Flack's Revenge

Indian Point PR Campaign may pit Cuomo vs. Giuliani

For a PR person who loves to follow politics and lives in Northern Westchester County, NY, it just doesn't get any better.

The NY Times reported today that Indian Point nuclear plant owner Entergy is in talks with former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani about a PR campaign to counter negative public perception, setting up a potential battle with the Governor:

The Entergy Corporation, the operator of the two reactors at Indian Point, which generate as much as 30 percent of New York City’s power, has been in talks with Mr. Giuliani about headlining a major advertising campaign aimed at allaying public concerns about the facility’s safety. The campaign would effectively pit Mr. Giuliani, an erstwhile Republican presidential candidate, against the governor, a Democrat.

Indian Point has been a sore point for people who live in the area. I understand the argument that it would be difficult to replace this source of power, and fears may be overblown. Yet the recent earthquake in Japan, which brought a nuclear plant close to meltdown, seems to have driven a fresh round of questions and scrutiny here in NY. And anyone from the area who is familiar with the emergency planning and evacuation procedures knows that these are jokes.

Andrew Cuomo, who by most accounts got off to a good start as NY Governor and seems to have the wind at his back, has voiced his opposition to Indian Point.

Giualini and Cuomo are two NY-based super-sized egos that fascinate and sometimes confound many people, myself included. I have greatly admired both men at various times, and have also been in irritated by them (although if I were to pick one for this campaign and in general it would have to be Cuomo).

It will be interesting to watch this battle unfold, as I am sure the media will be all over this.

(I thank my friend and ace photographer Steve Lesnick for pointing this article out).

Weiner and Sheen: Possibly the Best Pitchmen for PR

For the very definition of unscripted, unplugged and a little if not a lot nutty public figures, you have first Charlie Sheen and then Anthony Weiner, possibly the best advertisements for PR in recent memory.

They both took us on pretty wild rides. Weiner's episode culminated in a surreal press conference yesterday that was almost carnival sideshow (see the New York Times article Confession and Apology...) in which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart (who first broke the story) led off. Exactly how or why this came to be, I am not sure.

What is clear is that both celebrities pretty much winged it when it came to mixing it up with the media and going on public record (as the Times article said, Weiner did not use PR - As a politician, he was his own publicist, megaphone, strategist and multiplatformed tech man wrapped into a tightly wrapped Type A package - that now seems pretty obvious).

There will be some that say that these public figures deserved what they had coming, and no amount of spinning or image crafting would have helped. To them, I say: "are you serious?!!!" I guess if you enjoy watching public immolation and train wrecks that might be true (the stories also refute the myth that there is no such thing as bad PR).

How could PR have helped? Well by helping these guys not look like total idiots for starters. A little thought and planning when it comes to media relations, and some moves from the crisis management play book would no doubt have helped. Sure, they both probably would have crashed and burned anyway, but in a less horrific way, with easier paths to redemption.

Black and Bloomberg (Video Killed the Education Czar)

Bloomberg's embattled pick for schools chief, Cathleen Black, was removed from the position last week. In the end, it seems the empress had no clothes - or at least not everything needed to convince others (and herself) that she could do a good job as New York City schools chancellor.

I don't wish any ill will to Bloomberg or Ms. Black. The whole episode must be an embarrassment for both.

But I do like to riff on topics related to PR and communciations, and to spot and call out irony when I see it, and this episode was rife.

I think it is ironic that someone who comes from the media world was undone by the media spot lights. If it wasn't video and media training that doomed her appointment, it played a role, and showed how unprepared she was, according to this New York Times article excerpt:

Ms. Black struggled to grasp the complexities of the city’s budget process, despite intensive tutorial sessions that began on the day of her appointment and, according to advisers, never really stopped.

When her staff sought to prepare her for television interviews, through mock question-and-answer sessions, she tripped over basic facts and figures, including the process for deciding which schools to close.... Aides decided she was largely unfit for such high-profile appearances and all but ruled them out.

Ms. Black clearly could have used some more media training, she does not appear to be a very sympathetic figure, based on excerpts from the Times article Black Admits Being Ill Prepared:

A day after her surprise ouster as New York City’s top education official, Cathleen P. Black acknowledged that she was ill-prepared for the demands and visibility of running the nation’s largest public school system..

Although she endured stinging criticism of her management style and public statements as chancellor, she said that she was particularly irritated by unflattering snapshots of herself that appeared in the New York City news media.  “The worst pictures!” she complained.

...in an interview with Fortune magazine, her first since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged her to step down as schools chancellor on Thursday, Ms. Black also suggested that gender might have played a role in her rocky reception over the last three months.

From Telephone to Twitter - Hits and Misses in Andrew Cuomo's PR Playbook

It is a new political season, and there's been lots of coverage about the new landscape and incoming class.  Politics follows not too far behind my primary passions of PR, technology and social media.  So I especially like to track and read the articles that combine a number of these things.

On that note, the New York Times had a couple of great stories recently about Andrew Cuomo, the new Governor of New York.  It was interesting that one article focused solely on Cuomo's use of the telephone as a power tool, in dealing with the media and others.  It is an old school approach that is apparently effective (well, anyway, this was a very long article and the reporter seemed somewhat enamored and impressed).  According to the story:

The call comes with no warning, at almost any time of the day...The unhurried, instantly recognizable voice on the other end of the line belongs to Andrew M. Cuomo. There will be long pauses. There will be many questions. Get comfortable: you may be on the phone for a while...He makes relatively few public appearances, rarely gives on-the-record interviews and disdains the Sunday chat show circuit. His e-mails are restricted to a small circle and, frequently, to two words: “Call me.”

But more often, Mr. Cuomo calls you... he will first ask about the foot surgery or Little League game that came up during the last conversation. Only rarely does a secretary ask you to hold for Mr. Cuomo’s call: he makes it a point to be on the line when you pick up. He almost never puts anyone on hold.

The effect, many say, is a powerful sense of intimacy.. Mr. Cuomo also relishes the visceral feedback of a phone call, he said: the sound of the other person’s voice and the sense of his or her mood...“I am not an e-mail person,” he said. “You don’t get context, you don’t get emotion and you don’t get a connection.”

I think the subtleties in how we communicate often go underappreciated, and this article serves as reminder about the importance of these choices.  While an in-person meeting might even be more effective, Cuomo can cover more ground using the telephone - and the phone is clearly better than other forms of communications when it comes to the nuances, the seemingly small touches that can make all of the difference in the world when it comes to relating to people.  Cuomo's direct approach is also noteworthy, and might cause some PR folks to cringe because there's apprently no PR intermediary in the mix - yet I am sure jorunalists appreciate having that type of access (even if it is on his terms).

Then again, in this era it is never enough just to master one mode of communications, and another article in the New York Times covered a misfire in the Cuomo administration's use of Twitter.  Apprently, they were quick to publish the name @NYGovernor, but someone beat them to the punch in establishing a Twitter account under that name.  Here is an excerpt:

At first glance, the Twitter page...  seemed perfectly plausible for a politician, and featured the same snapshot of Mr. Cuomo — smiling and looking off into the distance — that can be seen on the home page of the governor’s new Web site.. [the] first few Twitter messages seemed right out of the governor’s press office...

But the tone eventually got less statesmanlike, as the subjects veered toward his dislike of the Executive Mansion (not enough parking for his muscle cars)...

If that did not raise enough suspicion, there was Mr. Cuomo’s Twitter biography: “First elected governor of the State of New York since the Luv Guv.”

Assault on the Media: When Politicians Attack

When politicians go on the attack it is a sure sign that it is campaign season, and the targets often are other politicians. However, as the New York Times wrote yesterday, in this election cycle, it would seem that the politicians are fighting mad at the news media.

For as long as there have been politicians and media there has been a tension between the institutions (recall Nixon's famous quote "The press is the enemy" from years ago). Politicians want great press of course, and love to get media endorsements.

However they don't always love the coverage, and recently many (especially on the right) have seemed to drop all pretenses and ignored the conventional wisdom that says you should not pick fights with those who buy ink by the barrelful.

The article lised the the litany of media attacks on journalists.  Please visit the link for the full story, and see below for excerpts.

• ...security guards for Joe Miller, a Republican Senate candidate from Alaska, handcuffed a reporter...
• Charles B. Rangel, the famously cantankerous Democrat from Harlem, castigated an MSNBC reporter as television cameras rolled... “It’s a dumb question, and I’m not going to respond,” Mr. Rangel said in July, dismissing a question about his ethics violations case before adding a gleeful “Next!”
• Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor in New York, had to be physically separated from a reporter for The New York Post last month as the two engaged in a tense shouting match...“I’ll take you out, buddy,” Mr. Paladino snarled as he jabbed a finger at the reporter.
• Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate hopeful in Nevada... recently shushed a local television reporter before he could even ask his question. On Friday, the Angle campaign banned two local television stations from its election night party after their reporters surprised her with questions at the airport.
• And in Delaware last week, Christine O’Donnell, a Republican Senate candidate, threatened to sue a radio station if it released a video tape of an interview she had just conducted.
• Sarah Palin, who often appears proudly contemptuous of what she calls “the lame-stream media,” and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who has accused the press of treason, have made a sport of needling journalists this year.

Obama v. Media: Is Tiff with Fox well Advised?

There was a good article in the NY Times Sunday Week in Review, The Battle is Joined; Now What? about the Obama administration's much talked-about dust up with the Fox News.  According to the story:

Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

The article analyzed the situation within the historical context of past presidential media wars.  For example, it brought up the Nixon administration, one that was famous for its paranoia.  (To put clients in the right frame of mind in our media training sessions, we start off with famous quotes about the media; e.g. Nixon's "The press is the enemy").

The story included words from Nixon VP Spiro Agnew about the media (“self-appointed analysts” at the Big Three networks exhibited undisguised “hostility” toward President Richard M. Nixon), but did not mention his famous quote denouncing the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism," one of my favorites.

We all know Fox has it in for Obama but does it make much sense for his administration to publicly declare war? Why turn a cold war into a hot war?  The elephant in the "unbiased media" room is that everyone knows there are biases, left and right leaning, and everyone plays favorites (or opposite) in their media initiatives accordingly.  As the article says:

... pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics... the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

It also cites a rule of thumb in political PR regarding battles: People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones.

I'll add one more: Don't let them show you are sweating.  A president that is well known for his cool demeanor should not encourage his operatives to be so blatant about participating in media wars.

Now, you too can be a Political PR Playa

You love reading about their campaigns in all the major media. You aspire to their level of PR sophistication.  Although you realize that their world is harsh, unforgiving and demanding, you somehow covet their klieg lights and glory and believe that this is where the real PR action is.

Well, step right up, tech PR folks.  Now you too can learn about PR political style, and can adapt all their tools and techniques to your next tech PR campaign.  In one easy lesson I will teach you how to:

• Trick out your war room so that is has feeds and displays that rival CES and intelligence that is the envy of the CIA
• Craft position papers and conduct opposition research
• Leak with the best of them and go on deep background
• Drive the other side crazy with astroturf campaigns and dirty tricks
• Develop enemies lists
• Plant negative stories
• Hobnob with the power brokers and elite
• Dodge fire at press briefings and arrange photo opps
• Spew lines like "They're killing us in Detroit.  We need to rally our base and get you on Larry King, stat!" with aplomb

All kidding aside, I do hold a kind of bizarre fascination for political PR, which stems from my addiction to news and passion for politics.  I somehow wound up in tech PR, which kind of makes sense considering I studied and worked in tech previously.

It is an ambivalent feeling.  On the one hand I do think that many in political PR are on the cutting edge of our craft. Then again, it seems to be take no prisoners, cutthroat PR.  You can gather this from reading about the results of their campaigns and inferring what is going on behind the scenes.  Sometimes articles lay out PR tactics in gory detail.  Also, I had first-hand experience: the Obama campaign hired away one of our top guys last year for a "once in a lifetime opportunity" that amounted to a four month gig.  They insisted he decide and start immediately, and we were screwed out of the customary two week notice (hi Ben!)

There's a practice in business called benchmarking, in which managers study practices in diverse industries outside their own to see what they can learn.  Is it possible that the world of tech PR can learn something from political PR?

We can start exploring this question by examining the topic of astroturfing, the practice of contriving grass roots campaigns.  I saw an Op Ed piece in the NY Times which defended the practice and suggested that it is not all that different from plain old political organizing (actually, reading this gave me the idea for this post).

Food for thought? Or is the idea of co-opting political PR tactics for tech PR not a good one?

Matt Lauer Comes to the Defense of PR

It is interesting to watch and get a sense of the new Obama administration's communications style, to see if some of the tactics that proved to be  effective in campaign mode carry over to governing.

So far, I am encouraged to observe that they are aggressive and using all available means to communicate and defend their policies.

As an example, some of you may have caught the dust up with CNBC reporter Rick Santelli.   He had come out extremely critical of the administration's housing bailout plan.  See this Washington Post link for more context: Gibbs Takes on Santelli.  According to the article, in a wildly popular YouTube video, Santelli ranted and ended with:

"President Obama! Are you listening?" Santelli demanded.

Apparently someone in the White House was. In response, Gibbs attacked Santelli by name repeatedly, accusing him of not having read the president's housing plan and mocking the former derivatives trader as not being an effective spokesman for the little guy.

"I'm not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives," Gibbs told reporters, his voice dripping with derision. "Mr. Santelli has argued -- I think quite wrongly -- that this plan won't help everyone. This plan will help, by the money that's invested in Freddie and Fannie, will drive down mortgage rates for millions of Americans."

Later, Gibbs added: "Now, every day when I come out here, I spend a little time reading, studying on the issues, asking people who are smarter than I am questions about those issues. I would encourage him to read the president's plan and understand that it will help millions of people, many of whom he knows. I'd be more than happy to have him come here and read it. I'd be happy to buy him a cup of coffee, decaf."

Agree or disagree with the administration, you have to admire their pluck and in particular Press Secretary Robert Gibbs'  defense.

On the Today Show this morning Matt Lauer interviewed Santelli.  Lauer noted that Rick had said he felt that Robert Gibbs was threatening him.  Although Rick tried to downplay this characterization, he did whine that it was unfair to be personally singled out and mentioned by Gibbs.

Here's the play by play below, and you can check out the YouTube video above:

Lauer:  If you go out of your way to call out the POTUS, you have to expect that  his representative may go out of his way to call you out.  Doesn't that go with the territory?

Santelli:  As a member of the press, do I not get to ask a question?

Lauer: And as the Press Secretary, doesn't he have the right to ask you a question?

Go Matt! (Santelli, if you want to call this blog out by name on national TV by all means, feel free!)

Obama, A Boon for Tech

They say all politics is local, my "neighborhod" is tech.

I don't want to appear to be myopic by focusing on just this aspect of the Obama administration amidst all the inauguration after glow.  But let's face it, the sector can use all the help that it can get, and it is great to have a President who really gets it when it comes to tech.

From his attachment to his BlackBerry, to his co opting of social media as a communications platform, to his views on building out our broadband infrastructure and healthcare information systems (see this Healthcare IT News piece), you can tell that Obama is literate and forward thinking when it comes to tech.

This Portfolio article talks about the positive reception for his FCC pick and links to Obama's Technology and Innovation Plan.

The right will continue to grouse that he is a liberal tax and spender, and find every way to undermine and criticize. 

Yet it is pretty clear that the government needs to continue to do its part in getting the economy going and part of this is spending on public works.  As I have long maintained, continuing to build out our information highway is no less vital than investing in physical infrastructure.  Other nations are ahead of us on this.  (People might think we are doing fine here, but weren't the Internet "pipes" slow yesterday - what did that do to productivity?  What about the digital divide and widespread availability of mobile broadband?)

And stimulating the development of better methods for pooling and sharing medical records will lead to dividends in fewer medical errors, better information for research, and ultimately better health care at lower costs.

Did Team Obama Flub its First Crisis Communications Test?

Opinion columnist Kirsten Powers thinks so, as she wrote in her piece NY Post piece Bungling on Blago yesterday.  According to Powers:

The Obama camp has managed to violate almost every tenet of crisis communications - starting with Rule No. 1: Get all the information out quickly, accurately and fully.

It's imperative that reporters don't learn something from a third party that you could have told them. And, in the era of nonstop news, "quickly" means within 24 hours...

Obama's response has been an exercise in dripping.

Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday, Dec. 9...In the intervening time, Obama has repeatedly stated defensively that he had no contact with the governor or his office and had not discussed the Senate seat, as if either would somehow be inappropriate.

In a Dec. 10 interview, he refused to say whether Blagojevich talked with his top aides: "It's an ongoing investigation. I think it would be inappropriate for me to . . . remark on the situation beyond the facts that I know."

But then, in a press conference the next day, he had no problem stating emphatically, "I'm absolutely certain . . . that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat" - and then said he needed to "gather all the facts" about what contact took place so he could release that info.

Which left everybody scratching their heads: How could he be "absolutely certain" if he still had to gather the facts?

The Obama team has sometimes claimed that it's holding off on giving details at Fitzgerald's request - and sometimes that it will talk specifics as soon as it has found exactly what contact occurred. Which is it?

She points out a couple of times that none of this should matter because there have not even been allegations about any improper involvement from the Obama camp.  Of course, there should be contacts and even some possible deal-making between Obama's staff and the governor's office over who will fill his seat (within appropriate and legal guidelines, of course).

She concluded:

The only scandal here, in short, is the way Obama's camp has mishandled the whole matter.

It is hard for me to argue with her logic.  At the same time I think that it is refreshing to see that there is after all a mere mortal with human flaws in Obama (hard to believe this, given all the positive coverage and heightened expectations). 

Hopefully he will be more focused on good policies and governing then on how he spins.