TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

From the studios of Media Training Worldwide, this is Inside Communications and I'm your host, Mike Baco. Whether it's behind the camera as a former news producer, or behind the scenes as a public relations and crisis communication expert, Mark Macias of 3M Media Group has seen it all. We go inside with him today on Inside Communic. So when people think about crisis communications, they think about the BP disaster, but sometimes it could be on a smaller scale with a local business. You've done a lot of producing, you've done a lot of crisis communications consulting. What should we know about the field of crisis communications?

You know, you never get a second chance in crisis communications. When you walk out the door, if you're bombarded by a reporter or you choo down one on one with the reporter asking confrontational questions, you only get one shot. And the most important thing you have to know beforehand is be prepared. And that's one of the biggest mistakes I saw as an investigative producer. As an investigative producer, as an investigative producer or executive producer. Producer, and even in many cases consulting clients, they choose to go into the situation and not really prepare for the questions that will be coming.

So let's take a look at how someone should prepare. You don't really know what the questions are going to be. So if you're consulting with someone and from your past life, as you mentioned, as a producer, is it that people are caught off guard by a question or they're just not prepared with their messages?

Yeah, in my book I teach something called you need to always have a screener. The screener allows you a little bit of comfort room to be able to determine how big of a threat you face. A screener can be someone as simple as an intern. As an assistant, it can be anyone who does not have authority with your organization. If you're an HR director, you are not a screener. You're automatically perceived as being in the know on personnel issues. But you can have an assistant or a secretary. That is your screener off the bat. The screener needs to. What that screener does is they can ask questions without necessarily being put under the light, being put, you know, scrutinized and questioned, they're also going to be in many ways given a break. Whereas if you as the owner of a company come in and you're forced to start answering questions, you know what? There's no holds barred. We can ask you anything we want. And if you're not prepared, then you look bad. But if you have an assistant and the assistant asks some simple questions, like, what's your name? Give me the title. That tells a lot. Sounds benign, but the title. Why is that a big deal? Well, you're going to know how experienced this person is. If the person says, I'm an associate researcher for Inside Edition, well, that tells you something. Whereas if the person says, I'm a senior producer with CBS or I'm with shame on you in New York.

Mm. So let's take a look back. If you're not a business owner and you're not a company, you're an individual here in New York and nationwide. Anthony Weiner, certainly a textbook case in how not to handle a crisis situation. This is an individual that he alone knew what the truth was. So what should he have done in that situation? Certainly, he eventually came clean and now he's out of office. But what should he have done right from the get go?

You cannot lie. Lying is not a crisis communication strategy. You know, it happened unfortunately with Clinton, Bill Clinton, it happened with Weiner. And in another 10 years, it's going to happen to another politician. They're going to think, I'm going to lie and I'm going to get away with it. The job of a reporter and a producer is to uncover and to dig. And if they have any sense or inkling that you're lying, it's only going to push them a little further. So in the case with Anthony Weiner, when he did his first, the first thing he did was he, like, held off. He didn't address it. You can't ignore it. That doesn't make the problem go away. He made another classic mistake. He said, this is not news. I'm going to focus on my job. Well, granted, it is news. There's a picture of you on your Twitter account with.

And he made it even more bizarre by trying to hold a press conference where reporters were badgering him with questions, and he was almost ignoring the questions and trying to just go off and make a speech about something which made, as you mentioned, reporters just want to dig deeper and deeper into this.

You know, a lot of people underestimate the value of kindness and personality. Even if you were dealing with the reporter. You know what, a reporter is human. And lots of clients I deal with on a crisis aspect, they tell me, I even had a politician tell me, this newspaper doesn't like me. We're going to alienate them and we're not going to talk to them. I told the guy running for that office, I said, no, you can't do that. You can't alienate an Abase, you need to find a way to be personable. And if you feel like they're not, you know, working in your favor, then you need to work in your favor to bring them over. That means be personal, be nice, be kind. I mean, it goes back to kindergarten basics.

Exactly. And you mentioned Bill Clinton as an example, as someone who did come back. It remains to be seen whether Wiener could come back. But what advice would you give to someone like Wiener, or even on a smaller scale, to a business who has gotten bad publicity? A producer's come to them they've done a piece of, whether it be for a newspaper or for a local station, really painting them in a bad light. What can they do to come back from that?

Yeah, Wiener made so many mistakes. And that's why it's important to off the bat, try and manage that crisis from the beginning. Because he lied. First of all, he badgered the reporters, then he lied, then he, you know, tried to ignore it. I mean, he just made so many mistakes that you cannot do in a crisis situation. As far as Anthony Weiner, the former congressman, I'd say he needs to lay low for a long time. And that means stay out of the spotlight. I mean, there was an article in yesterday's local paper talking about how he's already talking to the Democratic leaders about who his replacement's going to be. You know, I mean, it's politics. Everyone wants a name and everyone wants favor with a reporter. So if he's talking to these power brokers, of course they're going to talk. He needs to lay low and just let this die down. And maybe three years, maybe two, depending on how forgiving the public is, then he can try and rehabilitate his image.

And there's a great model for that right now on tv. From New York, former Governor Spitzer, who now has his own show on cnn. Do you see something in Wiener's future in terms of media appearances? Certainly one of the things that made his name was that he was so good to the media. He was a great sound bite. So do you see any future for that?

Yeah, I think the difference is that with Spitzer, and I'm not a sociologist, I think with Spitzer, you know, the public. I'm actually surprised that many of the women, my friends who are female, got behind him after the fact, even. I think that. I mean, that's a tough question. I think the difference is, is that Spitzer came out, the governor came out and was honest from the front, from the get go. He didn't try to Hide it. He came out with his wife. Those little things do matter because it's kind of giving the overall picture. Whereas Anthony Weiner lied. And that's a hard thing to come back from. And now you can, obviously, you know, President Clinton can. You show contrition and you show an upfront face and. And what you learn from it. But in the case with Congressman Weiner, I mean, that's. It's going to be. He has a larger uphill battle, I.

Think, than Spitzer did with someone that does have an uphill battle. You mentioned your book. Give us a little bit of an overview of what we find in that.

Book, Beat the Press, your guide to managing the media. The first half of the book is how to manage the Media, how to proactively get publicity. If you're a small business owner, what can you do to get your product or service in the news? The second half of the book is crisis communications. We what happens when, if you're a restaurant owner, when a reporter shows up and talks to you about your failed health inspection report, what happens when you have negative news but it's not out there yet? How do you manage that? Do you leak it slowly or do you just kind of stay under the radar? So it goes into the classic textbook stories as well as advice and insight that I learned over the years of how to manage a case. You know, whether it's good publicity you're after or whether it's managing bad publicity.

You mentioned over the years how things have progressed right now with the Internet. If you do a Google search on a company that may have had a bad report or investigation against them, or even a restaurant with a bad health rating that someone did an investigative piece on, that's there forever now. Has the game changed a little bit now with the Internet?

Yes, completely. As far as that. I did a story. I pitched a story for a client who was a crisis communications client, and I pitched it as on Google me. In fact, if you un. Google me, put that in, you'll be able to see that story on the front page of Google. What was interesting about that is that a lot of people do believe that, like in Facebook, if it's out on the Internet, the Internet's written in ink. It is not necessarily written in ink. There are strategies and tactics you can take to get negative news pulled off the Internet, which is what we did with my crisis client. Originally, there was a negative story. It was a hit job on him, that there were a lot of inaccuracies. We were able to get a major Publisher, national publisher, to pull this off the web and make some other concessions the way we did. That is if you are in that situation where you find, you turn, you find a website that has an article on you and it's number one, it has to not be true. Because that's the difference between, I mean, First Amendment is an opinion that we have the right to say, you know what, this restaurant has the worst food. It's another thing where a reporter comes out and says they failed their health inspection three times and they found rodents on the floor. If that's not true, well, then you have an actual case to get this pulled down. A lot of this is still evolving, but, you know, just because it is on the Internet, you know, people shouldn't lay over and say, oh, you know, I'm gonna go find a new career. No, there are ways to un Google yourself.

Okay, and what if you're an individual? We've been talking a lot about companies. What about if you're an individual in this situation and let's just say someone posts some nasty stuff about you? And we might think of that as crisis communication. But for the individual, it's a big crisis. For them, it's their reputation. They're going on a job interview, someone may Google them and see all this information before they even step foot in the door and have that preconceived notion about them. What about if you're just the lone individual somewhere?

Yeah, you know, it goes back to, you need to know if this is factual or if this is an opinion. If someone goes underneath Yelp and they write in restaurant reviews, this is the best food I've had in my entire life, you know, that's an opinion. But if someone else starts throwing out claims that you've had an affair or you're a legal attorney who's cheated on his taxes or something like that, if there are inaccuracies, you can go after them for slander, for libel, and that's many times enough just to get them to pull it off the web.

Mark Macias, thanks for going Inside Communications with us. Where can people find out more information?

3Mmediagroup.Com or the easy one?

Killthestory.com killthestory.com thanks for joining us today on Inside Communications. Hopefully you won't kill this story. We'll be back with more guests right after this.

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