Eye of the Storm

“I want to hold your hand.” - The Beatles

The legendary psychotherapist Phyllis Greenacre was known to sit knitting sweaters and socks during therapy sessions. It must have been sublimely calmative for those souls in crisis to see her thus so serenely engaged.

Too often that personal element is overlooked in our work. Absent an underlying human connection, our “crises centers” become battlefields. Once that happens, there’s no winning for losing. When execution and delivery by client spokespersons are essential to success, the best-laid “crisis plans” cannot succeed if those spokespersons are having panic attacks.

Like Dr. Greenacre, we need to communicate our own confidence and mastery to our clients, and that message must be predicated on their certain knowledge that we have been through similar crises a thousand times before. It’s been estimated that at least half of what defines success in crisis situations is, in the client’s eyes, the bedside manner of the crisis counselors.

Lawyers and accountants can at least offer some predictable results in consequence of specific events and actions. The Court of Public Opinion is a much less regulated venue. Our steady hand and reassuring tone are commensurately more important as a result. Let your clients know what they are likely to face next, and they will be forever grateful.

The Right Message?

Who is your audience? Communications is always about language specifically tailored to both audiences and context. At critical moments, each audience can only hear one thing. Everything else is just noise.

They need to know WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me?” They first need to hear if the news is good or bad. And if it is bad, they need to know that you are taking care of it so they can move on to other things.

This all too obvious lesson is too frequently missed by communicators and executives providing excuses not answers. Excuses are the “blah, blah, blah” of reality, while answers allow audiences to move their attention to the next thing, not you.

Picking the right message for the wrong audience, or vise versa, would be like playing stock prices at Rigoletto.

Richard Levick, Levick Strategic Communications

Center of Attention

When public attention is amassed and riveted in your direction, “no comment” casts you as the bad actor. It allows your adversary to play the hero. It fills newspapers and television shows with their side of the story.

Of course, you can’t always respond substantively in the midst of a legal entanglement. But you can say something to at least feed a little gristle to the hungry crowds.

There may even be an opportunity to advance your own cause with a carefully crafted statement. Consider the size and rapt expectancy of the audience pictured in our cartoon. You may never again be able to articulate your own cause more effectively than at such a moment.

After a recent shoving match with a cameraman, Texas Rangers pitcher Kenny Rogers held a news conference to apologize for his brutish behavior. Every national sports commentator commended him for doing so and agreed it was time to move on.

What most impressed these sports opinion-makers in their coast-to-coast commendations was that Rogers had made his statement against the advice of his lawyer.

Richard Levick, Levick Strategic Communications

What's Up?

In a court of law, such procedure would threaten our civilization. In the court of public opinion, such procedure defines it.

The media, to be sure, demands radical “streamlining” in the adjudication of a corporation’s brand or an individual’s fate. Because each day requires a fresh story, each day requires a separate verdict. Because there are only so many hours in a news cycle, there is only so much evidence that can be sifted and weighed.

When everything is on the line, there’s barely any time at all to sift or weigh. The media – and its decisive summations for customers, shareholders, regulators – is the ultimate rocket docket.

Richard Levick, Levick Strategic Communications

It’s The Messenger, Not the Message

On January 29, the Washington Post published this Tom Toles cartoon, which, in its depiction of an amputee soldier being visited in his hospital bed by Donald Rumsfeld in medical garb, should certainly be read in no other way than as a condemnation of official newspeak, if not depraved indifference to human life.

Who else besides Rumsfeld could possibly be the target here? "I'm listing your condition as 'battle hardened,' " says Rumsfeld. The humor is worthy of Lenny Bruce.

Yet in a letter to the editor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of its five members condemned this visual philippic as "beyond tasteless." Their letter was seemingly apolitical, its severe tone predicated on the assumption that Toles was making fun of the soldier.

The Post rather persuasively defended Toles on the basis of artistic freedom. Toles himself averred that he did not regret the cartoon, but he dutifully allocuted that his real intention was never to make fun of a maimed soldier. Mr. Toles’ response did not lack conviction, but a defensive tone was also palpable.

I don’t blame him for being a little edgy. Rumsfeld was destined to win this round because – in the language of professional communications – he had a third-party spokesperson, to wit, the Joint Chiefs.

In media, as in life, it’s all about the messenger. In this case, the messenger is formidable on two scores. First, it was the whole darn-tootin’ Joint Chiefs of Staff! By speaking with one voice, the messenger communicates utter resoluteness. It’s awe-inspiring. I mean, wow, they must really mean it! And they are the Joint Chiefs, after all.

Second, the messenger is purportedly disinterested, not some political crony of Don Rumsfeld. In their letter, the generals even express tolerance for anti-war opinion. So, while the messenger leverages a collective authoritarian energy, the message is additionally credible for being unmotivated by policy agendas of any sort.

The messenger reverses the trajectory of attack. If the beneficiary of that reversal happens to be an abrasively partisan politician…well, such are the fortunes of war.

Richard Levick, Levick Strategic Communications