Psychology Today deconstructs the content and style of the front-running U.S. presidential candidates.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution [via Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire] offers a peek at President Bush’s tour manual.
For those of you who work in the broader Corporate Affairs world, Harvard Business School has a piece on investor relations.
The New York Times recounts the use of “dial-testing” of messages used by the Democratic presidential candidates. The key conclusion from one “tester”:
But generally, Mr. Thau said, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards “know how to construct an effective debate response.” He could not say the same of others. Senator Dodd and Senator Joe Biden in particular tend to lapse into “Senate-speak,” Mr. Thau said, and do not frame their arguments with a beginning, middle and end.
Steve and I have had a few chats about the genius of Facebook – why it is becoming an essential connecting tool for professionals, and a great way to keep in touch with your network.
Well Newsweek has a brilliant article on the Facebook phenomenon…and inventor Mark Zuckerberg summed it up nicely:
“The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It’s really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it’s with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically.”
The communications potential of this is huge — and it’s why so many political supporters and cause promoters are creating Facebook groups faster than you can imagine.
The article goes on to warn, quite correctly, that if you’re going to add friends from work – like I have added the Chairman of my company – you have to think about what you post. The best communications advice I can offer is simple — what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
The role of the Press Secretary to a major political figure is a revered position in the field of communications. Alastair Campbell, the Press Secretary to Tony Blair, became one of the legendary figures in this field as the former tabloid editor became a leading “spin doctor” for Blair and even being derisively (enviously?) referred to as “the real deputy prime minister.”
Now, Campbell’s life in politics has been turned into a book, “The Blair Years: Excerpts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries.” The book is reviewed here in the Globe and Mail by journalism professor Tim Luckhurst.
In reading Luckhurst’s review, I was surprised to learn that Campbell despised the media people he had to work with. As Luckhurst writes,
This most effective media manipulator loathes journalists. “God I hate these people,” he confides in June, 2000. At other times reporters are “twats” and “wankers.”
There have been a number of legendary press secretaries in the political field going as far back as Pierre Salinger (for JFK) and Bill Moyers (for LBJ) to Marlin Fitzwater (for Reagan and Bush) and Mike McCurry (for Clinton). They all seemed, on the surface at least, to interact professionally with their adversaries in the media. There are always exceptions to this of course but I cannot recall a former press secretary of Campbell’s stature holding the media in such disregard.
(I should note that GW Bush’s former press secretary Scott McClellan seems to have earned some real scorn from the media and allegations that his stonewalling was a deliberate “new” media relations strategy. For more on this, read Vanity Fair magazine’s devastating profile of McClellan.)
My comparatively limited experience with press secretaries is that while they frequently clashed with reporters, and occasionally got angry, frustrated or bored with them, they rarely “hated” the media. On the contrary, there has always been a mutual respect between press secretaries and reporters – each recognizing that their respective professions are demanding, stressful and ultimately well-meaning. The Alastair Campbell-model press secretary is the exception, not the rule.
Three major North American professional sports leagues are facing crises that are rocking the leagues to their core: the NBA’s game-fixing scandal, the NFL’s dog-fighting embarrassment, and MLB’s Barry Bonds saga. All three instances are communications crises that have been handled in unique ways – the NBA with textbook crisis communication handling; the NFL with its usual corporate-style approach; and MLB with an ineffective and wishy-washy style that is eroding trust and faith in the institution that is baseball.
First, the NBA. Allegations that a referee not only bet on games he was officiating, but also fixed the outcome of the games through his calls is about as bad as it comes when it comes to a communications crisis. The allegations go to the heart of an organization’s credibility. This could yet be the NBA’s Enron. However, Commissioner David Stern has handled himself in an exemplary manner – at least as a communications leader during this period.
First point in the NBA’s favour: NBA.com has not glossed over the incidence – they have placed a transcript and video of Stern’s keynote press conference on its home page – front and centre in fact.
Stern’s key messages say all the right things from a crisis communications point-of-view:
- he was as shocked as everyone else
- he is as outraged as everyone else
- the NBA had done everything possible to prevent this
- this is an isolated incident
- the NBA is cooperating fully with law enforcement authorities
- the NBA will take steps to prevent this from happening again
Has it worked? Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban – no apologist – says yes.
I will tackle the NFL and the MLB approach in a future column.
No word yet whether Lindsay Lohan is taking her communications advice from the Essential Communicator. But it seems one of the Hollywood celebrities in trouble with the law is.
Nicole Richie had this to say on her DUI conviction:
“I have a responsibility and it’s something that I did wrong, and if I could personally apologize to every single person that has lost a loved one from drunk driving, I would,” Richie says in the ABC interview. “And unfortunately I can’t, but this is my way of paying my dues and taking responsibility and being an adult.”
It’s exactly the sort of “I’m sorry” people want to hear when someone makes a mistake — and will do a lot more to restore her credibility than blaming someone else.
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