Sweeping Away the Cobwebs and Pulling Back the Curtains

Admittedly, this blog has been moribund for awhile.

But with the great changes that are sweeping the landscape, I’m determined to take my own positive steps – and actually start posting again.

So while this is brief, it also is a post. It’s a start. And yes, it’s about Barack Obama.

America’s 44th President continues to prove savvy in terms of the online world and to promise that his governing style will be one of openness and public accountability.

He has launched an Office of the President-Elect website that will be a source of information about the plans and personnel for his administration, walking the American people through the transition from W’s gang to his Cabinet and staff.

It’s as if someone has gently parted the curtains and let a little light into a room that has been plunged into darkness and despair for far too long. And it’s beautiful.

Pregnant Pause

The situation at Massachusetts’s Gloucester High School – 18 young girls pregnant, with some allegedly having made a pact to achieve that status together – gives one pause.

As a parent, it’s heartbreaking whether they are your children or not.

As a PR professional working for the school- it’s likely ulcer-inducing. (Yesterday morning on CNN a commentator actually used the words that make a practitioner’s heart sink to their knees: “a PR nightmare.”)

Trying to Manage the Crisis

No doubt it’s been a hideous challenge for the mayor, Carolyn Kirk. At her first press conference as mayor yesterday- a genuine trial by fire – she tried to dispel rumours of the pact by dismissing Principal Joseph Sullivan’s previous comment to Time magazine that “They made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.”

Refuting the story, Mayor Kirk was quoted in The New York Times as stating that Sullivan was “foggy in his memory of how he heard this information….When pressed, his memory failed.”

And Sullivan is apparently not returning media calls at the moment. The Boston Globe noted that he “could not be reached for comment. An administrative assistant in the Principal’s office took a message but said that Sullivan already had a stack of unreturned messages from reporters – and Oprah’s people- piled on his desk.”

As crisis management strategies go, it is not a particularly bad one. Except that it seems as if very few in the media or the public are buying into this version of events as of yet.

Did They Manage to Manage the Crisis?

The Boston Herald noted that high school students, who know the girls in question, “were equally skeptical of the mayor’s denial, with several naming those involved and telling the Herald the alleged pact was common knowledge around school.”

Of course, there really is no way to know what actually happened without talking to these girls- which is unlikely at this point. Now they are being protected. Now it’s a little late.

The Blame Game

What’s really interesting is how many folks are pointing fingers at the media and PR- it’s because of Juno! It’s because of Jaime Lyn Spears’s pregnancy!

Well…not exactly. Admittedly it is possible that the positive spin the star’s “people” put on her unexpected pregnancy and the charming nature of the low-key comedy made some girls more curious about the experience. But you can’t really say it’s all Diablo Cody’s fault, can you?

Will Anyone Ever Really Know What Happened?

Again, without these girls telling their stories in their own voices, it is really hard to know where the truth lies. But if the allegations of a pregnancy pact is true, isn’t it possible that they wanted to build their own sense of connection and community – and went about it in the wrong way? Isn’t it possible that they felt lost in terms of what they wanted to do with their lives so they chose to take on the role of “mother”- without knowing what it really meant or entailed?

There seems to be a kernel of truth in that, particularly when you zero in on a portion of a statement in Time by Amanda Ireland, ar recent graduate of the school who herself became a mother her freshman year.

“`They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,’ Ireland says.”

Is that what caused this surge in teen pregnancy? And was there actually a pact as alleged?

Ultimately, whether it was misguided peer pressure, misinterpretation of media or just a desperate expression of a desire to be loved probably doesn’t matter. What matters now is what is going to happen to these girls and their children.

And how the school will manage this crisis both in terms of its reputation and its students’s futures?

Two Nations, Two Sports Messes and One BIG Need for Better Crisis Management

And now for something completely different….Sports and public relations.

Canada: HNIC’s theme departs and with it someone’s ability to manage crisis effectively

Up here in the not-so-frozen north, the whole mess is not so much with the NHL or hockey itself but with its mother network having first lost the rights to the Hockey Night in Canada theme and then whomever they asked to handle the ensuing PR having botched things so badly that even American comedians have picked up on the situation and have started making fun of it. (And, oddly enough, hockey isn’t quite so popular in the States, so if they’ve picked up on it there….oops.)

Colbert on HNIC

Stephen Colbert offered hilarious commentary on the whole HNIC situation last week. (Viacom, which appears to have a much less well-developed sense of humour, pulled it off YouTube. So this is a bit cumbersome, because this is copyrighted material and because of the aforementioned lack of a sense of humour, this has to be done in a round about way. You have to go to the Comedy Network’s site by following this link to the episode and fast forward to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds in to find the bit. But it is worth it.)

It’s a bit that simultaneously manages to make fun of both cultures, which is particularly rib tickling for someone who has spent half her life on each side of the Am-Can divide.

And what the fact that Colbert commented on HNIC means in terms of PR

But the fact that this bit exists is a very bad sign for whomever has been trying to handle the PR for this situation. They not only dropped the ball, but it has rolled downhill and gathered snow and now has turned into an avalanche. How did that happen? Were they not warned? What was their strategy for handling this supposed to be?

America: Does NBA stand for Now BSing America?

Talk about a mess. On the other side of the border, the issue isn’t just about music. It’s about corruption and it has the potential to be as big a scandal as the 1919 Black Sox fixing of the World Series if the allegations imparted are proved to be true.

[Please note: my take on this is rudimentary- for a really good examination of the Donaghy/NBA situation, you should go read Ironic Teachings's blog- he has a fabulous handle on this and is always a good read.]

The initial scandal

Tim Donaghy, a second generation basketball referee who officiated games for the NBA for about 13 years, resigned from the league when word came down that the FBI was investigating whether he bet on games that he had been officiating and whether his calls had affected those games’ point-spreads.

But he had a lot more to say.

As noted in the New York Post, Donaghy, who has also admitted to being a compulsive gambler, has claimed that executives in the NBA, seeking to increase playoffs-related revenue, sought to manipulate the games through the referees:

“Top NBA executives rigged playoff series to pack arenas and pump up TV ratings by ordering officials to shamelessly make calls that benefited favored teams, disgraced ex-ref Tim Donaghy charged in bombshell court papers today.”

The NBA’s response

The NBA has handled this by taking a position that can only be called “the best defense is a good offense.” But at least they are actually actively trying to counteract the allegations- not well mind you – but at least they are trying, as explained by ESPN’s website:

” ‘We welcome scrutiny here. This is something that should be scrutinized,’ said Stern, who called Donaghy a ’singing, cooperating witness’ and repeatedly referred to the former referee as a felon as he spoke with reporters for more than eight minutes near the loading dock of the Staples Center as he arrived for Game 3 of the Finals.”

Did it work?

Has this been an effective way to handle things? Apparently not if you read a sampling of the American sports press. The best summation may have been offered by Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times when he stated

“If Stern can’t see what a mess he potentially has on his hands and how no one from inside the NBA should be part of any league influence-peddling investigation, then he has become blind to the real world. As the USA Today editorial summed up: ”The NBA has much more at stake than winning an argument with a felon, which, after all, should not be hard to do.”

No, it has its credibility at stake.”

How could the NBA have handled this better? Is a poor PR strategy better than no seeming PR strategy at all?

And how have the great and glorious pastimes of two nations come to this?

Stopping The Viral Spread: Obama’s Reputation Management Strategy

Face it- you think politics, you think spin. You think maneuvering. You think manipulation — not to mention rumour and innuendo. Don’t you?

That may be about to change due to a new PR tactic that the already Internet innovative BarackObama campaign has put into play: Emphasizing the truth.

How utterly strange.

Just a few days ago Senator Obama’s campaign announced the launch of a new website called www.fightthesmears.com.

The Purpose of the Site

The purpose of the website is to debunk the nasty whispered untruths that have been seeping out of the American right-wing media and spreading like wildfire across the Internet.

And, as Time magazine noted, Obama’s method for combating those ugly insinuations is through a form of community building with this website as a hub.

“Obama is enlisting his millions of supporters to help him hunt down and quash these stories, just as those supporters helped him turn his insurgent campaign into a history-making juggernaut. Says Obama adviser Anita Dunn: ‘We will not allow Michelle — or, for that matter, Barack — to be defined by rumors.’”

It is a clever idea and a canny use of technology. And it will be fascinating to see if it works.

The Site(In Brief)

www.fightthesmears.com is well-conceived, laying out the false allegation made about the candidate and counteracting it right below, often with supportive scans of documents or video clips.

It’s fairly well done and it’s already had a lot to tackle in terms of reputation management. The New York Times gave a brief run down of the rumours that the site is currently addressing, even though the candidate has already addressed them himself in other media countless times:

” ‘Fight the Smears’ is designed to systematically dismantle Internet rumors by letting users see both ‘the smear’ and, the campaign’s response. The site already features sections fact-checking rumors that Mr. Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance, or has written racially incendiary remarks into his books or that he is a Muslim.”

Will it Work?

If anybody can make this kind of approach effective, Senator Obama can. His campaign’s use of the Internet and social media has been tremendously savvy from day one. In their last edition focusing on the current crop of candidates for the President of the United States, The Economist mentioned Senator Obama’s ability to connect with his supporters via the Internet:

“His website was thus a vast social networking site….a mechanism not just for translating enthusiasm into cash but also for building a community of fired-up supporters.”

The question now is will he be able to sway those who do not yet (or just plain don’t) support him? Will this be an effective form of reputation management? Will this work? And is this method one that will be used again by PR practitioners in other political campaigns? What do you think?

You Always Hurt the One You Love? Musings on Bill & Hillary

Presidents and Presidential contenders have always had relatives they wished they could lock away until their nomination, if not their term, was over.

Remember Billy Beer?

But the latest relative that has embarrassed and seriously damaged a candidate’s chances is a genuine shock. Who would have thought the supremely savvy politician Bill Clinton would in fact be a liability rather than an asset to his wife during her historic presidential campaign

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband has brought her yet more negative publicity. As noted in a New Republic blog by Michael Crowley, this is due to an anger-fueled outburst concerning Todd S. Purdum, husband of President Clinton’s former Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers and author of an admittedly unflattering, possibly unfair and apparently dubiously-sourced Vanity Fair article about the former President.

But it was not the ex-President’s first major gaffe during the campaign.

That unfortunate distinction falls on his ungracious handling of Senator Barack Obama’s landslide South Carolina primary victory.

As Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post noted, the former President’s reaction was the comment that Jesse Jackson had won in South Carolina in 1984 and 1988. It was a statement that discounted Senator Obama’s sizable victory and tacitly suggested that it was only due to the state’s strongly African-American demographics.

That, as well as his furious tirades at the press after that statement generated justified media backlash, certainly wounded his wife’s campaign.

It also raised an interesting question- How should a candidate handle negative publicity when it is generated by one who is near-and-dear to them? And what do you do when that relative is as famous as you are?

Furthermore, how did Bill Clinton, an adroit master of the political game, blunder so badly?

With Senator Obama finally having sewn up the Democratic nomination, it is unlikely that former president Clinton’s latest outburst can have any further negative impact on his wife’s political career, despite the mushrooming coverage of his ranting denunciation of Purdum as a “scumbag” (and worse) to a reporter from The Huffington Post.

But one has to wonder what might have been if the man had been on his game- if he had managed to generate positive publicity for his wife’s campaign rather than negative. Would it have made a difference?