Zeno Group Blog

Much has been made about Sarah Palin and her media foibles of late.  The fact that she (apparently a decision forced on her by the campaign) has granted few interviews and no large scale media availability has only amplified the mis-steps in appearances she’s made.  It’s to the point where it’s very hard to tell where Sarah Palin leaves off and Tina Fey begins.

My sense is that this is less about Gov. Palin – although her verbal gymnastics make George Bush seem like Socrates – and more about John McCain.

Sen. McCain famously used to refer the mainstream media as his “base,” engaging them on his campaign bus on any issue under the sun until there was nothing left to discuss.  And when his campaign was foundering in 2007 (I saw him on a 6 a.m. Aclea to New York that summer with no entourage chatting up passengers while heading to Wall St. to plead for money) he was still following this “open source” approach.  It served his campaign well again during the primaries, but after securing the nomination the campaign gradually began to limit access and employed controlled media events.  And, sooner or later, the crowd that giveth, taketh away.  We have seen this magnified by a factor of ten with Gov. Palin.

The media lessons from this approach are straightforward: one, engage and engage and then engage some more, lest you let others shape your image; and two, manage the dialogue on your terms by relentlessly using all available outlets to tell your story.  By not trusting the path that won them the nomination and shifting their approach they narrowed their window of success and became more averse to a discourse on their ideas.

The failure of the campaign to follow this is evident today, both in polling data and their 100% negative advertising.  They have driven their message bus – the former Straight Talk Express – into a ditch and may not get it out.

Like many of us with money in the market, I tuned into CNBC this morning to assess the damage after reading about all the turmoil over the weekend. Jim Cramer said something that caught my attention. When asked what brought about the current environment of a bankrupt Lehman Brothers, the problems at AIG and the impending sale of Merrill Lynch, he did not say is was a failure of regulation or oversight or law.

He said it was a failure of disclosure.

The primary reason that Lehman was unable to find a buyer, said Cramer, was that it had massive amounts of debt and other obligations that the market did not know about. And once this information came out they were cooked.

From a public trust point of view it does not matter what business you are in or what size you are. What matters is that you are transparent in all your actions and that you effectively communicate them to all stakeholders.

It ought not take the demise of a major American financial institution to remind us in the business of communication how critical this is, but it certainly makes the point.