Red-faced or Ready? Blog

This week is the one-year anniversary of Fashion Designer Kenneth Cole’s Social Media Mistake of trivializing a revolution in a tweet to 8,000 followers.

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo, Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online - KC”

It triggered a series of angry complaints from users who tweeted responses such as, “You should be ashamed of yourselves @KennethCole. How tasteless and insensitive. People are dying there!”

Known for writing his own Pun-tastic advertising copy after only seconds of thought, Kenneth Cole forgot that Social Media should exemplify redeeming social values. Provocative advertising gets attention but ultimately may backfire. The risk is often out of proportion to the reward.

According to The Huffington Post, the backlash prompted an almost immediate Tweeted and Facebook apology, “We weren’t trying to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historical moment - KC”.

Departing from our usual Red-faced media moments, we must compliment Mitt Romney on a very Ready soundbite after his win in the Florida primary. “A competitive primary will not divide us, “he told his cheering Republican supporters. “It prepares us. And we will win.”

This, after exit polls showed that nearly half of the exclusively Republican-registered primary voters said the most important quality was someone who could defeat the president. And, according to analysts, negative ads accounted for 92 percent of all campaign commercials that aired during the final week of the race.

He went on to say that “ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America.” And “my leadership will end the Obama era and begin a new era of American prosperity.”

It is only a coincidence that he concluded his victory speech with: “I stand Ready to lead this party and to lead our nation.”

Rapper the Game was not Ready for the power of twitter.

In mid August, the Game tweeted to his over 500,000 followers to call a number for music internship jobs. That number turned out to be the Los Angeles County Compton Sheriff’s Help Line. For more than 2 hours, the emergency lines were flooded with the “flash mob” calls requiring additional backup. It is unknown how many emergency calls could not be connected due to what Jayceon Terrell Taylor, the rapper’s real name later called “a joke gone wrong.”

Everyone can make a mistake and we all learn from this one. Everyone is a role model for someone and has the opportunity to lead his or her followers responsibly.

Before apologizing though, the Game compounded his mistake by first responding with outrage and sarcasm toward the Compton sheriffs. “Yall can track a tweet down but can’t solve murders! That was an accident but maybe now yall can actually do yall job.”

As a result, he received negative attention from his followers and non-followers alike.

As Martin Luther King once told us all: The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Charlie Sheen did just that with his self-absorbed rants in the media. You are never too important to forget to whom you are speaking!

Anne Ready was READY FOR MEDIA in this Los Angeles’ Times’ Entertainment article, Countdown to the Oscars.

“Actors are really playing a role at an event,” said Anne Ready, a media trainer whose clients include Disney and Warner Bros. “Just as they would for a character in a movie, they need to give thought to who they’re playing that night. If your purpose is to focus on your acting, mismatched shoes (Helena Bonham Carter nominated as Best Supporting Actress for the role of Queen Elizabeth in The King’s Speech at the 2011 Golden Globes) would be fairly distracting. But if you’re trying to make a statement about individuality, that would be the way to do it.”

LA Times: Nominees need to be as polished as Oscar himself

According to Canada’s The Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Chile’s trapped miners were given media coaching while still in the mines to help them face the more than 700 worldwide journalists assembled to cover the story. Reportedly, the miners requested a female instructor to put them through their exercises via video link after complaining that the man first given the task was “too ugly!”

Less is more when confronted with a touchy subject. On her daily radio call-in show, Dr. Laura Schlesinger used the full N-word a reported 11 times during a five minute rant with a Black caller.

If the good doctor were READY FOR MEDIA, she would have avoided the classic media mistake of repeating negative or loaded words. Even in denial. Think former President Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”

But Dr. Laura is a quick study and at the first opportunity used her bully pulpit (President Theodore Roosevelt’s term meaning a terrific platform from which to persuasively advocate an agenda) to contritely apologize for using the N-word on the air.

http://video.tvguide.com/Most+viewed/Dr.+Laura+apologizes+for+rant/6290585?autoplay=true&partnerid=OVG

In the media, as in politics. “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!”

“When you say something to a journalist, think first about who it is that you’re talking to. Journalists are people who tell stuff to other people for a living. We love to tell people stuff. We get off on telling other people things they didn’t know before. Information is our currency, our life blood, our only substitute for barely making a living wage.”

Leslie Dinaberg, The Daily Sound, Santa Barbara, California, July 9, 2010

When you ask the really hard questions, the CEO may lead with a hard right!

This week’s International Herald Tribune reports that California’s now-candidate for governor, Meg Whitman, went too far as eBay’s hard-hitting CEO and paid dearly for it.  Seems Ms. Whitman “forcefully pushed” an eBay corporate communications employee who was attempting to prepare her for a news media interview and paid a six-figure sum to avoid a threatened lawsuit.

To “Ready” a CEO for a journalist’s potential aggressiveness is virtually impossible for an employee.

The best preparation for war is training with live ammunition.  It takes an external professional in media training to go head-to-head with your company’s spokesperson or CEO.  It’s not as hard on the employees and may save your company a black eye.