Bob Dylan's Nobel PR Crisis

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate.

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. In the news, not surprisingly, Donald Trump. Now, we're not going to talk about the specific politics of the situation. Most of you, in fact, anywhere you are in the world, you probably have a strong opinion of Donald Trump, whether you like him or don't like him. I'm not going to try to persuade you, but there are a lot of lessons to be learned about crisis communication emanating from that campaign. Some of them good lessons, some of them insightful, some of them things to avoid. One of the things that's going on now is the Trump hotel business is in a bit of a crisis, and the apartment building business, because the Trump name no longer has cachet, especially in places like New York. Now, Donald Trump has famously bragged in the past that just putting his name on a building generates about another 25% premium on the price. You can charge more a quarter more. That's not happening anymore. Now, this came out about a month ago, but even more news coming out today about how Trump hotels are not going to have his name anymore. They're going to be called Skyen or cyan. Forgive me if I'm not pronouncing it correctly. But more, more unrest in Trump world as the value of his name is slipping. I gotta tell you, this is especially embarrassing for a lot of people in Manhattan. And I know many of you think, well, Donald Trump's from Manhattan. That's his base. They must love him there. Well, no, the vast, vast majority of wealthy, educated people in Manhattan utterly detested Donald Trump. I'm not saying that's a reason for you not to like him or not to vote for him, just stating it as it is. I would be willing to bet that 95% of educated, successful, prosperous New Yorkers are not voting for Donald Trump. Here's the problem. Many of them live in his buildings. In the past, it was either considered cool or sort of kitschy or a conversation piece. Not anymore. Some of his tenants, like Keith Olbermann we spoke of yesterday, has now famously sold his apartment and moved out. He finds Donald Trump so despicable, so detestable. The idea of living in something with Trump's name on it was just beyond the pale. And he decided to move. I have no idea if he made or lost money, but certainly anyone who has bought in the last few years and is selling within the last few years is going to have to lose money. That is the nature even of Manhattan real estate, especially when a brand has become tarnished. Now, it's one thing when Subway has a spokesperson like Jared and they have a lot of TV commercials around him, then all of a sudden he's caught as a child molester. Well, you fire him, you say he violated his morals clause, you sweep it under the rug and yeah, it's embarrassing for six months. But Subway continues to sell sandwiches. It's not really affecting them in a material way. Quite different when the founder, the namesake. I guess the closest thing to this would be when Martha Stewart went to prison for her stock manipulation problems. And while I don't think that was the sole source of problems of Martha Stewart Living, it certainly coincided with a lot of the downward slide of that stuff. I can't imagine it ever regained anything close to its initial pop when it went public and Martha Stewart became, at least temporarily billionaire. Now, the advantage Trump has, at least in this case, is his main Trump business. The real estate business is not a publicly traded company. Also good news for investors because you don't have them losing a lot of money and going bankrupt and seeing their stock price go to zero. So he does have more flexibility. He can't simply be fired the way Jared from Subway can. But it does, it does show you the perils of politics. There's a lot of people in public life who have high profile companies, are involved with issues and they may be out of the mainstream, they may have eccentric views, they may be seen uttering politically incorrect views, but it's, it's sort of lapped off this, ha ha. And, oh, isn't that charmingly different? Isn't that unique? But when you get to the point of running for president and you have some 65% of the country view you unfavorably, that has an impact on your business and it seems to have an extraordinarily detrimental impact on the Trump businesses. Now to the point where they're, they're scraping his name off. There are petitions going on in Trump owned buildings in Manhattan as we speak, where people are trying to cause management to change the name, to scrape the name Trump off the building. And I think that will only increase as the election proceeds. And if the outcome isn't favorable, for that matter, even if it is favorable, I think you're going to see the people in Manhattan not want to live or stay in a Trump building, apartment or hotel. I especially think it's going to hurt hotel. I mean, who wants to, who wants to tell their, their colleagues at work? I mean, let's say you work in a big corporation and you have black employees and gay employees and Hispanic employees and Muslim employees. Do you really want to tell them, hey, I'm going to New York for this convention. You can reach me at the Trump Hotel. I just. Even if you liked Donald Trump, even if you voted for him, for the life of me, I cannot imagine an executive wanting to tell an administrative assistant, book me a hotel in the Trump Plaza. Well, he doesn't own the Plaza anymore, but one of the Trump buildings, hotels. When I go to New York next week, I don't see that happening. That has to affect the bottom line. So where is the bottom line going to flow for Donald Trump in a positive way? Many have talked about the idea of him starting his own TV network, and at first blush, he does appear to have what it would take to run a media outfit. It's the one thing he's actually been good at his entire career, and that is not running businesses or being an entrepreneur in any traditional sense or being a real estate magnet. But the one area where he's actually been very successful is playing a character on tv, being a reality TV star. So for him to start a Trump TV, I do think is a very logical step. Now, this has been talked about before on this program as well as others, but here's the interesting twist. Just this week, there was a lot of commentary about how Trump TV started on his website, his Facebook page earlier this week. And all it really was was a few of his staffers and his campaign manager and a couple of high level officials just putting out a live feed on Facebook. Now that's something I think is innovative. I do think that more and more campaigns are going to do that. And the Huffington Post and Business Insider did a story on this kind of making fun of Trump, saying, well, he started this, only 200,000 people signed up, and then it were watching, and then it drifted to 60,000 or 30,000. Let me tell you, getting 30,000 people to watch you live on the Internet is a huge accomplishment. It's nothing to sneeze at. Certainly getting 200,000 is an accomplishment. If that many are watching you live, think how many can watch it on demand. Perhaps a million. Now you're talking numbers that are a lot more significant than anything Al Jazeera ever put up or for that matter, what happens in any typical day part on cnn, CNBC or msnbc. So I do think that, win or lose, and you can probably figure out which way, I'm guessing that happens. My, my view is not divergent from mainstream polling. In America these days that shows Hillary Clinton is up between five and 12 points in the general election. So if Donald Trump loses, I think it's a natural extension of what he's all about, what motivates him, what is his interest and what his expertise is to start his own TV network. He doesn't have to do the expensive way, the way Al Gore did, which is buy another existing TV network, cable network, spend hundreds of millions of dollars, or the way Al Jazeera did, which was spend hundreds of more millions of dollars buying out Keith Olbermann and the Young Turks and the Air America and all the folks that were a part of Al Gore's network. So they didn't have to do. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do the expensive way of being on cable boxes and on people's TVs through a cable channel. You could just do it through the Internet. You could do it through Facebook. You don't even have to spend $9.95 for your own domain name. Although I don't think that's a problem. Even for someone who is, let's say, have had as many business failures as Donald Trump, he can still afford $9.95 for a website. But the fascinating thing is if you have a name, if you have an attraction, if you have a message, if you have issues, you can attract a huge audience online, live, whether it's Facebook or YouTube or other venues, and you can then monetize it. And the thing about Facebook is it does seem to be easier to get people's attention. If Donald Trump had decided to have his crew do a Google hangout, I don't think they would have gotten 200,000. Facebook makes it easy. If people already like you, are fans of yours or friends of yours, and you're doing something live, they that typically goes to the top of your feed. That's what you see because they want to make it easy for Facebook members to see live stuff going on. And it's not as complicated as giving someone a long URL and click this and sign up here to watch you on Google Hangouts. So whether you support Donald Trump or not, I do think all of us who are trying to communicate, whether we're running for president or parliament or Congress or we're just trying to sell a book or sell our expertise or help our neighborhood get cleaner, whatever it is we're trying to promote, I do think that video online is key. And live video, even though it's more of a headache, it can ultimately Be very powerful. I know that. And I'm not getting 200,000 on my live feeds, but when I do a live video on Facebook, as I've done a few times in the last week or so, the audience is often 10 times as big as if I just post a video on Facebook or if I post a video on YouTube. So there is in fact something powerful about live video. And knowing how much Donald Trump loves attention, loves the media, loves being in front of the camera, I could just imagine him doing, you know, six hours a day live, Donald, whatever idea pops into his mind, especially if he doesn't become president and he becomes the number one critic of the new administration, I think that is a role he'll relish. I do not see him sort of slinking away after this election. Regardless of the outcome, I think he's gonna be here to stay. And I wouldn't even rule out his ability to get the GOP nomination in 2020. That's not something that's been talked about a lot. But when you step back and think who else in the Republican Party speaks for so many voters, has such a strong, passionate core of supporters and is closer to a lot of the members of the party on issues like trade than other more traditional Republicans like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, I think a lot of Republicans are fooling themselves if they think, well, Trump will lose, we'll never hear from him again, we can go back to business as usual. I don't think it's going to be that easy. And whatever people thought of Sarah Palin and her various media ventures, Fox, Facebook, etc. I think Donald Trump is going to be doing 10 times that. Folks, good lesson on preparing for podcast, media interviews, TV videos, etc. Have a backup plan, have a plan B. So called redundancy in the whole world of Internet. I learned that the hard way earlier today. I recorded a whole show, went to do the final edits and upload it into itunes. Lo and behold, it was gone. And I had a digital recorder. I thought I'd hit start. I thought I'd monitored it throughout. I thought everything was going fine and it just. There was nothing there. Now, unless a ghost or a phantom came and erased it, I'm pretty sure it was human error. That is my error. I must have not hit the record button. Now, what I'm doing, when I interview guests, what I try to do is I interview the person, typically through Skype video. I record it on software within the computer, in my case, Pamela. And I also record the interview on a Roland digital recorder. And that way I've got two copies. But if I'm just doing a solo show, I not done that. So that's. That's the source of my stuff, my stumble and why I'm having to repeat myself now. At least to me, not to you. Also in the news of interest from a media crisis, communications PR perspective. Bob Dylan. The Nobel committee awarded him their Prize for Literature. Now this has generated controversy in a lot of different. Different areas and levels. The Nobel Committee is apparently upset with Bob Dylan because he didn't bother thanking them and he's not even acknowledged it. It's just sort of. It's as if the Bruns Avenue elementary school in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I graduated in. In 1975 and from. From sixth grade. It's as if we gave him the Singer of the Year award and sent him a certificate and he was too busy to open his mail one day. It was given about the same level of significance. But this is the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now, on the one hand, I have to say, well, that's kind of rude of Bob Dylan. I understand you're famous and you've had every accolade in the world, but still the Nobel Prize for Literature. And you can't somehow recognize it. But I place more criticism on the Nobel committee because part of the utility of a prize like this, the value, the prestige, is what they can give to an artist to give them a wider audience. Well, I'm sorry, nobody's going to go out and buy Bob Dylan albums because he won a Nobel Prize for Literature. People who like his albums, people who like his downloads, they're already buying it. And hundreds of millions of his songs have been purchased. He's already rich, he's already famous. And maybe he's got another 30 years in him. But I mean, he is in his 70s. And this prize isn't going to do anything to give him a wider audience, help his career, free up his time for creative pursuits. He has all the time he wants all day long, every day. He doesn't have a day job. He's Bob Dylan, for goodness sakes. The other problem I have with the Nobel Prize going to him is can anybody name anything he's written in the last 45 years? Now, others have commented on this too, and maybe he's come up with good stuff. But this is somebody who's known primarily for what he wrote in the early 60s, blowing in the Wind and a lot of good stuff. But should the Nobel Prize for Literature be given to someone for stuff they wrote 50 years ago. The other big criticism from a lot of authors and a lot of novelists is why in the world, when there's so many novelists creating great complex works of serious literature, you know, 800, a thousand pages, they've spent 10 years on it, and it's great stuff. Why are we honoring somebody who doesn't write books and doesn't write novels, but is instead writing lyrics to songs? And the argument they make is that's really a different medium, number one. Number two, people who write songs have a much easier time of getting a lot of tension and making money and getting rich and famous and reaching wide audiences. And it's just true. Music is an e. It's not easy to be a music star. But if you are good and you're writing and you're performing your songs and there's just a lot more ways of marketing your stuff than if you are the writer pecking away at the keyboard in the back of academia somewhere. And I have to say I find that a pretty credible criticism. Why not give the Nobel Prize to literature, of someone who writes literature? And as much as Bob Dylan's lyrics are considered beautiful, powerful, influential, just not the same thing. At some level, it's almost like giving the Nobel Prize of Literature to Steve Jobs posthumously because, well, he had to type programs and he had to type a design for the interface for the iPad and that's writing of sorts. And it's great and it's had. But let's give him the Nobel. I mean, at some point you've got to draw some lines and I think lines were crossed by the Nobel committee. What do you think? I'd love to hear from you. Please post your comments on Twitter @tj Walker or Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube or my brand new blog for this show which is speaking with TJ Walker.com so any of those places. I'd love to hear from you. Also, happy to hear about your suggestions on future topics and future guests. Thanks so much for joining me as always. This is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. If you have an upcoming podcast, TV interview or speech and you want to be prepared, why not do it the right way? At no cost, no obligation. You can get access to our online media training school and public speaking school, plus several of my books on how to speak more effectively to the media and to live audiences. Just click in the show notes below or go to mediatrainingworldwide.com thanks so much. See you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to speaking with T.J. walker.