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You are here: Home / Archives for Charlie Hayslett

PR 101 for United Airlines: Just do what your mama told you

April 13, 2017 by Charlie Hayslett

One of the lessons my parents pounded into me growing up was to admit my mistakes, apologize and do my best to fix whatever I had screwed up (which, in my case, was a lot).  One sure way to get into big trouble was to blame somebody else for something I had done.

Which brings us, of course, to United Airlines and poor old Oscar Munoz, its beleaguered CEO.  He looks like the kind of guy whose mama raised him right.  She probably told him the same thing mine told me.  My hunch is that for most of his life he minded her.  But then he had to go and get hired as CEO of one of the world’s biggest airlines.

Work in PR long enough (actually, not very long at all) and you’ll see this kind of thing over and over again.  Something goes wrong and all manner of corporate defense mechanisms kick in.  Lawyers get involved.  Circular firing squads form up.  Meetings and conference calls are called and held.  More lawyers get involved.  Discussions that should take minutes drag on for hours.  Group think replaces common sense, natural instinct and in some cases human decency.  Decisions that finally get made are usually wrong.  Things get worse.

In Munoz’s defense, his first reaction was probably the one most competent CEOs would have: let’s get the facts first.  The only problem with that is when millions of people are watching video of a goon squad dragging a paying customer off one of your airplanes, the facts don’t matter.  That’s game over.  That’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later territory.

What’s clear is that something went bad wrong, and in those early moments that’s really all that matters.  In today’s world, when traditional media is chasing thousands of Facebook and Twitter feeds, job one is to act immediately to get ahead of the story – or at least try to catch up to it.  Say you’re sorry.  Apologize to everybody in sight.  Tweet it out, put it on your own Facebook feed, post a quick-and-dirty video of the CEO (weeping, if possible) on the company website.  Stop strangers on the street and beg for their forgiveness.  Say you’ll figure out what happened next, but for now you want folks to know you’re on it.

Instead, while Munoz and his team were engaged in the no doubt mind-numbing discussion that spawned the term “re-accommodating,” United’s stock was taking a billion-dollar nosedive.  Its largest shareholder, Warren Buffett, was, according to Fortune Magazine, down $90 million at one point during that first awful day and finished with a one-day loss of $24 million.  And that’s before you add the legal and PR fees it took to generate “re-accommodating.”  Since then, of course, Munoz and United stumbled through a second lame non-apology before finally getting it more or less right in an interview with ABC News yesterday.

In the long run, this too shall pass.  Some good may even come of it.  United and probably the entire airline industry will have to rethink its protocol for booting paying passengers off overbooked flights.  United’s share price will recover and Warren Buffett may not ask for anybody’s head on a platter.

In the meantime, though, United’s epic PR fail has generated hundreds of navel-gazing articles on PR and crisis communications, guaranteed itself a chapter in future college textbooks, and given guys like me a chance to write stuff like this.  PR counselors all over the country (including yours truly) have gotten calls from reporters looking for deep insights and pithy quotes about the United debacle.

The truth is, it’s not that complicated.  PR isn’t just what you say, it’s what you do.  All Munoz had to do was remember what I’d bet his mama taught him.  Next time I’ll wager he will.  He’ll save a ton in legal and PR fees and won’t have to worry about phone calls from Warren Buffett.

 

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: Oscar Munoz, PR, United Airlines

Does credibility matter anymore?

February 7, 2017 by Charlie Hayslett

I’ve been meaning to loop back and pick up where I left off with my last post about how Donald Trump’s election as president impacts the world of political and public communication. Lord knows there’s enough subject matter to choose from. The flood of leaks coming out of Washington. Whether to call the president a liar in print. Why Sean Spicer can’t afford a suit that fits.

Sadly, my mind keeps coming back to a question that would have seemed ludicrous just a few months ago.

Does credibility matter anymore?

Time was, that would have been dismissed as a silly question. After all, most of us grew up having some version of the Ten Commandments pounded into us, including the one about not bearing false witness against our neighbors. As a Boy Scout, I quoted the scout oath and law from memory at every meeting; the first bullet point in the law was to be trustworthy. (Okay, I had to look that up just to be sure, but at least I remembered it was on the list.)

After more than four decades in journalism and public relations, I can tell you that journalists and PR practitioners alike place a high value on their personal credibility and that of the institutions they represent. In both trades, trust is fundamental.

But now comes Trump. For any other candidate, such a casual relationship with fact and truth would have been disqualifying (indeed, for Hillary Clinton, it arguably was). The political media was woefully slow to try to come to grips with Trump’s flights of fantasy, but by the end of the campaign a veritable legion of fact-checkers had run out of Pinocchios and flaming trousers in an effort to let their readers know what was happening.

He won anyway. Now he owns the bully pulpit. His every utterance (and tweet) is de facto news. As I started fiddling with this post yesterday afternoon, Trump was speaking to a military audience at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and meandered off script to accuse “the very, very dishonest press” of not reporting terrorist attacks. This morning’s New York Times devoted nearly half a page to the story.

This, of course, followed Kellyanne Conway’s now infamous “Bowling Green massacre” gaffe (which she at least had the sense to acknowledge) and Melissa McCarthy’s brutal send-up of Spicer on Saturday Night Live. Those kinds of things provide much-needed moments of comic relief for folks like me, who are admittedly still shell-shocked by the election.

But do they really matter? Does credibility matter anymore? In the post-truth era of fake news, when people apparently are entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions, will Trump and his White House pay a price for his transgressions?

In the short run, maybe not. But in the long run — and maybe even sooner rather than later — I still think it will take a heavy and ultimately decisive toll. We’re already seeing some evidence of that. Politico is out today with a brief report under this headline: “White House rattled by McCarthy’s spoof of Spicer”. (As this is being published, that story is listed as the most read at politico.com.) Social media reaction to Conway’s “Bowling Green massacre” has been epic.

But for me, the most telling moment came when the relentlessly combative Conway went on CNN and practically pleaded with Chris Cuomo in an exchange over Trump’s mocking of the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski. Trump World and some right-wing media have gone to great lengths to dispute that view of Trump’s performance, but Cuomo was having none of it. “Why can’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?” Conway asked; seconds later, in an exchange muddled with a lot of cross-talk, she says “you should give [Trump] the deference and respect if he says [he wasn’t mocking Kovaleski]” and “you’re calling him a liar and you shouldn’t.” (You can find the exchange starting a little over nine minutes into this clip.)

To Conway’s point, presidents and indeed most elected leaders do get the “benefit of the doubt” and “deference and respect” from the media – maybe more than they deserve. Trump’s problem is that he’s squandered any right to expect that from the media. The sheer tonnage of baseless and unfounded statements from his campaign and now his White House has tipped the balance, so that now the media’s first impulse is not to trust him, but to question him. And, more often than not, they’re right to do so.

This morning, as I was trying to figure out how to close out this post – and how to answer my own opening question – a Facebook friend helpfully (and unwittingly) posted a meme with an old Edward R. Murrow quote:

“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”

I can’t do better than that. My money’s on Murrow.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bowling Green massacre, Conway, credibility, Edward R. Murrow, Melissa McCarthy, Saturday Night Live, Spicer, Trump

Thoughts on Donald Trump and PR: Will Xi Jinping sit still for WWE-style head-shaving?

December 13, 2016 by Charlie Hayslett

So, now that we’ve all sobered up and realized that, yes, somehow, the country really did elect Donald Trump president, it’s time to figure out what the hell happened and what it means.  Post-mortems and circular firing squads are still being organized.  John Heilemann and Mark Halperin are no doubt hard at work on their next campaign tome, tentatively titled “Game Change 2016: WTF, America?”.

I should probably get a political disclosure out of the way early.  I didn’t vote for Trump and am scared witless of what his presidency will mean for the country.  I will count his administration a raving success if the planet isn’t reduced to a smoldering, radioactive ember, blown out of its orbit around the Sun, and sent sailing aimlessly through the Milky Way.  If I could figure out how to set the bar lower, I would.

All that, however, is above my pay grade, and my purpose today is to muse about what his campaign tells us about – and means for – the world of public and political communication.  Ordinarily, these are subjects that would be the focus of numerous books and boring academic articles.  However, since the world probably won’t last long enough to get those done, I’m going to try to cram a few hopefully useful observations into a series of blog posts.

Observation 1: We should have seen this coming.  It’s not like we weren’t warned.

I usually start my Sunday mornings with The New York Times’s front page and opinion section, but on the morning of October 17, 2004, the cover of the Times Sunday Magazine caught my eye and I wound up reading the cover story, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” by Ron Suskind, over about three cups of coffee.

At one point in the story, Suskind recalled being called on the carpet by an unnamed senior White House aide (since widely identified as Karl Rove) over an earlier story of his, and wrote this:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I thought at the time that was an audacious statement and wondered where such a belief might take us.

Now we know.

Armed with a Twitter account, Donald Trump throughout the campaign created new realities several times each day, many if not most demonstrably false.  The much-maligned mainstream media was duty-bound to report his utterances (Twutterences?  Tweeterences?)  and woefully incapable of vetting them in anything like real time.

The old lament that “a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” was proven wrong.  In the 21st century Twittersphere, a lie can now orbit the planet multiple times before the truth even finds its socks.  Bewildered newspaper editors and broadcast producers have finally taken to reporting that Trump claimed this or that “falsely” or “without foundation,” a genteel effort to avoid calling the incoming Leader of the Free World a bald-faced liar.

Observation 2: Trump understands storytelling.

I haven’t been able to find the exact quote, but I remember President Bill Clinton years ago saying something along these lines: “I prefer to argue not about who’s good or bad, but who’s right or wrong.”  It was his way of trying to frame political debate around issues rather than personalities.

Trump’s response to that has been, basically, “Pfffft.”  Trump understands the power of story-telling and that all stories have good guys and bad guys.  In his stories, he’s always the good guy.  Therefore, he’s always right.

Throughout the arc of his very public life, Trump has stuck to that basic plot structure.  All you need to do to understand Trump’s messaging architecture is take a look at one of the zillions of copies of his fake professional wrestling takedown of WWE magnate Vince McMahon on live TV.  At the end of the “match,” Trump and a wrestler held McMahon in a chair in the middle of the ring and shaved his head with electric razors.  Even I have to admit it was pretty great.

Fast forward less than a decade and you’ll find Trump using the same professional wrestling motif to drive his campaign.  Trump’s enduring strategy has been to target the bad guy du jour and pursue him (or her) mercilessly.

He pre-launched his presidential campaign by establishing himself as the nation’s Birther-in-Chief and pretty much locking up the nation’s fever swamp vote before anybody knew what was happening.  (And when President Obama finally said, fine, here’s my long-form birth certificate, Trump’s response was classic.  He took credit for forcing an answer to the question.  He created a new reality, and he was still the hero – at least in the fever swamp.)

From there, he moved on to identify, attack and decimate a long line of evil-doers and villains: Mexican rapists, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted, Muslims, Mexican judges, Little Marco, more Muslims, Crooked Hillary, Carrier and United Technologies, etc., etc., ad infinitum.  Most of those are now obviously in his rear-view mirror, but he’s continuing this strategy into the transition and his presidency.

Without a doubt, the biggest bogeyman he’s teed up since the election is China.  It’ll be interesting to see if Xi Jinping understands he’s supposed to sit still and have his head shaved in the final scene.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Donald Trump, Political Communication, Public Relations

City Hall 0, AJC 1: How not to manage the media

October 2, 2015 by Charlie Hayslett

By Charles Hayslett
CEO, Hayslett Group

There are a handful of basic rules in PR.  One is that if you find yourself in a hole, you should put down the shovel and stop digging.  Another is that it rarely pays to pick a fight with folks who buy ink by the barrel.  Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and his team violated both of those maxims (and others) in truly spectacular fashion this week when they went nuclear over a piece earlier this week by Atlanta Journal-Constitution “At Large” columnist Bill Torpy.

As Torpy tells it, he set out to do a feel-good feature on the three Atlanta firemen who saved three children in a house fire a couple of weeks ago.  The firemen were willing to do the interviews but said Torpy needed to get a green light first from their fire department bosses, who, for some reason, kicked it upstairs to City Hall.  Which said no.  “Sorry,” a City Hall flack told Torpy.  “Can’t make it happen.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: blog, communications, government, issues management, journalist, social media

Turning no news into big news

November 10, 2014 by Charlie Hayslett

By Charles Hayslett
CEO, Hayslett Group

I’m surprised at a couple of things about the weekend kerfuffle over Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter’s order barring the media from reporting “a certain news story” related to the ongoing Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating trial.

The first is that Fox 5 News, which apparently had the scoop on the story, and the AJC, which caught up on Saturday, didn’t simply defy the judge’s order, which was plainly an unconstitutional attempt at “prior restraint.”  I’m sure there was a fair bit of hand-wringing and debate among managers and lawyers in both newsrooms, but it seems to me that the AJC and Fox 5 set a troubling precedent by acquiescing to the judge’s order.

What happens the next time a superior court judge somewhere in the state decides he doesn’t like a story the AJC is about to publish and issues a similar order prohibiting publication?  Is the newspaper not bound to honor the order until it can get the judge or an appeals court to lift it?  I don’t want to make too big a deal out of this, but it seems to me it turns an important part of the first amendment on its head. [Read more…]

Filed Under: communications, ethics, Fulton County, issues management, journalist, Uncategorized

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