Donald Trump has given a free masterclass on public relations and here are 5 key lessons for busi...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. What a week it's been! This is the week that has seen the storming of Capitol Hill, which has many implications. And again, this podcast is not about politics but about public relations and communications. And it's fair to say the optics on the events of the 6th of October are not good for Donald Trump, but also they're not good for United States. Either. Now, what I'm interested in on this show is how we as business owners can learn from events, learn from best practice, and learn from technologies on how to get noticed. And I wanted to share today some of the lessons of what we can learn by how Donald Trump has accomplished from a PR point of view an amazing accomplishment. Like it or not, believe him or not, he has done an amazing job in building a brand. Now, of course, you could also argue that he's done a great job in destroying a brand too, but we get on to that later. So I thought we could just have a look at some of the lessons that we can learn from Donald Trump on how to build a brand and how to communicate. And I thought I could use the 5-stage methodology that we have here of Speak PR to create a structure for that conversation. We talk about storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. Now, if we look at storify, now what Donald Trump has managed to do is to convince a sizable amount of the American population that they are victims of a plot to remove their well-being, their rights, and their guns. So he has managed to tap into an anxiety that exists within a certain group of people in America that their well-being is already under threat. So under Storyfy, Donald Trump has managed to take an underlying narrative And to build on that. And when you're thinking about building a story for your own business and looking at how you can tap into a narrative that already exists, it's much easier to flow with the water than to swim upstream. Donald Trump has done that. He's tapped into the zeitgeist that was already in America in certain sections, and he has made a story of that. Now, under personalization, Trump has clearly understood the avatar that he's talking to. We talk about avatars, we talk about a personification, we talk about a character profile. Now, what seems to be interesting is that one would think that Donald Trump, a white Anglo-Saxon male from the Northeast, from New York, New York, would really be appealing to white men. But actually seems to be appealing to white men who are less educated, audiences one would think in rural areas. But this alone wouldn't justify the volume of votes that he obtained. Now it was interesting to read in the newspapers and to see online young Americans— I've read of a young female graduate talking about moving out of Washington, D.C., because now she's afraid of what the Democrats will do to make the city into a communist-run den of iniquity. So it seems that some of Trump's avatars, the ones that we saw roaming the halls of Capitol Hill, the QAnon group wearing the horns and the tattoos and waving the Confederate flag, Some of those avatars obviously are bonded to him, but it seems that some avatars, the female population and intelligentsia, people like Mitch McConnell, who may or may not be bonded to him, but they've certainly allowed themselves to be led by him, perhaps out of self-interest. But the, the, uh, personalization of the story, understanding that these people want leadership, want to believe in being great again, has obviously resonated deep and wide across America, and obviously certainly in the Midwest. Now, in the third part, we have engage. Now, what Trump has managed to do is to create engaging content. We talk about the need to create compelling content, which has 3 simple elements in order to be shared widely, and this is in our Speak PR course. We talk about the first need is that information is new, secondly that it's simple to understand, and thirdly that it's relevant or context-sensitive. So let's just look at those 3 different elements. Now on the concept of being new, what Trump did was to talk about draining the swamp. So he didn't introduce a new narrative, but what he did do was introduce something new, which was to basically start again, throw out all those corrupt and unscrupulous self-interested politicians. And that was new. In the past, politicians went to Washington, D.C. to kind of carry on the work of politics. So the narrative that he created, which was new, was that he was going to get all these old crocodiles to leave the swamp. Now, that was a genius, because here we have a billionaire who had rarely left New York other than to fly to Mar-a-Lago, managed to convince working-class white voters and some Latino and some African Americans— it must be said— that a billionaire would understand their position and would defend their rights. Now, second is the concept of simple to understand. Now, this is where the Make America Great, or MAGA, is a classic example of an advertising slogan which is at once evocative and simple and universal. Now, the use of colors of white on red and red on white, much like the St. George's flag for England, or even Coca-Cola, the use of primary colors contrasting together with this central theme of making America great and restoring people to their former fortunes was very, very powerful, but also very, very simple. In fact, it was so simple you could fit it on a hat. Now, the 3rd element of making content to be powerful is that it is relevant or context-sensitive. Now, in this dimension, Trump played on the growing anxiety amongst white people in America At the loss of jobs and the loss of their domestic and international prestige. We talk about the Black Lives Matter campaign, for example, and how that's creating threats across American society to the entrenched interests of certain groups of society— predominantly white Anglo-Saxon men. So Trump identified that these people are actually going backwards. In socioeconomic terms and political terms. So his message about making America great again really was about helping the average white American male re-establish the position that they'd enjoyed in the '50s and saw fade actually through the '60s and '70s and '80s. So the halcyon days of the 1950s have been slowly eroded through legislation, through, for example, the Schooling Act Um, and through the Vietnam War and through the hollowing out of the Midwest and the Rust Belt through either export of jobs but also through the automation of jobs. So this is why the wall to be built and the confrontation with China were all about being offensive, offensive strategies to protect those working-class Americans who were losing their jobs and their livelihoods. As we know, the tragedy is that these jobs were not being lost due to foreign powers, but to automation and to companies— American companies like Amazon— who have leveraged the internet much more than international companies or immigration labor. But it's an easier narrative, just as it was for Hitler to blame the Jewish diaspora for the woes of the German poor in the 1930s. Than it was for their geographical location and their lack of industry after the First World War. So now let's look at amplification, the next part of our Speak PR program. Now in this section, this is where Trump really showed some mastery. He took control with a Twitter following of over 80 million and ignored traditional media. Now, that in itself was fairly radical, but what he managed to do was to go one step further and called the traditional media the enemy of the people. Obviously, as we all know, freedom of speech and the independent press are enshrined in the American Constitution, but what Trump managed to do was to delegitimize the independent media with the simple term fake news. Hundreds of years of history and editorial integrity were destroyed by these 2 words: fake news. So in this way, Trump's genius has been to label his competitors with these very simple and targeted jibes and play to this audience that has got a natural fear, and to alloy them together around a common enemy. Sounds pretty familiar, really. It's just what Goebbels did in the 1930s. Now, in bypassing traditional media, Trump was able to install his own message of MAGA directly into the hearts and the minds of his avatars, his followers, his base, as the Americans, uh, like to call it, without any filtering, which would normally take place through journalists and editors and publishers, with or without Rupert Murdoch's assistance. Now, Trump has understood through Twitter he has a direct channel to people. He also has used Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch, for example. And it's this ability to go direct that is a learning for all of us. Are involved in marketing now, that businesses now can own their own media channels, and those can become as powerful as the traditional earned media coverage, as long as one can build a community which follows their own media channel. So I say that again, as long as you can build your own media channel that's so compelling that people actually encourage and invite other people to come and join that, you've got some mechanism to actually get people to join and follow you, you can have an amazingly powerful tool. Now finally, to the 5th stage of our process, which in our East-West Public Relations Speak PR, we talk about the knowing the, the measurement. Now, the measurement in the Speak PR is what we call the Active Communications Index, which is how much work is being done by the team on a day-to-day basis to communicate. Now, in the case of Trump, his own metric has been political polling. Of course, he's got vanity metrics about followers and so on, but because of his own media and his own audiences reflecting to him only the successes that he believed he was enjoying, it was impossible for him to comprehend the failure at the polls. So the lesson here then is that everybody who's a business leader must look at their own numbers with objectivity, but also to expose themselves, expose ourselves and our teams to the numbers that we don't like. So In our Active Communications Index evaluator, which I built at speakpr.co, we have an evaluation tool where we ask companies to complete a survey on how much activity they undertake each week, and then this is benchmarked against other companies which have undertaken activity in the same time period and of the same scale. Now, I believe this is important because our absolute numbers are important, but our relative numbers are even more important. How much work I do in public relations is important, but the question is, is it as much or more or less than the competition? I might be doing a lot, but if my competition is doing more, my a lot doesn't really count. So comparing our own activity with the activity of our competitors is key. And of course, the hubris of Trump was that he wasn't looking at anybody else's numbers other than that straight polling, but he had bought into his own, his own parameters and his own content and his own guidance. So ultimately, the population in America— but in our less maybe glamorous lives, our consumers and our staff have a choice. They don't vote or come to work or buy according to the absolute number that I put out. They buy according to the relative amount— how much work I do compared my competitors. So in the Active Communications Index, we need to look at how much work we do ourselves, but we must also look at what our competitors are doing, because if we fail to monitor our competitors, then our own victory isn't guaranteed. So the Trump episode and the tragedy on Capitol Hill this week plays into the speak PR narrative of storification Personalisation, engagement, amplify, and to know. And just like Joseph Goebbels had led the Nazi PR campaign of the 1930s, which convinced a population to become slavish in the following of the Nazi mindset and Hitler, with all the terrible implications that that brought for society and for the world, Donald Trump and his architects have understood that a sustained focus and a simple message shared to a receptive audience consistently can carry tremendous weight. As you think about your own company and its public relations and marketing, it's worth looking at the skills that Trump and his team have brought to bear on American politics, in fact on the global political stage, but also at the way they've transformed traditional communications. Now, whilst we may not like what Trump and his cohort have used these skills for, one has to recognize that they've been extremely effective. A man with no political office became president and had just under half of the popular vote in America. It's a pretty stunning attainment. Whether or not you like what he's done with it. So indeed, Trump hasn't just managed to change the perception of the Trump brand, but also of the brand of America. And this could be his greatest PR coup, following of course on from his aborted coup of Capitol Hill. So I'm sharing today. Like everybody in the world that has witnessed the events this week in America, with large measures of sadness and surprise, but also with some learning that can come out of this. So for all of us that are engaged in marketing our own businesses or organizations or, or countries, Trump and his associates have taught us many lessons. And the Speak PR program creates a structure for us to all evaluate those practices. So I hope you find this of use and maybe of some interest. So thank you to you for listening for this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please do subscribe, leave a comment, really helps. If you would like to talk with us about the Speak PR program, do please come to speakpr.co. And if you'd like to find out more about what we do as a PR firm, come to eastwestpr.com and even subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Thank you once again, and till we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a safe, sustainable business, that if you're communicating, maybe look at what Trump has done. Maybe not do why he's done it, but look at some of the successful tools and Tips that he's given us all on, on how to get noticed and how to, how to lead a following. Okay, thank you so much.