Misinformation and disinformation aren’t new to us. But the lightning-fast spread of fake news is – as is the believability of artificially generated images and videos that we see alongside them. Against this backdrop, place brand teams are facing new challenges to secure their reputation. And reputation is becoming a make-or-break pillar of national security.

Ahead of his presentation at CNP Global this November, Nick Cull, Professor of Public Diplomacy for the University of Southern California and author of Reputational Security: Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World, explains why place brand teams should be investing in reputational security, and why a transnational response is so essential.

In a time when the geopolitical landscape is changing rapidly, why is it important to link place reputation and image to security and statecraft?

For the last twenty years, people have primarily linked reputation and foreign policy through the idea of soft power. And soft power was understood as an eternal positive where reputations could only go up; you could only become more beloved, and it was a way for successful places to become more successful by talking about themselves. But I think we have to realise that reputation isn’t just an upward journey, and there are people out there seeking to damage your reputation. We need to think about reputation as a contested area, and as part of the core business of defending a place – not as an optional extra.

Reputation also has to be more than accentuating the positive, as the old song used to say. You also need to eliminate the negative. It’s much harder to change our realities; it involves difficult conversations with policymakers and with the citizens themselves. But in the past, we’ve seen that at key moments, the security and reputation of countries has depended on collective activity to address flaws within a country – to make a country that’s thought of as corrupt less corrupt, to make a country that’s thought of as racist less racist. It has to be more than talking about how nice it is to have a holiday there for two weeks in the summer.

You talk in your book about the five activity pillars that support public diplomacy. Can you expand on those a little for us?

Of course. First, there’s listening: learning about other places, and channelling what you’ve learnt into your policies. Then there’s advocacy, which is explaining what it is that you actually believe, and then cultural diplomacy, which is engaging with foreign publics through culture or in the realm of culture. There’s also exchange, or creating two-way experiences and bringing people of two different places together. And finally, there’s international broadcasting or facilitating provision of news through state sponsorship. And this is different from advocacy, because it has to be restricted within the ethical boundaries of journalism.

So those have always been the big five for me: listening; advocacy; cultural diplomacy; exchange; and international media. And you can see these working throughout the course of history. I’ve even found some medieval examples of what amounts to broadcasting! True, they were just writing down their news and sending it out by messenger. But it’s still that notion of engaging with the world by sharing what is happening at any one time.

How can cities and countries meet the threat of weaponised information with public diplomacy?

In my second book about this, I started to look at the ways in which you can defend yourself in today’s world. Thinking about the weaknesses in the world media system, I think media literacy is the biggest area we can be working in. People are less vulnerable to distorted media if they learn how to evaluate information. This is something each generation has to learn for themselves, because the problem is that each time a new mechanism comes along, people are more likely to believe in it. It’s like we don’t have the antibodies of scepticism to accurately evaluate information coming from a new platform.

It took us 20 to 30 years to get used to mass circulation of newspapers. It was difficult for people to not believe everything they heard on the radio. Our current challenge is that right as we’re recovering from social media, along comes artificial intelligence. It’s like trying to stand up in the sea when multiple waves are hitting you. So, I would argue that one of the first tasks is teaching media literacy. And the second thing is to develop stable media platforms. Many of the places that are most influenced by propaganda don’t have strong indigenous media. It’s out of fashion, but an important part of development aid is often developing effective local independent media.

Finally, there’s information disarmament. There is this whole forgotten history of media negotiation in the 1980s between the USA and the Soviet Union, culminating in the installation of a media hotline. If there was any disinformation in the Russian media, the Americans had a number to call, and vice versa. It was never actually needed because by the late 1980s, they were taking such care to represent one another more accurately. But it’s that commitment to and negotiation around mutual representation.

It's largely been forgotten how important this was in the negotiations, but it was really impactful. There was a Soviet claim that the Americans had invented AIDS in a biological warfare laboratory. And the US basically said they’d suspend medical diplomacy – or sharing medical research – with them unless this disinformation campaign ended. One of the disinformation experts in the US government told me that it was spooky how effective it was; it was like someone had turned off a tap.

And what are your thoughts about how AI is impacting on disinformation and misinformation campaigns?

Learning how to protect our reputation in this particular era is a challenge, and I don’t always think that governments respond to the right things when they’re talking about AI. This time last year, there were terrible floods in North Carolina, and at the time, there was an AI image circulating showing a little girl in a boat, drenched in rain and clutching a puppy. The implication was that Biden’s government hadn’t done enough to protect residents. Immediately, the response was that this was an AI image being spread, but it really misfired because they were talking about the wrong thing. They were talking about the fakeness of the image, not whether or not it was true that the federal government had let people of the region down. To me, it’s like walking into the Sistine Chapel and saying “that’s not really God on the ceiling, you know.” It’ s missing the point.

People evaluate images based on whether or not they resonate. When we respond to these challenges incorrectly, we can really antagonise audiences, because it’s emotionally true to how people feel about the situation. It’s difficult to know what the best thing you can do is in that kind of situation, but I think being genuinely concerned and meeting humans as a human yourself is the best thing you can do. After an earthquake in Sichuan, Hu Jintao, then the President of China, went to the region and was seen comforting people and being part of the solution. You need to have that emotional connection.

We often advocate for the importance of place-to-place collaboration within branding and marketing efforts. When it comes to reputational security, public diplomacy, and soft power, what role does collaboration with other places play?

There are really constructive ways we can work with one another: getting to know each other through shared cultural activity, thinking seriously about our diasporas; learning more about the reality of people’s lives. The fact is that many people live across more than one country, and that’s changing the way places operate and the way that they are represented.

The bottom line is that we’re all in this together. Soft power gave us this idea that there was a battle royale of identities – that it was a beauty pageant where we were competing to be the most desirable nation. I don’t see it like that. I think we have collective reputations now, and that means we need collective reputation security; when one democracy has a problem, all democracies are doubted around the world.

We ought to take care of each other and help one another be our best selves. And sometimes that means criticism and pointing out that this isn’t how a democracy should behave. But collective reputational security seems to be the logical next step for me and working to help others communicate themselves more effectively.

Finally, many city or nation brand teams are time and resource poor. What one action do you recommend they take that will have the biggest impact for their place?

I think once you’ve established your reputation is really important, you need to be honest about what your reputation is. And having that understanding of the overarching reputation of your place. The reputation of a nation is built out of local reputations, and a local reputation is impacted by a national reputation. So, you need to be able to see how you’re part of a greater reputation – how the local is part of the national, and how the national is part of the transnational.

Thanks Nick, that’s been really insightful. We look forward to hearing more from you at City Nation Place Global.

City Nation Place Global is heading to London this November 5-6, bringing together place brand and marketing leaders from around the world to connect and share best practice with one another. See the full agenda to find out more.