising their profile and driving yet more traffic to the very places you are trying to undermine?

With reportsthat brands are increasingly under online attack, these questions are going to continue to occupy communications professionals in the coming months and years.

So, how to respond? The answer must lie in the values of the brand in question. Remember brands are a simple set of associations connected to an organisation or an individual.

These associations (brand values) will have settled into a pecking order with particular attributes taking precedence over others. These in turn will have been carefully crafted to aid the objectives of the brand.

It is the dominant values that will determine responses and it is the job of the communications professional to identify which are the dominant associations and develop a response in accordance with them.

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