Monday Morning Media Minute

The answers you get often depend on the questions you ask.  So, if you ask the wrong questions, you’re likely to get the wrong answers.

The current brouhaha over the appointment of a new senator from Illinois to replace that guy with the funny name who quit because he got a better job is a good example.

Gov. Blagojevich’s in-your-face appointment of Roland Burris is hardball politics by someone who appears to be asking:  How do I stay out of prison?  He’s reminding prosecutors and everyone else that he’s still governor.  My guess is he wants something — his freedom — in return for resigning.

There’s been talk in Springfield of speeding up impeachment proceedings against Blagojevich by legislators asking:  How do we get rid of the political awkwardness caused by the Burris appointment?  They’re asking the wrong question.  Blagojevich may deserve to be impeached, but speeding it up to scuttle the Burris appointment is the wrong answer because they asked the wrong question.  The right question is should Blagojevich be removed from office because he’s corrupt, not should he be removed from office quickly because he embarrassed other politicians by making an appointment he’s legally entitled to make.  Moving quickly to impeach Blagojevich for the wrong reason will cause more problems than the one it’s intended to solve.

And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced before the Burris appointment that the Senate would refuse to seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich — something he’s repeated since the appointment was announced.  Experts disagree over whether the law is on the side of Reid and other senators who want to keep Burris out of the Senate.  Regardless of how that issue is resolved, the effort to keep Burris from being seated promises to create a political circus that can only cause further embarrassment for Senate Democrats.

Reid and others like him asked the wrong question:  How can we show our disapproval of Blagojevich?  They should be asking whether Blagojevich got any kind of illegal payoff for naming Burris to the job (no one’s credibly suggested that’s the case) and whether Burris is qualified to be a senator (clearly he is).

The Blagojevich mess will take care of itself over time.  I have my guesses about what will happen.  You probably do, too.  We won’t resolve that here.

So, what’s the point?  People and organizations in the public eye frequently create problems for themselves by asking the wrong question, sometimes in the name of doing the right thing.

Make sure you ask the right questions.  You’ll have a better chance of getting the right answers if you do.

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.

I like a good food fight.  So, I’ve been enjoying the potshots the Republicans have been taking at one another since the election.  Actually, it started before the election.

Entertainment aside, the pre- and post-election fighting within the sometimes-competing McCain and Palin campaigns stands in stark contrast to the message discipline shown by the Obama campaign.

Part of the difference can be explained by the difference between a winning team and a losing one.  It’s a lot easier to stay disciplined when you’re winning.  But staying disciplined also helps you win.

I’ll leave it to folks smarter than me to figure out why Obama won and McCain lost.  But a few thoughts about the importance of having a clear message and sticking to it.

Know what you want to say and why you want to say it. You can’t develop effective messages until you know what you want to achieve (your objective) and who your audience is (who you’re trying to influence).  It’s important to take time before you go public to figure these out.  I’m constantly surprised at how often people start talking to reporters and the rest of us before they have a clear message — or even a clear objective.

Once you have your message, stick to it. That sounds easy enough, but it isn’t always as easy as it sounds:

• Some spokespeople have an aversion to repeating themselves.  That’s a mistake.  Most of your audience won’t get your message until they’ve heard it several times.  So repeat yourself.

• Everyone has their favorite way of telling your story.  Even when an organization takes time to develop messages there almost always are at least a few people who think they have a better version.  Maybe they do.  If so, adopt their version.  Otherwise, insist they follow the same script as everyone else.

• People have personal agendas.  Just because someone claims to be speaking on your behalf doesn’t mean they don’t have their own personal agenda.  If they’re putting their personal agenda ahead of yours, they aren’t really loyal followers.  If they’re on your payroll and you have the power to do so either fire them or put them in jobs where they are no longer acting as spokespeople.

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 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.

Do you find the presidential polls as interesting as I do?

At the beginning of this year, Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination and John McCain was broke, his campaign on life support and most people — including me — thought he was done.

And just a few months ago Barack Obama looked like a shoo-in for the White House.  He may still get there, of course, but he’s not looking like a shoo-in right now.

I’m not going to offer any political predictions.  I’ll leave that to the pundits.

But I think the ever-changing dynamics of the political polls are a reminder of two important lessons for those of us who practice public relations.

Lesson 1:  Telling your story effectively is a marathon, not a sprint.  The news release you issued yesterday was a resounding success with coverage beyond your wildest dreams?  Congratulations.  But your job isn’t done.  Your audience won’t even begin hearing your message until you’ve said it so many times you’re sick of it.  So, if you’ve got a story to tell that you really want the rest of us to hear, you need to keep telling it.  The same is true for your setbacks.  They hurt.  But one setback — or even a series of them — won’t decide the final outcome unless you let it.

Lesson 2:  If you don’t tell your story, no one else will do it for you.  I’m constantly puzzled by how many companies either don’t tell their story at all or water it down to take all the sizzle out of it because they’re afraid “something” will go wrong.  Telling your story effectively will often mean you’ll get pushback from your opposition or your critics.  But they don’t even have to bother pushing back if you’re not pushing forward.  Successful candidates — and other successful communicators — start every day with the goal of controlling the message for that day.  Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t.  But you can’t succeed without trying.  And you can’t get anyone to hear your story if you don’t tell it over and over.

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 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.

I love movies and plays. The best ones feel spontaneous because the actors have practiced their lines and moves so many times that they feel unscripted.

Follow their example.  Once you’ve defined your message, practice it until you can say it verbatim without sounding scripted.

Actors follow a script and rehearse. Musicians follow a script and rehearse. Dancers follow a script and rehearse. Professional speakers follow a script and rehearse.

You can follow a script and rehearse, too.  During media training, we sometimes develop messages as a group for the practice interviews that follow.  Sometimes we’ll spend more than an hour developing messages and honing them until each one is a simple statement that can be repeated in a few seconds.  Then, we write them on big sheets of paper and paste them on the wall where the people being interviewed can read them.

More often than not, the participants don’t say the message they helped to write the way it’s written on the wall the first time through.  Instead, they paraphrase what’s on the wall to sound natural.  Inevitably, the paraphrased version isn’t as good.  If it’s better than the one on the wall, we change what’s on the wall.

Following a script is hard until you’ve done it a few times because it feels scripted and rehearsed.  But if you do it right, the scripted version is your best version of what you want to say. So, say it that way. How do you make it sound spontaneous and unrehearsed?  By rehearsing it until it sounds spontaneous and unrehearsed.

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.

As a spokesperson, are you paid to lie for your boss? Do you find it necessary to lie to your boss? And how strong an obligation do you have to keep your boss’s secrets secret?

Those are some of the questions raised by Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

Question 1: Are you paid to lie for your boss?

Here’s how CNN’s Anderson Cooper put it last week during a discussion of McClellan’s book: “Don’t these people lie all the time? Maybe lying is too dirty a word, but their job, they’re PR people, their job is to spin a story. Their job is to focus on one thing in answering a question and completely ignore the question you ask.”

And here’s how CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen said it: “Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.” He was ridiculing the Public Relations Society of America and others for suggesting McClellan may have violated the ethics of the PR profession by lying for his former bosses at the White House. Suggesting that telling the truth is an ethical obligation for PR people “strikes me as if the Burglars Association of America had as its creed ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’” Cohen said.

Cooper and Cohen aren’t alone in feeling those of us who work in public relations are paid to lie for our clients.

During the 20 years I worked in newsrooms and through much of my 25-year career in public relations, I would have told you one of my strengths is that I speak “the truth.” What I’ve come to understand is that I do my best to speak my truth as well as I can. And professionally I do the best I can to help my clients speak their truth.

People see things differently. And we’re entitled to present our point of view without having to make the case for the other side. When I’m representing my clients, I’m obligated to represent their point of view. That’s what they hire me to do. And I’ve taken their money with the understanding I’ll do my best to help them tell their story.

That doesn’t mean I have to lie or mislead by verbally dancing on the head of a pin with tortured interpretations of what the meaning of “is” is. In fact, I’d be doing my clients a disservice if I did.

My experience has been that good clients are at least as careful with the truth as any journalist I’ve met. And any client who expects you to lie or mislead on their behalf isn’t worth having. Keeping your integrity is intact is important. But you don’t have to put it in those terms. If you lie or mislead, sooner or later you’ll lose your credibility and your effectiveness

Did Scott McClellan lie for his bosses at the White House? I can’t say for sure, of course. But I believe he did. Did he tell “the truth” in his book? No. But he probably told his truth as he now sees it.

Does his book serve the national interest by pulling back the curtain of secrecy at the Bush White House? Maybe. I’ll leave that for others to decide.

But one thing his book has done is reinforce the stereotype that people like me regularly lie as a matter of course because it’s part of our job description. And that means he did all of us who practice public relations a disservice. He made it harder for us to do our jobs.

Question 2: Do you find it necessary to lie to your boss?

One of the most important — and difficult — things a good public relations professional can do for clients is give them advice they don’t want to hear. Over the years, I’ve seen too many of my colleagues who aren’t willing to do that. They tell their clients only what the clients want to hear.

I’m not providing a client full value for their money if I’m not willing to be honest enough to give them my best advice, even when I know they won’t like it. There are two caveats:

• My job is to advise the client. But, ultimately the client gets to decide what to do. My job is to do what s/he wants, even if I think s/he should do it differently. If I feel strongly enough that the course of action the client has decided to take is unethical or will require me to do something I’m simply not willing to do, then I have a responsibility to quit.

• If I know a client isn’t open to advice, I don’t give it unless asked. I do the best I can for them under those circumstances. And if I find I can’t do good work for them, it’s time to leave.

By his own admission, Scott McClellan reached a point where he no longer believed in what he was doing at the White House. He was lying for and to his bosses. He says he ultimately resigned because of that. Did he wait too long to resign? I don’t know. But the fact that he waited as long as he did to quit and waited until he had a book to sell to speak out will inevitably hurt the credibility of his message.

Question 3: How strong an obligation do you have to keep your boss’s secrets secret?

I see my obligation to honor the confidences of my clients as equivalent to the obligations attorneys, priests, therapists, doctors and similar professionals have to honor the confidences of their clients, parishioners or patients. With his book, McClellan has violated this trust.

The impact? Steve Lang, a former colleague and retired vice president of external communication for AT&T Broadband (now Comcast) said it well in an email to me last week. Steve says McClellan “has dealt a blow to PR people everywhere. One of the toughest parts of the PR job is gaining the trust of upper management, and gaining access to the decision-making process in order to be that voice of the public inside the company. Well, that just got harder, thanks to little Scotty.” I agree.

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.

Foot-in-mouth disease. It can hit anyone who talks to reporters.

Hillary Clinton fell victim to it last week with her now-infamous reference to RFK’s assassination.

The first news reports about Clinton’s comment made it sound like she was saying one reason for her to stay in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is that Barack Obama might be assassinated. That’s not quite what she said, of course. But the damage had been done.

What do you do if you find yourself in a similar situation? That depends.

If your verbal faux pas will disappear from the media after a single news cycle, you may just want to take your lumps and move on — especially if anything you say will keep the story alive another day.

If the issue’s likely to stay in the news for more than one news cycle — or, if it’s serious enough that you feel an explanation is necessary — then you’ll probably want to do what Clinton did: Clarify what you meant (or acknowledge you made a mistake), apologize if appropriate and then move on.

Your objective: Limit the damage by limiting the amount of time the issue remains in the news.

Last week’s incident is also a good reminder that it’s important to be careful what you say around reporters. The best way to do that is to know what your message is before you talk to reporters and stick to it. Any time you answer a reporter’s question that you haven’t prepared for you run the risk of suffering from foot-in-mouth disease. So, think before speaking.

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. Want to read and comment on back issues of MMMM? Check out the MMMM blog.

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What this is: An idea you can read in a minute or so and use to make your interactions with the news media more successful. More Monday Morning Media Minutes.

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© 2008 Jerry Brown

Here’s a bandwagon some of you can ride – Indiana Jones.

The new Indiana Jones movie promises to be a big hit. That’ll lead to a round of stories about whether Harrison Ford can still cut it as an action hero at age 65. We’ll be reading about how he’s a little creaky around the edges and/or still a hunk and dozens of variations on those themes.

And then we’ll start seeing stories about senior citizens continuing to succeed at things once reserved for younger people – and stories about people remaining active at jobs, sports and other activities far longer than they used to.

Do you have a story to tell around that trend? If so, get it ready so you can pitch it once the movie hits the theaters and the media starts looking for stories to tell.

Don’t have a story that fits the Indiana Jones hoopla we’re about the experience? Then look for other trends in the news or dates on the calendar you can use as a hook for your story. If you watch for them, you’ll be surprised at how often they come along.

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. Want to read and comment on back issues of MMMM? Check out the MMMM blog.

© 2008 Jerry Brown

What you don’t say is important. Because it adds impact to what you do say.

Get out your editing pen and trim the fat from what you’ve written – press releases, speeches, factsheets, newsletters, whatever.

Be ruthless when editing yourself. Start by knowing who your audience is and what your message is. Get rid of anything that doesn’t support your message. If you can say it in fewer words, do it. Replace big words with little ones.

Most of us try to say too many things and use too many words to do it.

Trimming the fat adds impact to your message. I almost always write too many words to begin. Then I start trimming. Sometimes I play editing games, picking an arbitrary number of words to get rid of, for example. If that proves easy, I pick a smaller word count and do it again. Or I find ways to trim a page or more from what I’ve written. If I’m ruthless with my editing, the end product is always better.

I keep editing until the only way to cut more is to get rid of things important to my message. Then it’s time to quit.

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. Want to read and comment on back issues of MMMM? Check out the MMMM blog.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to own up to a really bad mistake before your critics can point it out for you.

Like Denver Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony’s assessment of his team’s embarrassing 102-84 loss Saturday to go 0-3 in their NBA playoff series with the Los Angeles Lakers: “We quit. Everybody. From the coaches to the players, we quit. And I said it.”

Anthony’s criticism of his team worked because it was undeniable and because he included himself: “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m not pointing the fingers at nobody. I didn’t play worth a damn . . . and I can accept that. But as a competitor, there’s no way that I should lay down and quit and lay down on my team like we did tonight . . . We all just gave up.’’

Contrast that with teammate Allen Iverson’s complaint about being pulled from the game early: “To not go back in, I don’t understand that. And (Coach George Karl) didn’t even say nothing to me even afterward . . . I played every game with a broken finger and all. I always came to play, every game we had. So why not tell me nothing?’’

Unlike Anthony, Iverson pointed the public finger of blame at his coach while ignoring his own lousy performance during the game. Iverson’s lucky that Anthony’s quotes got top billing in the media. His comment was divisive and made him look like a whiner. It would not have played well as the lead of the stories about the Nuggets loss.

Here’s the lesson for the rest of us. If you screw up in a way you know will be noticed (and sometimes when it wouldn’t be noticed), your best PR strategy may be to own up to it yourself before you critics do it for you. And almost always, pointing the finger of blame at yourself when it’s deserved will serve you better than trying to find someone else to pin the blame on.

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. Want to read and comment on back issues of MMMM? Check out the MMMM blog.

Senator Obama’s a brilliant orator. But he could use some media training.

I’m one of those who think the questions that dominated the first 45 minutes of last week’s debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton were silly and trivial. But, given the tenor of the coverage of the Democratic primary the last few weeks, they shouldn’t have come as any great surprise. And there wasn’t a single question on the list, silly as it was, that he shouldn’t have been able use as a bridge to talk about the things he wanted to talk about.

Obama made the mistake too many articulate professionals and executives make. They assume they can “wing” it when talking to reporters because they’re able to do that so much of the time.

Don’t make the same mistake – or allow anyone who talks to reporters on behalf of your organization to make it.

You can’t wait for reporters to ask the “right” questions to begin delivering your message. If you do, you may never get to your message.

That’s why I encourage everyone who talks to reporters to get media training – and regular refresher courses. Unless you talk to reporters often enough to keep your interviewing skills well honed, being media trained once isn’t enough.

Remember: The reporter’s in charge of the questions that get asked and the story that gets written. You’re in charge of your answers.

Obama was unhappy because he didn’t like the questions that were asked. But he wasn’t in charge of the questions. He was in charge of his answers. And he didn’t do a very good job of taking charge of his answers to deliver his message.

Don’t make the same mistake when you’re talking to reporters. Take the time to figure out what questions you’re likely to be asked, what your message is for the interview and how you’ll deliver it – even if the reporter doesn’t ask the “right” questions.

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.