Monday Morning Media Minute

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

Former Major League home run hitter Mark McGwire finally confessed to the obvious last week — that he used steroids back when he was hitting all those home runs.

It may be too little, too late.  But it’s also too early to tell.

A basic tenet of crisis communication is that you need to act as quickly as possible to acknowledge your mistakes, fix the problem and take convincing steps to prevent the problem from happening again.

Even with last week’s confession, McGwire falls short on all three counts:

• His confession is late.  And self-serving.  Five years ago, McGwire refused to answer questions about drug use during a congressional hearing, saying he was “not here to talk about the past.”  Five years ago, he wanted to protect his reputation and avoid legal liability.  Now he’s talking because he’s accepted a job as hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals and apparently has gotten advice that a preemptive confession would make it easier to keep the job.  In short, the reason for his confession is self-serving.  And he’s still making the unbelievable claim that he would have hit all those home runs even without the drugs.  He only took them for “health” reasons, he says.  Really, Mark?

• He can’t “fix” the problem.  The Major League record books still list all those home runs, including the 70 he hit in 1998 to “break” Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61.  Statistics are a really big deal for many baseball fans.  McGwire and others who rewrote the record books while on steroids have created a huge statistics problem for Major League baseball.  And McGwire is still trying to argue his records should stand because the drugs didn’t affect his performance.  Of course not.

• McGwire retired nearly a decade ago.  He certainly can urge younger players not to follow his example.  But he can’t undo what he’s already done.

I heard at least one on-air suggestion following McGwire’s confession that he be banned from baseball.  Baseball commissioner Bud Selig almost certainly will face pressure to do just that.

McGwire’s already been passed over several times for baseball’s Hall of Fame because of suspicions about his drug use.  The early evidence is that finally coming clean won’t improve his chances.  If anything just the opposite is likely to be true.

There is one thing that may work in McGwire’s favor.  Apparently, he’s still popular in St. Louis.  McGwire received a standing ovation this weekend from local fans in his first public appearance in St. Louis since making his confession.  Popular support may help him keep his new job.  But stay tuned.  This story isn’t over yet.

In the meantime, what’s the lesson for the rest of us?  The opportunity to begin restoring your reputation by acknowledging your mistakes is short-lived.  Wait too long and it becomes virtually impossible to do.  Just ask Pete Rose.

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

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

It was a story with a predictable ending.

Early this month, Colonel Van Barfoot, a 90-year-old World War II veteran and Medal of Honor winner, was ordered by his homeowners’ association to remove a flagpole he uses to fly the American flag in front of his house.  Even if you haven’t seen this story before, you already know who won.

The fight between Barfoot and his homeowners’ association in Richmond, Va., made national headlines when the association ordered him to remove the 21-foot-tall flagpole from the front yard of the house he moved into last summer.  The trouble started after Barfoot flew the flag on Labor Day and again on Veterans Day.

The homeowners’ association objected to the size of the pole.  But it beat a hasty retreat after its argument with the highly decorated veteran generated headlines nationwide.

Good for them.  Sometimes the best thing to do when you find yourself on the losing end of a story like this is to surrender quickly and beat a hasty retreat.  To its credit, the homeowners association did just that.  And the story disappeared immediately.  A good lesson to remember if you find yourself in the wrong end of a story like this.

Unlike the fight, the association’s decision to let Barfoot keep his flagpole didn’t make national headline.  I had to do a little searching to confirm this story came out the way I assumed it would when I first saw it a few weeks ago.  Is it unfair that the media covered the fight but not the resolution?  Maybe.  But that’s predictable, too.  And, in this case, I suspect the homeowners’ association didn’t mind dropping out of the headlines.

This is the last Monday Morning Media Minute of this year.  As is my custom, I’ll be taking next week off.  I’ll check in after the first of the year.  In the meantime, Merry Christmas (or whatever you celebrate).  And I hope you have a happy, prosperous and way-better-than-swell new year.

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

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

Back when I was in school, getting into a fight on the school grounds usually led to a scene where the nun or priest in charge made the two combatants look one another in the eye and shake hands.

Surprisingly enough, it worked more often than not, with the former opponents leaving the room as friends — or, at least, no longer needing to go after one another with fists.

Last week’s beer diplomacy at the White House seems to have had the same effect.  Since chatting in the White House Rose Garden, Sgt. James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates both have had positive things to say.  Gates even suggested the two men may have lunch together and perhaps even take in a ball game together.

A budding friendship?  Time will tell.  But President Obama succeeded in defusing an ugly political problem by doing something too often overlooked in the face of a crisis involving hostile audiences – sitting down with the opposing sides to talk things over.

I’ve found that one of the hardest things to do is get clients involved in contentious situations to reach out to their opponents to see if there’s a way to work things out.  It’s easy to demonize your opponents and assume there’s no room for compromise.

Trying to reach a compromise can be a slow, tedious process.  It doesn’t always work.  But if you find yourself in a situation where vocal opposition threatens to block what you want to do, reaching out to your opponents is worth a try.

Just be clear on one thing:  You’ll have to be willing to listen and even compromise.  If you’re not willing to do that, don’t bother with the overtures to the other side.

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

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

This week’s confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor are as strong an example as you’ll ever find for the importance of media training.

With 60 Democrats in the Senate there are only three things that could derail her nomination to the Supreme Court at this point – a sudden health crisis, a surprise none of us know about yet or a serious gaffe when it comes to answering questions during the hearings.

With the stakes so high and the atmosphere so heated, Supreme Court nominees now go through extensive practice sessions to get ready for their run through the nomination-hearing gauntlet.  If Sotomayor learned to stay on message – which in this case means ducking most of the really difficult questions – she’ll soon be a Supreme Court justice.  If she gets off message, things could become interesting.

Most of us will never face the kind of sustained, nationally televised grilling she’s about to go through.  But anyone who’s been in front of a hostile reporter or group of reporters during a crisis knows just how unnerving it can be if you’re not prepared.

A single comment can lead to negative headlines.  So, anyone who talks to reporters on behalf of your organization should have professional media training.  It’s the single most effective thing you can do to improve the success of your interactions with the media.

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

Nancy Pelosi has made three classic mistakes in telling what she knew about waterboarding and when she knew it as a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

• She didn’t tell the whole story.  Crisis Communications 101:  When you’re in a crisis communication situation, tell the whole story at the beginning.  If you don’t, all those ugly facts you want to hide are fodder for keeping a bad story alive.  And each new forced disclosure will hurt your credibility.  Pelosi has been telling her story in stages.  And the news conference she called last week in an apparent effort to put the story to rest didn’t work because her words were so carefully parsed that she still doesn’t appear to have told all she knows.  This is a politically charged story.  So, Pelosi’s political opponents will do all they can to keep the story alive.  She’s helping them do that.

• She’s relying on the “rules” to excuse her own behavior.  In a crisis situation, saying you met regulatory or legal requirements is a useless defense (except in court).  If your actions contributed to the problem, the rest of us don’t care whether you met whatever legal or regulatory rules applied.  We don’t trust the rules to protect us.  In Pelosi’s case, she uses this defense to explain why she didn’t complain about waterboarding of prisoners even after a member of her staff told her the CIA had told him they were doing it.

• She picked a fight while trying to shut down the story.  Pelosi accused the CIA of routinely lying to members of Congress.  That kind of accusation wasn’t going to go unanswered.  Not a good strategy when you want a story to go away.

None of us like to own up to mistakes or misdeeds.  That’s why so many companies make the same classic mistakes Pelosi has made with her current predicament.

It’s not easy to come clean when you’ve screwed up and the world is watching.  But, if you want the story to go away quickly, it’s the only chance you have at making that happen.

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.

The rules for communicating are different during times of crisis.

People have a pesky way of believing they have a right to know exactly what you’re up to when it affects their pocketbooks, health or livelihood.

In today’s supercharged political and economic climate that’s even more true than usual.  So, it’s surprising so many companies, politicians and others are still so tone deaf to the need for more openness and honesty.  Just a few examples from the last few days:

• The New York Post reports that Gov. David Paterson has secretly given pay raises to more than a dozen members of his staff after asking state employees to give up a 3 percent raise because of the state’s financial crisis.

• The Huffington Post posted an audiotape of James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley, telling financial advisers at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney (the two companies are merging) that they’ll be receiving generous “retention awards” that shouldn’t be referred to as bonuses.  He’s figured out big bonuses aren’t politically acceptable right now.  That’s progress.  He apparently hasn’t figured out that simply calling them something else isn’t the correct answer as far as the rest of us are concerned.

• Sen. Roland Burris of Illinois — the guy appointed by former Gov. Blagojevich to succeed Barack Obama in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body — now says he talked to several of the ex-gov’s aides and was hit up by the ex-gov’s brother for contributions before being appointed to the Senate seat he now occupies.  That’s not what he told the Illinois Legislature in sworn testimony before the Senate voted to honor the appointment and seat him.  His senate career will be a short one.

• The Octo Mom, the single women who just had octuplets with six more kids at home, finally acknowledged she’s getting food stamps and other public assistance.  She earlier had claimed she could support all those kids herself.  So much for her big book deal.

Here’s the point:  Whatever policies you have during “normal” times for disclosing information don’t count for much when the public and the media believe they have a direct stake in what’s going on.

Transparency and honesty are extra important in such times.  And getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar will be more damaging than usual.  Just ask the Peanut Corporation of America, which knowingly sold peanuts that had tested positive for salmonella because they thought it would be too expensive to recall the peanuts and get to the root of the problem.  Taking the cheap way out put them out of business and may send some of their executives to prison.

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.

If Wells Fargo is lucky the full-page ad they ran in Sunday’s New York Times won’t get much attention.  It’s a classic case of what not to say during a crisis.

The ad appears as an open letter from John Stumpf, the bank’s president and CEO, under the title “The Value of Team Member Recognition.”

My friend Steve Lang, who brought the ad to my attention, says it well:  “I cannot begin to express how many things are wrong with this.”

Wells Fargo used its ad to announce it’s canceling all of its employee-recognition events for the rest of the year because “many of the media stories on this subject have been deliberately misleading (and) . . . lead you to believe every employee recognition event is a junket, a boondoggle, a waste, or that it’s for highly paid executives.”

After declaring the straw man he’s created in his letter to be nonsense, Stumpf goes on to say the losers in this decision are the little people at Well Fargo — tellers, personal bankers and others — who won’t be able to get a personal acknowledgment from him for their good work.  Other losers, he says, are the little people in the hospitality industry — hotel housekeepers, restaurant servers and the airlines.

Instead of sending personal letters to each of his employees thanking them for their good work, Stumpf says:  “Since we aren’t thanking our award winners in person this year, we’ll have to do it this way.  Thank you, all our 281,000 team members.”  That’s underwhelming.

Stumpf also says “the funds to pay for recognition events . . . do not come from the government.  They come from our profits.”

Wells Fargo accepted $25 billion in TARP funds from federal government during Round 1 of the government banking bailout (conditions for Round were announced today).  They got our money on the premise that the entire banking industry – presumably including Wells Fargo – would collapse unless we taxpayers immediately forked over hundreds of billions of dollars, no questions asked.

To best of my knowledge, Wells Fargo and the rest of the banking industry have yet to say thank you to the citizens of America for our help.  They also have yet to offer any explanation of what they’ve done with our money or what they’re doing to fix things.

The rest of us don’t care about Wells Fargo’s pain.  We care about our pain.  And we care about whether all that money our government forked over to the banking industry is actually doing any good.  That’s what Wells Fargo should have talked about in its ad, assuming that it ran an ad at all.

Everybody’s favorite subject is me.  It’s always a good idea to talk about how your story affects the rest of us, not how it affects you.

Another point:  One of the jobs of public relations professionals is to provide advice that will help their clients avoid saying or doing things that will hurt rather than help them.

Unfortunately, they don’t always do that.  Sometimes, they don’t do it because they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs.  And sometimes they don’t doo it because they drunk their client’s Kool-Aid and don’t recognize the problem.  I don’t know whether Stumpf’s PR staff advised against the Times ad and were overruled or whether they supported the idea.  But it’s too bad they weren’t able to keep him from shooting his company in the foot.

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.