Samsung, Ken Bone, Trump, Michelle Obama and More

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. So folks, you've often heard of me talk on and on and on, it seems like, about the need for corporations in times of crisis to communicate with video. So if you heard that Samsung had a video put out last week to address their concerns of their phones just going up in flames, you'd probably think I'd be the first one to praise it. Now, I did look at the video. This was put out by the Samsung America President and coo, Tim Baxter. It looked perfectly fine, the message was perfectly fine. And yet, as you might be able to detect from my voice, I wasn't a huge fan of it. Here's the problem. This video didn't come out until 13 days after Samsung acknowledged they had any problems with their phones and that it seems like months since there were all the reports of Samsung phones going up in flames. I mean, I could swear it was two months ago and I was on a flight to Europe or somewhere and the flight attendant is saying, and you know, whatever you do, if you've got a Samsung phone, power it off, put it in a bowl of water, take the battery out. I mean, they were extremely cautious. And for Samsung to just now really be talking to people. A week or so ago there were a lot of reports about how Samsung had so buried even a press release about this. It just boggles the mind that in this day and age there are, I don't know if it's the legal department, the marketing department, the communications department, or just the CEO's office itself subscribing to the theory that's now about a hundred years old of oh, if it's bad news, let's just not talk about it and hope it goes away. Just bizarre when there's a story of this magnitude. Now folks, it's not like there was one little store selling a Samsung product one place and somebody accidentally put, you know, a rusty razor blade inside. That might be a big story in a small town for one day, but that's not a threat to the overall reputation and brand of Samsung. But when your phones are setting themselves on fire, causing major health risks, possible deaths, that's a huge institutional risk to your entire reputation. That's when you don't want to be waiting 13 days to put out a video from the president. You don't want to be waiting 13 hours. You need to have something like that out in the first hour. I'm going to link to the story about this and you can see the Video for yourself. By the way. I think it's bizarre that Samsung doesn't have a CEO. And if there, forgive me, I don't know who the CEO is, but if this, if the CEO's first language isn't English, that's okay. We live in a multicultural world but still have a video and have it subtitled. Because if ever there were an issue that affected the integrity of a corporation, its stock price, its entire future, the issue of whether your product just spontaneously combusts, I think fits pretty much everybody's definition of what a CEO should be talking about. And the idea that this is just going to be pushed to the bottom of the page somewhere that it could be ignored is just, it's utterly bizarre to me. I'd love to know what you think. What do you think of Samsung? Would you still buy their products? Now I buy Apple products, I have to confess. Not because I'm really that crazy about Apple products. It just seems like I do podcasting, I have, I have podcast, I listen to podcast, I make videos with my phone. It just seems too hard to try other phones. And now I've been locked in for, it seems like forever. Although I have to point out I did buy the first iPhone. Thought it was horrible, threw it away, went back to the Palm trio. This is now 10 or 11 years ago, but at some point six, seven years ago, I just figured, okay, I have no choice. There are just too many things you can only get on the iPhone. But Samsung, I just don't know how people think they can put their head in their sand or bury something in obscure portion on their website. If this had been a company I was involved with, I would have put the video on the home page of the main website so that anybody who is looking for anything to do with Samsung would be able to quickly, easily find that information and not have to hunt and pack and do Google searches the way I did to even find this video. Folks, you don't have to put out a video every single day the way some people do, some egomaniacs like me. But if it's a crisis that is going to make you the punchline of jokes for months, years, perhaps decades. Yeah, I think you need to try to control the narrative and get out there. Speaking of controlling the narrative, we are only 23 days away from the 2016 presidential election. Some of you are tired of hearing about it, you might be tired of me talking about it, and that's okay. You certainly might be tired if you perceive that your candidate isn't the same as My candidate. And this is not a political podcast in the sense of me trying to convince you to my viewpoint or my politicians, but I have to use these are great learning tools for communication because politicians are in fact ones in the greatest spotlight. Communicating, giving speeches, good ones, bad ones, giving media interviews, good ones, bad ones. So I was struck by the news in the last 24 hours that Donald Trump's son in law has entered negotiations. There have been very credible reports that he's talking to investment bankers and others about how to set up a Trump TV network, an online venture, a media company. Some have speculated that what Donald Trump has done in the last couple of weeks has not really seemed designed to winning undecided voters, shall we say. But then it is perfectly designed to help him build a stronger allegiance with voters who share his philosophy on life, news, the media, and would be a great source of, of contact for really cultivating this network and monetizing them a la Glenn Beck. So I very much think that Donald Trump could be a huge success when it comes to a Trump tv. He has firmly committed followers. He has a different worldview. I mean, that's what was so striking About Fox News 20 years ago is you really didn't have a network designed to give mainstream conservative voters something that they felt was on their side. Donald Trump's philosophy, even though he has Roger Ailes in his court on his team, he has a philosophy of economic nationalism, of protectionism, of anti immigrant that is very, very different from the mainstream conservative Fox News, Wall Street Journal view on things. So I think he has a base. I think he has a way of making himself distinct. And if he maintains an interest, if he can make enough money from it, we may be seeing Donald Trump on TV. I mean, it could be 24 hours a day. I could certainly see him doing a 1, 2, 3 hour daily show after the election, assuming, of course, he's not the President of the United States. But as I've commented on before, there's a world of difference between being a successful politician and a successful media personality. And Al Gore, not the most cultivating of media personalities, but he did win more votes for president than anyone else in the history of the country. The year he ran, Mario Cuomo, successful governor, won three terms in office in New York, but his radio shows, eh, nothing to be too excited about. So it's a different skill set and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that, that Donald Trump has what it takes. By the way, folks, learning a learning lesson here, learning moment. And I could have stopped the tape edited it out. But I wanted you to realize that I'm being transparent with you. The phone rang. I just, I did not stop the recording. Excuse me, I did not stop my phone, I did not turn my phone off, my ringer off before starting the recording. So, A, I apologize. B, let's learn that. Use this as a learning moment. You need to not only turn your ringer off, I would recommend you actually turn your phone off before doing any kind of show or recording, whether it's audio or video. And hang on just one moment, I'm drinking a little water. If I don't sound 100% normal to you because I have a cold and I don't expect a lot of sympathy from you, everybody gets cold. It's not the most debilitating thing. But if you talk a lot for your living, as I do you, it's massively inconvenient. And right now the whole house has a cold. My wife, my daughter, the only one who doesn't is my mother in law who's nice enough to live with us, oh, about 60% of the time. And wow, has she really been picking up the slack. Appreciate that a great deal. So there's no real solution to a cold. As you know, I've been drinking tea, tea with lemon and honey. I'm not necessarily recommending that. Drinking a lot of water. Right now I'm drinking water that is a little warmer than room temperature. It's not scalding, but it is hot. Just seems to make my throat feel a little better. And I'm also standing even closer to my microphone than usual because I really, really don't want to raise my voice and I don't want to strain my voice at all. And this just makes it much easier to almost whisper and there's just a lot less stress on the voice. Speaking of Donald Trump. And this will switch out of the political at least the Trump talk in just a moment. But interesting study profiling his followers in, I believe it was slate, slate.com, one of my favorite online publications, saying that, you know, the media, others need to take Donald Trump's voters and message seriously. But what is it? If you listen to the mainstream media narrative, there's this sense that Donald Trump is speaking to down and out white people, people who've lost their jobs to globalization, people who've lost jobs, their jobs to immigrants, people who are unemployed, poor. When you look at the data, it turns out that's not the case at all. The average Trump voter is in fact employed his and it's More often a his than a her. But his average annual income is $72,000 a year, which is hardly rich, but is pretty significantly above average above the median wage in the United States of America. So it's not that they are economically down and out. There's something else motivating them and attracting them to the Donald Trump message. What would that be? I'm more than happy to entertain your thoughts on that. Please let me know. It's hard to talk about politicians messages without everybody jumping all over you saying, oh, you're trying to proselytize CJ for your particular candidate. And that's really not what this particular show is about. So I'm going to table the Trump talk for now. Let's switch over to the other side. Not Hillary Clinton, but Michelle Obama's speech last week. Get some of you left like Michelle Obama. Some of you hate Michelle Obama. But even Glenn Beck, who is by anybody's standards not a Democratic supporter or an Obama supporter or a liberal, has commented that Michelle Obama's speech last week where she really basically savaged Donald Trump, according to Glenn Beck, this was the most effective speech since anyone has given on the national scene since Ronald Reagan. Now, that's pretty strong praise from someone who isn't just trying to butter up an ideological ally. That's pretty strong praise from someone who does know about communication. And believe it or not, I happen to be a huge, I wouldn't say fan, but respecter of Glenn Beck's ability to communicate, whether it's a speech, whether it's his talk radio show, whether it's just talking to a camera for an hour. The man knows how to captivate and communicate and express and convey emotion. And he thought that Michelle Obama's speech was extraordinarily captivating with its emotion, its conviction, the authenticity, sincerity. Now, keep in mind, if Michelle Obama were tomorrow to announce she's running for president, her negatives would go up, I believe, higher, higher than Hillary Clinton. It's just, it's frankly easy to be popular as a first lady because Nancy Reagan was popular for not all of her time in office, but most of it. And Barbara Bush was popular, Laura Bush, believe it or not, Hillary Clinton was fairly popular as a first lady and in fact led the best keeping guide for most respected women most of the years she was the first lady. But what Michelle Obama did last week got so much more attention than a typical State of the Union or not a State of the Union, a typical speech by any first lady. And I think we can expect to see More of her, not just in the next month before this campaign is over, but in the future. I don't think she has the political bug in her to run for office herself, but she's clearly someone who has an interest in public policy and public issues. And she's still relatively young. What may I say? I think of Obama and his wife as very young because they're only a few months older than I am. So I think we're going to hear her on the national stage for the next quarter century or more. And she only enhanced her attractiveness as a spokesperson with the speech she gave last week. Now, in other news, we talked about this briefly in one of the shows over the weekend. Ken Bone, the guy who asked the. This is the guy in the red sweater who asked the question at the last debate, the town hall forum. And all of a sudden, he became an Internet meme. He got massive, massive attention. Everybody loved him. Everyone thought he was great. He was doing Reddits. And all of a sudden people started investigating and they could see that he. He put out all sorts of, well, some would say nasty, others would say politically incorrect statements on other websites. So now he's being raked over the coals. You know, he didn't ask for that. On the other hand, he. He did seem pretty happy to soak up the fame and I guess get free car rides from Uber and perhaps other sponsorships. And it is a lesson from folks that, number one, nobody's perfect. Number two, when you think you're saying odd things, weird things, nasty things, online, in private, it's not really private. Pretty much nothing these days is private. It's just the only advantage most of us have is nobody really cares about us enough to make it a big thing. But as Ken Bone shows, you never really know when you might become famous. And I hate to use the trite, overused cliche of Andy Warhol, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. But that really does seem to be the case for Ken Bone. Folks, tomorrow is another big day for those of us who care about speaking and presenting. The third and final debate of 2016 is coming up. I'm looking forward to it, even though even I, as a political junkie, I'm somewhat sick of this campaign. There's still nothing like the excitement, the unpredictability of what can happen in a live primetime televised debate. I am assuming the ratings for this will be dramatically lower than the first debate, a little lower than the second debate. This one is going to have Chris Wallace, who can be a very tough interviewer, I would expect him to really grill Donald Trump and hold him accountable and to be equally as tough on Hillary Clinton because there's a lot riding on this for fox. FOX has a certain reputation. As you know, Chris Wallace as a part of fox, I think is going to be doing everything he can reaching this huge, huge audience to send a signal that he is independent, thoughtful, hard hitting and a real journalist. So I think we're going to see an outstanding performance on his part. Even though earlier on in the campaign season Chris Wallace sort of famously said it's not his job to fact check a candidate during debates. I think we're going to be surprised at how tough and forceful Chris Wallace is going to be in this debate. I could be wrong, but we'll see more on that after the debate. But I'll be watching that tomorrow as I hope many of you will be, and I'll be dissecting it right afterwards. I'm TJ Walker. As always, this is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. If you have an upcoming speech or media event, are you absolutely certain you're gonna look your best and sound your best? If not, why not go through some training starting, oh, I don't know, how about right now? You can start learning right away. It's only one click away and it cost you absolutely nothing. All you have to do is click in the link in the show notes or just go to Media Training Worldwide and get our free online media and presentation training course as well as a few books and you can start learning right away. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Please send me your comments on Twitter jwalker. Thanks. Thanks for listening to speaking with T.J. walker.