Donald Trump has already posted more than 30,000 tweets from his @realdonaldtrump account. Four weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, the Republican frontrunner is running a communications operation on Twitter that no previous major-party primary candidate has attempted, and corporate communications teams — especially at companies with meaningful federal-contract exposure — should be thinking now about how they would respond if the campaign turns its attention their way.
The Volume Is the Point
The 140-character format seems to suit Trump's direct style. Tweets go out at all hours. Attacks name individual reporters, individual competitors, and individual companies by handle. Every attack cycle produces a news cycle. Every news cycle produces coverage. Every coverage cycle reinforces the volume the campaign is running.
The mechanic is not accidental. Trump entered the primary cycle with roughly 5.5 million Twitter followers, an audience most senators would take years and a national campaign to build. He has grown that number to over 17 million during the campaign so far. The audience reach is now larger than the combined circulation of every major American newspaper. A single Trump tweet reaches an audience most Fortune 500 CEOs would need a multi-million-dollar paid campaign to touch.
The Corporate Exposure
Corporate communications teams at companies with meaningful federal-contract exposure — defense contractors, aerospace manufacturers, infrastructure firms, healthcare providers, telecoms — should be thinking now about the scenario in which the campaign turns its attention their way. Two dynamics are already visible in the primary cycle worth studying.
The attack is public and named. Trump does not send private letters to CEOs. He tweets. The complaint is public before the company can respond. The framing lands before the corporate communications team can review it. The traditional relationship between a candidate and a corporation — private negotiations, off-the-record calls, quiet policy signaling — is not the model in play.
The response asymmetry is structural. Trump's Twitter audience is more than 17 million. Boeing's Twitter audience is under half a million. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and most other major federal contractors run comparable follower counts. The audience-reach gap between the campaign and any single corporate target is more than 30-to-1 on Twitter. No corporate paid-media budget can close that gap in real time.
The Wrong Response
The pattern in the primary cycle so far has been for targeted individuals and organizations to respond aggressively. Politicians attacked by Trump defend themselves loudly. Journalists attacked by Trump respond in kind on the same platform. Some corporations that have been referenced in Trump statements have followed the same pattern, responding on Twitter with defenses of their operations, their pricing, and their independence from government pressure.
The pattern is producing consistent results. The response extends the news cycle. The response gives the campaign additional content. The response converts a one-day story into a five-day story. Companies defending their honor and right to work independently of political pressure are, in most cases, achieving the opposite of what they intended. The attention they are drawing to the original attack outweighs the credibility they are recovering by responding.
What Works Better
The best response for corporations facing this scenario — and the applicable model for smaller companies that could find themselves facing a comparable dynamic with any high-audience critic — is to approach it strategically rather than reactively.
Do not pick up the gauntlet. A verbal duel with a candidate whose audience is 30 to 40 times larger than yours is a duel you will lose in reach terms even if you win it in substance terms. The audience seeing the response is not the same as the audience that saw the attack. The two audiences do not intersect meaningfully.
Offer a peace summit instead. A calm and controlled invitation to sit down and work through the issue reads as adult across every audience. It closes the news cycle. It removes the content the campaign was using. It creates the opening for a private conversation that may or may not happen but at minimum removes the public confrontation from the daily cycle.
Do not seem arrogant, combative, or unreasonable. When the world is watching — and 17 million Twitter followers plus every cable news outlet is a version of the world watching — the corporation that looks reasonable outperforms the corporation that looks combative regardless of the underlying merits. Reasonableness compounds credibility across audiences that are not paying close attention to substance. Combativeness does not.
Diffusing Is the Win
Diffusing a volatile situation is much more of a win than going to battle, even if at the end you can declare a victory on the merits. If things cannot be worked out, you will have lost a little time and gained more respect from those looking at the situation from the outside. That respect is the durable asset. Twitter engagements are not.
What Corporate Communications Teams Should Do Now
Three operational moves worth making in the first quarter of 2016, regardless of which candidate becomes the nominee.
Audit federal-contract exposure and public-visibility risk. Any company with meaningful federal-contract revenue and public-facing operations should be mapping the specific policy positions that could produce an attack cycle from any presidential candidate. The exposure map should be done now, not during the attack.
Draft the peace-summit response template in advance. The right response to a public attack is short, calm, and closing. The company that has drafted the response in advance can post it within an hour. The company that has not will spend twenty-four hours arguing internally while the news cycle runs against it.
Brief the CEO on when to speak and when not to. The single most important decision in this scenario is whether the CEO responds personally or through the corporate communications operation. In most cases, the corporate communications operation should carry the response. The CEO gets pulled in only when the situation escalates to a level that requires the personal voice. Making that decision in advance — under what conditions the CEO steps forward — is a decision that cannot be made cleanly during a crisis.
The primary cycle has just begun. The dynamic that has already produced a series of attacks on individual companies and industries will scale substantially over the balance of the year if Trump wins the nomination. Corporate communications teams that build the response infrastructure now will handle whatever comes. The ones that do not will improvise, and improvisation is exactly what the campaign's operating model is designed to exploit.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
