Monday Morning Media Minute

Some years ago a very successful and seasoned product publicist regaled me one afternoon with stories about some of the biggest successes — and a couple notable disasters — of his long career.

His point: He had made many good products more successful by raising their visibility with the media and the buying public.

But raising the visibility for products that flopped made the failures all the more painful because everyone was watching. There’s nothing worse than falling flat on center stage with a sellout audience.

Hillary Clinton has gotten two lessons along these lines in the past few weeks.

Her 3 a.m. ad was remarkable for breaking through the clutter of the campaign rhetoric. It got noticed in a big way. Even so, I think it probably hurt her at least as much as it helped.

Barack Obama responded quickly with his own version of the ad, which appeared to be as successful as hers. And cartoonists and comedians had a field day with Hillary’s ad – a lot of them recalling the sexual escapades of her husband.

In the end, I’m not sure America’s answer to who we would want to answer that call at 3 a.m. was as heavily weighted in Hillary’s favor as she had hoped.

And her relentless effort to position herself as the candidate with “experience” — the point of the 3 a.m. ad — backfired in a big way more recently when it became clear she’s been lying in describing how she came under fire in Bosnia. Because of network videotape footage showing just how far her version was from what happened, the Bosnia story always had the potential to blow up in Hillary’s face.

But in the wake of the 3 a.m. ad and Hillary’s strong reliance on experience as a key message, the Bosnia story got more visibility than it might have otherwise. And it did more damage.

The moral of the story? We all want to promote our stories. But it’s important to know when you have a story that will help you and when you have one that may do you harm. If the latter is true, you may want to think twice before telling your story. Sometimes silence is a valuable tool for public relations professionals and our clients.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Treat your audience like adults. Sounds simple, but it doesn’t happen nearly often enough.

The reason Barack Obama’s speech last week on race struck such a responsive chord with the American public is that he spoke to his audience about a difficult subject like we are adults:

• He talked about the bad along with the good.
• He was honest.
• He didn’t pander to his audience or take cheap shots at his opponents.

In the days of gotcha politics and journalism and the four-second soundbite, talking to your audience like adults can be hard.

It’s hard because the media isn’t good at telling complicated stories. It’s hard because much of your audience won’t pay attention long enough to hear the nuances of what you have to say. And it’s hard because most of us aren’t very good at talking about the bad with the good, especially when discussing difficult topics.

Yes, it’s hard. It’s also important to do. It’s especially important to do with people who hear your message a lot or who are paying close attention to what you say because they believe what you do will have a big impact on them.

How do you treat your audience like adults? Four ways to begin:

• Be honest. Tell the truth as best you can.
• Be consistent. You’re entitled to have a point of view. But don’t change what you said yesterday because it isn’t convenient today.
• Be authentic. Pandering to an audience that knows you’re insincere may work some of the time. But it won’t work with people who pay attention to what you say and do over the long term. And once you lose their trust, you’ll have a hard time winning it back. If they like and trust you, they’ll help tell your story to their friends and families. Lose their trust and they’ll tell that to their friends and families, too.
• Do what you say. Ultimately, the people who are paying attention will judge you by whether your words and actions match up with one another. They’ll give you more credit for saying things they don’t like if they know you’re being honest than for saying things they like if they don’t trust you to do what you say.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

It’s good to have friends who can help tell your story and support your case.

Eliot Spitzer learned that lesson the hard way: He didn’t have any when he needed them.

Would Spitzer have kept his job if he had more political friends? Hard to say. But he would have had a better chance of surviving or, at least, leaving office with more of his dignity intact – and a better chance of making a comeback someday.

The lesson for the rest of us? Make friends, even when you’re in a strong position. If you make friends when you don’t need them, they’re more likely to help you when you do. And failing to make friends because you don’t think you need them means the smallest stumble can be fatal.

One good thing about having friends is that, often, they can tell your story or advocate your case in ways you can’t. But pay attention to what they’re saying on your behalf.

Several of the presidential candidates have learned that lesson during the campaign. Nearly all of them have experienced friends or spouses saying things that hurt or embarrassed them.

Last week’s incident with Geraldine Ferraro saying Barack Obama “would not have made it this far if he was a white man” is particularly intriguing. It’s either a good example of using a third-party to deliver a message you can’t deliver on your own or a case of a friend doing damage by speaking out of turn.

Was Ferraro acting with the approval or even at the suggestion of the Clinton campaign to say out loud what many blue collar white voters in Pennsylvania feel? Was the Clinton campaign using her to play a race card Hillary couldn’t do on her own?

Or did Ferraro step out of line and inadvertently embarrass her candidate? If so, she certainly wasn’t in any hurry to stop the damage. She kept the story alive at least one day longer than it would have lasted on its own by continuing to defend her comment during repeated TV appearances even after Clinton had “repudiated” it and Ferraro had resigned from Clinton’s Finance Committee.

Either Clinton was making use of Ferraro in a very calculated and cynical way to play a race card she couldn’t do on her own or Ferraro was freelancing in a way that was simply out of bounds for a third-party advocate. Either way, what she did is a good example of the power and limits of using third-party advocates. If they stay on message, they can be very useful; if they get off message, they can do a lot of damage.

Make as many friends as you can. Use them, when appropriate, to help tell your story. But pay attention to what they say.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Control your message. Easy to say, but sometimes hard to do.

Barack Obama lost control of his message before Ohio and Texas, and it cost him.

Two prime examples: The Canada-NAFTA miscue and the Hillary is a monster quote.

There’s some evidence the NAFTA issue came from leaks instigated by Obama’s opponents. His big mistake was not responding effectively.

The “monster” quote came from Samantha Power, a senior advisor to Obama who got off message, which damaged Obama’s campaign and forced her to quit her job. It goes to the heart of the point I want to make this week – some fundamentals of maintaining control of your message:

• Know what your message is. You can’t control your message if you don’t know what it is. A surprisingly large number of people talk to reporters with nothing more specific in mind than getting a “positive” story or avoiding a “negative” one. That’s not good enough.

• Make sure everyone who talks to reporters on your behalf also knows what your message is – and that all of them stick to the same message.

• Limit the number of people who talk to reporters, if possible. It will reduce the chances for contradictions that will make you look dishonest or hypocritical.

• Have a coordinator responsible for knowing who is talking to reporters on your behalf and for sitting in on as many interviews as possible. If you don’t have someone within your organization who has participated in every interview a reporter does with people in your organization for a given story, then the reporter knows more about your message than you do. And you won’t have any way to clear up misstatements or contradictions before they end up in a story and do you harm.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Audiences aren’t all the same. So, it’s important to know who you’re talking to — or want to talk to — because what works well with one audience may fall flat with another.

Consider, for example, the very different requirements for communicating effectively with casual audiences, experts and “stakeholders.”

Casual audiences: By casual audiences, I mean people who have a casual interest in your story — the average reader of most news stories, for example. One of the worst things you can do to communicate with a casual audience is give them too much information. Less is more for a casual audience. Give them too much information and they won’t hear anything you say. Your message needs to be simple, relevant and memorable to reach casual audiences.

Experts: In this context, I’m including anyone who knows a lot about your story – or the topic of your story. They may or may not look to you for a lot of information. But they’ll certainly look to you for specific, factual information about the part of your story that interests them. If they can’t find it, they’ll dismiss or discount your story. Without the specific information they’re looking for, they may see a simple, memorable message as “fluff” or “spin” and it may actually make your story less effective with this audience.

Stakeholders: People use the term “stakeholders” to mean many things. In this context, I mean people who see themselves as having a direct enough stake in your story to want specific, factual information about how your story affects them — regardless of whether they know enough to be an “expert.” They’ll want as much information as you can give them about the part of your story they care about. A simple, memorable message may be important for this audience. But they’ll also want the kind of detail that turns off casual audiences.

You’ll get lucky sometimes and be able to communicate with each of these audiences separately. More often, you won’t.

That means you have to have a simple, memorable message for the casual part of your audience. But you need to give the rest of your audience the information they need — or a way to get to it easily. More about another time.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.