So what hit me today? My back, mainly, so I’m stuck in bed after an attempt to spend some time in the office, laptop in, well, my lap now.
Apart from the pain and the fact that I have the posture of a 90 yr old, everything’s fine. I’m fairly done with the communications strategy / promotion plan and I’m quite glad I inserted a section on reputation management, in which the most important part is – at least in my perspective – a couple of tiny crisis management guidelines. Ah, concepts!
Last summer, I was among the innocent by-standers within a crisis where we were not supposed to be by-standers. Heh, I always wanted to manage a crisis – yet not enough to take the shortest route, which, as dearest Cris points out, is me causing one (I do that enough times in my personal life though).
There’s enough material on the ol’ world wide web on this subject, so I hope I’m not nearing the production of an(other) inaccurate and profoundly incomplete analysis. But there are a few things I would like to note down.
1. No apologies, I know. And it wasn’t that kind of image crisis where apologies or financial compensation would have made a difference. I still feel that the idea behind applies. There’s this old saying on smoke and its close relationship with fire, you know it. Now, I’m not saying one should admit to anyone’s fantasy, but do admit to those facts which are correct. Compensate with some admission. Show some balls (they’re solid gold for the public) and give them something. Say, for instance (no connection with reality whatsoever, duh!) – I do own a dildo. But I didn’t buy the dildo on public funds. I still make monthly payments to the bank for that asset. And of course, I can actually prove it. Moreover, it was a second-hand dildo, so the purchase costs were lower than published in your report. This can be supported with evidence as well. Not that there’s any of your business but there you go.
Yeah, I know. A dildo wouldn’t be the first thing one would like to admit to in front of the public. I bet Clinton didn’t enjoy it either with the Lewinsky affair. Although he – ahem – had and/or produced the best misrepresentation of sexual relations, he had to admit to an improper physical relationship. What the hell am I trying to point out here? (Wondering myself.) Oh, yea. The big issue to me – a tiny part of the global audience – was the perjury charge. Why risk that? True, I would have liked a more-Marilyn-Monroe-resembling-dolly (quite vain, I know, but he must have had a better choice at hand!), but there’s like tons of guys and gals, as well as ladies and gentlemen, cheating on each other, so we’ve gotten used to the idea. The aftermath of the penis and consequences of the vagina are kind of facts – no, this ain’t a plea for extra-marital affairs but we know they happen. I am just observing that, on their own, extra-marital affairs don’t lead to impeachment. Perjury does however.
Same with dildos, they should be bought on money you either own or end up owing, not on public funds. Dildos per se are ok though. On public funds? That’s something else – well, maybe just not in Romania.
So, what to do?* (*I know, communication is where I should have started it, keeping to the old what-how-when pattern, but I simply loved the 1 to 2 “so, what to do?” transition. Plenty of “how” in “what” anyway. And these are not rules! Just basic things I note down, because I was once amazed to see reputation being thrashed with no real answer to that.)
... I'm not gonna say anything because things speak for themselves, and you're smart enough to see, unless you're deaf and cannot talk.
2. The obvious: co-fuckin-mmunicate! Don’t keep to yourself. Get your ass moving and dancing. Open up and stick to the ground rules.
Keep it to one person per crisis, so they’ll know who’s talking. And tell ‘em stuff for real, not bullshit. People know when you try to bullshit them, seriously, most of them do. Even if it’s a brightly shining, state of the art, nicely wrapped piece of bullshit, they’ll notice the bullshit underneath. And they won’t believe a thing, either the bullshit or the package it was delivered in. So be transparent, people like that: for a reason. Gift wrapping is for gifts, not for bullshit, which people hate anyway – for another reason. So communicate, and give substance enclosed in a huge layer of transparency.
I’d also keep to the facts and avoid discussing concepts (guess that’s one more to have fun with in the Clinton case). We’re talking the purchase of a dildo as public expenditure, not what a dildo is or how public funds get to be public. Of course, if concepts are indeed misrepresented, they should be set straight. However, what shouldn’t be forgotten is that, once the concepts are in order, facts should be sorted out too, since it was facts vs. fantasy that brought us to discussing concepts in the first place.
3. Be fast.
Ok, so you’re not necessarily the most poker-faced person ever been born to a human couple but you gotta regain your composure quickly. The faster the better. If you respond tomorrow – and you already know there’s no smoke without fire – it will look like you’ve taken the time to prepare an answer (Băsescu, who does have a tendency towards good crisis management – yea, he does, I hate but have to admit it – took time to deny in the punch incident: oops!), that you actually needed that time to come up with an answer. Why? Because you didn’t have an answer, that’s why. You did buy that pink dildo from tax-payers’ money, you asshole, now we know that.
You don’t want to send that message, do you? No matter how clever and appropriate and by-the-rules your response is, it does come with this additional message, which I like to call the removal of the early bird price tag. So play poker more often, and get used to the idea that you may not always get all your aces, yet you can still win.
Not that that’s all, but it should suffice for now. Long ones are pretty boring, so installments are funnier, ain’t it so?
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Oh shit. It’s November. It took me till now to realise I stole the Marilyn Monroe thing from Carlin (currently shouting in my ear Cafe Vagina! )
