Monday Morning Media Minute

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

The New York Times published a must-read article this weekend for anyone involved in crisis communication.

The 5,200-word article — “In Case of Emergency:  What Not Do” — by Peter S. Goodman examines reasons so many companies do a poor job of communicating when they find themselves in the middle of a headline-generating crisis.

But it misses an important point.  You can create big problems for yourself by saying too much or too little.  The trick is knowing when to talk and when to shut up.

“As conventional wisdom has it, the three companies (BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs) at the center of these fiascos worsened their problems by failing to heed established protocol:  When the story is bad, disclose it immediately — awful parts included — lest you be forced to backtrack and slide into the death spiral of lost credibility,” Goodman writes.

Then he quotes Eric Dezenhall, a Washington-based communications strategist who worked for the Reagan White House, as being “particularly scornful of the classic imperative to ‘get out in front of the story,’ as if swift disclosure provides inoculation against all ugly realities.  When the facts are horrible, he (Dezenhall) argues, the best P.R. fix may simply be to absorb the pounding and get back to business, while eschewing the sort of foolish communications gimmicks that can make things worse.”

Dezenhall points to Tiger Woods to prove his point:  “What was Woods supposed to do?  Call an immediate press conference and rattle through a list of lady friends declaring, ‘Tiffany, yes; Trixy, no; Amber, don’t remember . . .’?  And if Woods had pre-empted with a confession, would this have caused the news media, bloggers, pundits, Hooters waitresses and everyone else to collectively reward him with their silence?  Not a chance.”

So who’s right — “conventional wisdom” or Eric Dezenhall?  They both are.  As I said earlier, the trick is to know when to spill your guts and when to stonewall.

It boils down to one thing:  The impact, or perceived impact, of your crisis on the rest of us.

All of us have a stake in understanding and avoiding, if possible, the health, environmental and financial damage posed by the BP oil spill.  So, withholding information — no matter how damaging — amounts to withholding information the rest of us need to evaluate our own personal risk and what to do about it.

On the other hand, the details of Tiger Woods’ sexual escapades would have made great gossip and titillating reading.  But it wasn’t information we needed to stay out of harm’s way.  So, stonewalling wasn’t just an option for Woods.  It was his best option.

When the public is at risk, it’s important to get ahead of the story and be transparent.  The more people who feel threatened, the more important it is to lay everything on the table for all to see.  If only your reputation is at stake, then you have a lot more leeway to stonewall.  And, often, remaining silent will be your best option.

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

Sometimes the best response to a story you don’t like is no response.

The problem with responding to a negative story — even if you feel it’s wrong — is that your response may keep a bad story alive longer than it would live on its own.

Attacking a negative story that’s clearly true?  That’s just drawing more attention to the story while picking a fight you can’t win.  That’s a losing strategy.

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party-backed Republican running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, has threatened to sue Reid for posting an old version of her campaign website that includes some of her more controversial opinions on Social Security, health care and other topics.  Angle’s campaign had replaced the old version with one designed to be less controversial.

She’s not challenging the authenticity of the posting by Reid’s campaign.  Instead, she’s accusing Reid of copyright and intellectual property violations.

The result has been a lot of media coverage of the controversy in Nevada and elsewhere, negating the Angle campaign’s effort to tame down her website.

I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is Reid will win the legal fight if the issue ever gets to court.  Even if he doesn’t win in court, every round of any legal battle will simply draw more attention to the very information Angle scrubbed from her website in the first place.  So, it doesn’t matter whether she wins in court.  She’s picked a fight that’s fueling a story she wants to go away.

Here’s my question for you next time you find yourself tempted to respond to a story you don’t like:  Will your response really make your point?  Or will you just keep a bad story alive for another news cycle?

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

President Obama faces a big challenge tomorrow night when he goes on national television to talk to the nation about the BP oil spill.

He has to find a way to take command of what has proven to be a perplexing problem.  He has to:

• Dramatically improve efforts to clean up the oil already in the water and on the beaches.
• If possible, shut down the leak before August.
• Deliver on what he promises.

Obama may also need to figure out “whose ass to kick”  as he suggested in a TV interview last week.  But that can’t be the focus of what he says.  The focus has to be on taking charge of fixing the problem.

What are the PR lessons here?  Several, I believe:

• Having the right objective and the right message will be critical for Obama tomorrow night.  If Obama thinks he needs to focus on “whose ass to kick”  — which is to say if he focuses on finger pointing and blame — tomorrow night’s speech will likely fail.  His objective needs to be meaningful progress toward fixing the problem and effectively communicating how he’ll do that.  He needs to take charge of the situation.
• It doesn’t matter what he says if he doesn’t deliver on what he says he’ll do.  Politicians and PR professionals sometimes make the mistake of thinking words can fix any problem.  They can’t.  It doesn’t matter what Obama says tomorrow night if he doesn’t find a way to start fixing the problem.
• Time is not your friend a crisis and this one began eight weeks ago.  Obama has fewer options today than he did six or seven weeks ago.
• With so many competing interests involved, Obama will be criticized no matter what he says or does.  So, he needs to focus on fixing the problem, not trying to make everyone happy.

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

——-

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

One of the things I learned during my 20 years as a journalist:  The bigger the story, the easier it is to tell.

Big, dramatic stories pretty much tell themselves.  Your job as a reporter is to get the facts, put them into words and get out of the way so your audience can understand the story without having to work at it.  No fancy rhetoric or clever lead needed.  Just the facts will do.

The BP oil spill is one of those stories.  Ironically, that made writing this Media Minute harder than usual.  Everything I have to say falls into the “well, duh” category — so clear in hindsight it’s almost embarrassing to put it into words.

That said, some lessons from the BP oil spill:

• One of the best ways to avoid a catastrophic failure is to be really worried about having one.  The oil industry in general and BP in particular appear to have become lax about safety because the people in charge assumed a catastrophe like the one unfolding in the Gulf couldn’t or wouldn’t happen.  Like so many disasters, multiple warning signs were present and ignored.  What warning signs is your company ignoring?  What can you do about it?  Is it worth doing something about?  Consider these consequences in addition to the unimaginable economic and environmental damage being done:   BP may not survive as a company.  Some of its executives may end up in prison.  And the BP oil spill could become the offshore drilling industry’s Three Mile Island.  In 1979, the partial meltdown at a nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, helped solidify opposition in the United States to nuclear power.  It’s one of the reasons there have been no new nuclear power plants approved for construction in the United States since the 1970s.
• As important as it is to communicate openly, honestly and clearly during a crisis, what you do — or don’t do — is far more important.  BP has done a mediocre job at best of communicating with the public since the spill.  But the fact that they haven’t been able to stop the leak or prevent the ever-spreading damage is what’s doing the real damage — to the environment and to the company.
• Time is not your friend in a crisis.  As the days have turned into weeks, the options available to BP and the Obama administration have become more limited and the stakes to them have become much higher.  The stakes will continue to grow for them and us until it’s fixed.
• The BP oil spill has now been officially classified as worse in terms of oil spilled than the Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska.  The political consequences will be much, much higher than Exxon Valdez.  Why?  Because it’s more visible and far more people are directly affected.  The political consequences will become higher yet if a hurricane blows oil farther inland than it would reach on its own or if the oil begins working its way up the East Coast.

Investing the time, money and energy required to avoid a disaster can be expensive and hard.  But it’s a lot cheaper than dealing with the crisis that happens because you didn’t do those things.

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

Is there an inherent conflict between stepping up publicly to accept responsibility during a crisis and the need to defend yourself in court?

Several readers posed that question over the past couple weeks after I criticized Goldman Sachs for its PR efforts in response to Wall Street reform legislation and oil industry executives for trying to point blame away from themselves and at one another while testifying before a Senate committee about what caused the big oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

My answer to the question?  Sometimes.  But a lot less often than many companies seem to think based on their ineffective communications when they find themselves in the middle of one.

Some crisis communications basics.

• When the public’s in danger, or believes it’s in danger, you have to disclose the facts.  All of them.  Even the ones you want to hide.  Especially, the ones you want to hide most of the time.  When it comes to civil lawsuits, you can’t hide the facts anyway.  They’ll all come out during discovery.  Hiding the facts when the public feels threatened only buys you public distrust and outrage without providing any protection once you get to court.
• Accepting responsibility because a problem happened on your property or as a result of your operations — and providing credible evidence you’re doing all you can to fix the problem and keep it from happening again — is not the same as admitting guilt in court.  You’re going to be sued anyway.  Showing the rest of us you’re willing to fix a problem we already assume is your fault will help you when you get to court, not hurt you.

The mutual it-was-their-fault-not-ours finger pointing by the oil executives came during a Senate committee hearing on the Gulf oil spill.  A BP executive blamed the leak on a blowout preventer installed by Transocean and suggested Transocean may have disregarded pressure readings indicating a problem hours before the explosion destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that led to the leak.  The implication was that the explosion and spill could have been prevented if Transocean had paid attention to the pressure readings and taken corrective action.  Transocean suggested faulty cement work by Halliburton might be the cause.  And Halliburton pointed the finger of blame back at BP and Transocean.

The comments won’t give those executives or their companies any protection in court.  But the comments did make them look bad in front of members of Congress and the public.  They damaged their cause without gaining anything positive in return.

Ditto for the folks on Wall Street who have refused to help develop reforms that will help prevent another economic meltdown like the one that happened in 2008.  If they wanted to, they could help fix a system most of us believe is broken without doing anything that would amount to an admission of guilt in court.

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

Crisis communication is the best proof I know of that those who don’t learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.

And the people most likely to get it wrong seem to be high-level corporate executives and public figures — people you’d think have had enough exposure to crisis training to know better.

Last’s week’s three-way finger-pointing exercise in front of Congress by executives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton is a good example.

You probably saw the stories.  In front of two Senate committees, executives from each of the three companies blamed one another for the big oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.  They managed to travel full circle in their finger pointing without any of them actually accepting responsibility.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from their performances that day.  I’ll touch on just two:

• These executives forgot — or didn’t know — the most basic rule of crisis communication:  Accept responsibility, fix the problem and provide credible proof you’ve taken the necessary steps to keep it from happening again.  It’s still too early for items two and three on that list.  But it certainly isn’t too early to accept responsibility and promise to take care of the other two items as soon as possible.  These executives sounded like kids trying to escape blame after mom walked into the room and found them standing around a broken cookie jar on the floor.  Did you feel better about the companies or the executives speaking for them when they all claimed it was the other guy’s fault?  I didn’t.
• Their messaging was lousy.  These companies work with one another.  And I think most of us hope they’re working together as a team to figure out what happened and how to fix it.  Didn’t they discuss in advance how to answer questions about whose fault it was?  It didn’t sound like it. Their comments raised questions in my mind — and, I suspect, the minds of others — about how well they can work together to find a solution if they’re trying to push blame off on one another.

So, is there a Catch 22 here?  If they had done the right thing from a communications standpoint would they have made their legal problems worse?  My answer to that is no.  I’ll explain why next week.

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

Do you feel warm and fuzzy about the people running Wall Street?  Are you confident they’re stepping up to make the reforms needed to prevent a repeat of the economic meltdown that triggered all those bailouts?

Me, neither.

Goldman Sachs launched a public relations campaign last month to clear its name following the announcement that the Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a criminal investigation of the company and in advance of the highly publicized hearing by a Senate subcommittee headed by Sen. Carl Levin — the one involving the now infamous exchange about the rhymes-with-gritty deal Goldman promoted to its clients.

Goldman’s PR campaign, including Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s hour-long interview last week with Charlie Rose, is pretty much the sum total of Wall’s Street’s effort to play nice with the American public in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown that put a lot of people out of work and made our collective 401(k) accounts so much smaller.

But Goldman’s PR campaign is too little too late.  Collectively, the folks who run Wall Street have shown no remorse or humility about bringing the national economy to the brink of collapse.  And they’ve shown no real interest in reforms that would keep it from happening again.

Is that a mistake?  That depends on your point of view.  From a PR point of view — winning the hearts and minds of the public — Wall Street’s stance has been a disaster.  But when it comes to looking only at the bottom line, they may be doing exactly the right thing.  That’s out of my pay grade.  So, I’ll leave it to others to figure that one out.

But here’s my point for the rest of us.  Until you convince your audience you care about how what you’re doing affects them, they won’t support you.  Wall Street doesn’t appear to care about our support.  If you care about the support of your audience, make sure you help them understand that you care about them.

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

One of my grandfathers was a country doctor in the little town of Grady, Arkansas.  He occasionally received chickens or something else besides cash in return for his services.

That was because in his day country doctors didn’t turn away patients, whether they could pay or not.  And some folks were too proud to accept something for nothing.  So, if they didn’t have cash, they paid with whatever they had to offer — including chickens.

But that’s not why I noticed when U.S. Senate candidate Sue Lowden of Nevada suggested recently that patients could use chickens to pay for their medical care.  That story caught my attention because I knew as soon as I heard it she was about to receive a lot of media attention she didn’t want.

Lowden quickly became the butt of jokes from comedians and opposing politicians.  The chicken-joke story hit its peak, as far as I can tell, with a Las Vegas TV story that’s since found its way onto YouTube.

Lowden made at least three mistakes:

• Her first mention of paying doctors with chickens appears to have been off the cuff.  She went off message.  Always have a clear message before you talk to reporters and stick to it.
• Once the story blew up, she didn’t take steps to contain the damage.  Check out the link to the Las Vegas TV story.  Lowden still looks like a deer in the headlights several days after this story went south on her.
• She doesn’t appear to have a strategy for putting the story behind her.  Lowden’s not the first public figure and won’t be the last to say something she shouldn’t have in public.  Such gaffes can be hard to fix   Just ask British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who quickly apologized last week after calling a woman he talked to while campaigning a bigot.  Brown was in his car when he made the “bigot” comment and thought he was speaking in private.  Unfortunately for him, he was still wearing a TV microphone.  The comment may have ended his chances of staying in office — despite his hasty effort to undo the damage.  Lowden hasn’t really tried to contain the damage.  She needs media training.  And help with her messaging.

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

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

Are Ronald McDonald’s days numbered?  Will the day come when he’s promoting fruits and veggies instead of burgers and fries?

In last week’s MMMM, I wrote about the group that killed Joe Camel going after Ronald McDonald as “the product of a well-orchestrated and shrewd marketing strategy” that’s helping make kids fat and contributing to “a deadly epidemic of diet-related diseases.”

I concluded by saying I don’t know where the Ronald McDonald retirement campaign will go or how successful it will be.  But I said McDonald’s would do well to open up lines of communication with the group promoting the “retirement” campaign.

Business Wire founder Lorry Lokey, now retired, offers a starker view:

“Actually, Jerry, McDonald’s only route to saving the clown is to make radical adjustments to its menu.  That doesn’t mean doing away with fries and burgers. But why not add a parallel menu of the good stuff — fruits, veggies, yoghurt shakes and so on offered with any purchase?

“Maybe offering a free salad tray of small carrots, beets, tomatoes, celery, etc., would be an inducement, and all of those are pennies in price compared to the same volume as a hamburger.

“As for fries, some fast food outlets are dumping the high cholesterol oils in favor of other, less damaging stuff.  As for burgers, use 90% fat free beef. Problem is that it costs more.  And as for full flavor carbonated drinks, switch to diet only.  Boy, that’ll be the day!  And with all this have Ronald McDonald pushing acceptance of it.”

You might quibble with the details of what Lorry says simply because it’s impossible to know what the future holds.  But conceptually, I think he’s probably right on.  Unless McDonald’s finds a way to address the complaints underlying the Ronald McDonald “retirement” effort, the clown’s likely to become a growing liability for the company that created him.

Symbols are important storytelling tools.  But for the same reasons that Ronald McDonald is so good at selling the McDonald’s brand he could easily become a symbol for what’s wrong with the McDonald’s brand in the hands of a group using him to fight childhood obesity.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  And Lorry Lokey’s.  What’s yours?

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

The group that killed Joe Camel has a new target:  Ronald McDonald.  They want force the famous clown into “retirement.”

The Corporate Accountability Group of Boston says Ronald McDonald is “the product of a well-orchestrated and shrewd marketing strategy” that’s helping to make kids fat and contributing to “a deadly epidemic of diet-related diseases.”

The group kicked off its Ronald McDonald retirement campaign recently with events outside McDonald’s restaurants in cities around the United States.  And it claims a poll it sponsored shows nearly half of those polled agree Ronald McDonald should go.

McDonald’s doesn’t seem to be getting a gold watch ready for its iconic clown, though.  The company says Ronald McDonald is a “beloved brand ambassador” and notes that Ronald McDonald is used to promote the Ronald McDonald House Charities as well as for selling Happy Meals.

The Corporate Accountability Group plans to use the same tactics it used against Joe Camel to try to bring down Ronald McDonald.  The clown “is a deep-fried Joe Camel for the 21st Century,” the group says.

Ronald McDonald will be a much tougher target than Joe Camel.  Marketing cigarettes to teenagers is a lot more unpopular than marketing fast food to kids — no matter how unhealthy.  And Ronald McDonald is an iconic figure who — up to now at least — has a happy, positive image with adults and kids alike.

But that doesn’t mean McDonald’s can afford to ignore the attack on its iconic symbol.  For the same reason that the red-and-yellow clown is a good marketing tool, it’s also a good target for a group wanting to go after the problems caused by fast food.  The Ronald McDonald retirement campaign puts a well-known face to what the protesters are saying.

I have no idea where the Ronald McDonald retirement campaign will go or how successful it will be.  But McDonald’s would do well to try to open up lines of communication with the group promoting it to see if there are grounds for a truce before Ronald McDonald becomes a symbol for what’s wrong with McDonald’s as well as serving as the company’s chief “brand ambassador.”  This issue isn’t going away any time soon.

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