The Hidden Moment a Crisis Really Begins

Molly McPherson opens this episode not with a scandal, but with a pair of pants. It’s a disarming entry point into a much bigger question: what happens to trust when an expert starts to monetize? Drawing on her own decision to join the affiliate platform LTK as a mirror, Molly unpacks a real client crisis involving a content creator whose audience turned on them—not because of what they did, but because of what had quietly eroded. This episode introduces the Crisis Doctrine, Molly’s new framework that distills years of crisis communication work into foundational principles. At its core: trust is the benchmark for reputation, and a crisis almost never begins when you think it does.

What You’ll Learn

• Why joining an affiliate platform forced Molly to confront the social contract she has with her audience—and what that has to do with crisis communication
• How a content creator’s monetization shift quietly weakened trust with followers long before the public backlash began
• The first two doctrines of the Crisis Doctrine framework: why trust is the currency of reputation, and why crises begin before the headlines
• Why “the medium is the message” is one of the most underused ideas in crisis communication—and how social media algorithms accelerate the collapse of trust
• What transparency actually looks like in practice when you’re someone who teaches it for a living
• Why the real work in a crisis isn’t the statement or the PR campaign—it’s restoring what was broken long before the story went public
  
  

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Transcript

A Different Kind Of Story

Molly McPherson 0:05

This is going to be a different episode this week. But if you stick with me, I promise there's a lesson in here about social media, trust, and reputation that could help you if you ever find yourself on the wrong side of public opinion. So let me start with something simple. These pants, if we're listening to me on the podcast, you can't see them, but I love them. They're comfortable, they hang well, they're flattering. And I've told almost every friend I have that they should buy them. I travel a lot for work. Sometimes I'm speaking, sometimes I'm sitting at a desk working with clients, and comfort matters, but appearance matters too. And these pants hit both. So why am I starting a crisis communication podcast talking about pants? Because I'm about to tell you something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I recently joined LTK. If you're not familiar with it, LTK is an app that allows creators to share affiliate links to products. You've probably seen it before. Even if you don't know what it is, you know what it is. Some people do get ready with me posts or they show what they're wearing, and then you can click a link and buy the same item. If someone buys through the link, the creator receives a commission. And when the opportunity came for me, I struggled. I didn't know if this was the right decision. Because I know something about social media that most people don't think about. And that is when someone follows you online, there's a social contract. People follow me because I teach, I explain crisis communication. I break down what's happening behind the scenes in scandals and reputation crises. I share what I've learned from my years of doing this work with people who are in very real trouble. And that's why people are here. So the question I asked myself was this if I suddenly start talking about pants and sweaters and lifestyle things, does that change the contract? Does that affect trust? That question was sitting in the back of my mind recently when I was working with a client who had a very significant social media crisis. And I have to be careful here because I always protect my client's confidentiality. But there's a lesson in the situation that I think is important enough to share. We'll call it a classic TikTok crisis. This was a content creator who had built up a large following by sharing knowledge and expertise. People followed them because they trusted what they were teaching. They had credentials, education, experience. Followers were there to learn. Over time, though, something started to shift. Partnerships started appearing, brand collaborations, monetization. Now, none of that is inherently wrong. Not at all. People build businesses online. That's normal. But when monetization starts to take up more space in the relationship between the creator and the follower, the social contract changes. The relationship becomes more transactional. And what happened with this person is something I see happen all the time in a crisis. When the backlash starts, that's the moment they think the crisis has just begun. But that's not actually when it began. One of the first things I tell clients is this a crisis almost never starts when you think it starts. People call me and tell me when I ask them the question, they'll say, Oh, it started two days ago, a week ago. But when I start asking questions and tracing events back, the real beginning of the crisis is often months or even years earlier. And in this case, the crisis wasn't the person attacking them online. That was the symptom. The real issue was the trust had already been weakening. And when trust weakens, it changes how people interpret everything you do. This is something I'm starting to formalize in my work. And it's part of something new that I'm building. It's called the crisis doctrine. For years I've shared ideas, advice, and observations for my work in crisis communication, but they were scattered across different platforms. TikTok here, podcast episode here, client calls, keynote talks. My brain was ping-ponging between celebrity scandals and corporate crises and private client work. So I decided finally everything I know needed to go into a framework. The crisis doctrine. These doctrines aren't pulled from academic theory. They come directly from years of working inside crises and watching the same patterns repeat over and over. And the first doctrine is this trust is the benchmark for reputation. Trust is the currency. When trust is growing or stable, your reputation is strong. When trust begins to erode, your reputation becomes vulnerable. And here's the second doctrine: a crisis begins before the headlines. Most people think the crisis begins when the video goes viral or the headline appears. But by the time that happens, the conditions for the crisis were already in place. Something in the relationship between the audience and the person at the center of the story has already shifted. And that's exactly what happened with the creator I'd mentioned earlier. Their followers originally came for expertise and knowledge, but over time, monetization began to change the relationship. Then something happened that triggered a backlash. But the backlash wasn't the beginning. It was the moment when the weakened trust finally became visible. There's another idea that helps explain why these situations unfold the way they do. It's something I learned in college in a media theory class from my journalism professor, Marshall McLuhan's idea. The medium is the message. When I first heard that, I didn't fully understand it. But over the years, I see how powerful it is. You can deliver the exact same message in different mediums and get completely different reactions. You could say something in an email and it lands fine. Say the same words on TikTok and you could get canceled. Same words, same tone, different medium. And today the medium that shapes reputation more than anything else is social media. The algorithm amplifies outrage, suspicion, conflict. When people start questioning someone's motives, the algorithm doesn't calm things down. It accelerates everything. Which brings me back to the question I asked myself when I joined LTK. Does introducing affiliate links change my social contract with you? The honest answer is yes. It changes a little. It changes it a little. And pretending it doesn't would be dishonest. Some people won't care, some people will like it, some people will probably roll their eyes. That's the reality of social media. But the reason I'm talking about it openly is because trust matters. If I'm going to teach about trust and reputation, then I need to practice the same transparency I advise others to use. So here's the standard I'm setting for myself. The teaching stays first, the crisis analysis stays first, the doctrine stays first. If I share something like these pants, which are Viore, by the way, they're brand new, they're paper thin, new line. I love them and I've told all of my friends about them. But when I share something with you like this, it's because it's something I genuinely use and I like. Not because I'm suddenly turning into this lifestyle brand. But I'm also not going to pretend that monetizing online doesn't exist. Creators build businesses, experts build businesses. That's the ecosystem we're in. What matters is whether the trust remains intact. And that's what the crisis doctrine is really about. Understanding how trust is built, how it erodes, how crises emerge, and most importantly, how trust can be rebuilt. Over the next several episodes, I'm going to start unpacking the full doctrine framework. And these aren't just PR tactics, they're ways of thinking about reputation. That's the work I do. Because the real work in a crisis isn't writing the perfect statement or launching a PR campaign. Those are tactics. The real work is restoring trust. And when you understand where trust broke down, you can start to repair it. So that's where we're going next. Thank you for listening, for your patience today with a different kind of episode, and for the trust you've placed in me over the years. And if you ever find yourself in a crisis, or if you know someone who is, the Crisis Doctrine Framework is something I'm building specifically to help guide people through those moments. Thanks for being here, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye for now.