Nothing feels more like a crisis or brings out holes, bruises and messes like losing the presidency. Were the roles reversed, the Democrats’ blemishes and moles would be on exhibit.

Here’s the crisis for the Republicans: Major chunks of its constituents — in shorthand the Tea Party — think Mitt Romney lost because he was too moderate, clearly not conservative enough. These constituents also include fundamentalists, much of Wall Street and major chunks of the nation’s business leadership who don’t want to pay higher taxes. [Not a unique failing of the rich.]

Contrast this rightward political pull with analysis of the electorate. While Romney won the white male vote, President Obama slammed him in categories like women, people of color — especially blacks and Hispanics — and the young.

The Republican Party is like a cartoon character stretched across an abyss, one toe to each side of cliffs that are drawing away, making the plunge inevitable.

The Republican paradox, going back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 drubbing by Lyndon Johnson is that the more conservative the party’s candidates, the more energized the party’s core becomes; but the more right the party moves, the less likely it is to win the presidency and actually govern because its candidate doesn’t mesh with the electorate.

The perfect personification of this paradox is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A fervent Romney supporter who castigated Obama through the summer, he became a governor of all the people in Hurricane Sandy’s wake when his state was seriously hurt and needed federal aid.

No one begrudges Christie pushing for aid, that’s his responsibility. But his born-again approach to Obama had to embarrass the Romney campaign on top of its being sidelined by the storm itself, while Obama got all presidential.

This is not to say the moderate-right Republicans like the presidents Bush, or even Richard Nixon, were flukes. But a great many Republicans — you heard and read it repeatedly during this campaign — still idealize Ronald Reagan. Like Sandy, however, Reagan was a 100-year storm. His conservatism was more populism and when combined with his gleeful personality he was not nearly as harsh sounding or seeming as George W. Bush and Nixon often seemed.

Reagan won by appealing to conservative Democrats. No one wrote about “Romney Democrats” this time around. Romney spent so much money and energy in the Republican primaries running with seven others — almost all more conservative than he — for the Reagan mantle that Romney depleted his financial and personal resources for the run against Obama. But beyond that, Republicans ran into issue buzz saws among the voters, given Republican stands on abortion [stigmatized by stupid rape comments], women’s rights, immigration, health care [yes, many people who need Obamacare voted], ending two costly wars, and a sense of tax fairness.

This paradox is not unique to Republicans. The late Sen. George McGovern was the liberal Goldwater in 1972 when his far-Left ideas and furious descriptions of Nixon alienated him from the electorate and into a landslide loss, even though history proved him right about Nixon.

After Obama it appears that Hillary Clinton and perhaps New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are lining up. They are, literally, Clintonian Democrats, like Obama. [She's married to him; Cuomo was in his cabinet]. Unless the Republicans can reconcile their right-pulling base with a left-shifting electorate, there may not be another Ronald Reagan on the horizon for many years.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Here are yesterday’s results on that score, which demonstrate that the media refrain of “long lines at the polling places,” had much more to do with bad systems and poor voter access than larger numbers of Americans exercising their right to vote.

How bad was it? In 2008, Barack Obama won his first term with the most votes among 131 million eligible American voters.

In 2012, he won 59.9 million of 118 million votes cast. Mitt Romney won 57.2 million. Some 13 million people didn’t vote this year compared to four years ago.

It goes down hill from there. For the 2012 presidential election, 237 million Americans were eligible to register and vote, according to the U.S. Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Of those, about 150 million actually registered.

Nearly 87 million people eligible to register and vote did not in 2012.

That means that only 49.78 percent of eligible voters cast ballots for the two presidential candidates yesterday — the lowest percentage in a presidential election since 1996. Thus only 25.27 percent of eligible voters elected the president.

Just one in four eligible American voters chose our next president.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

As a crisis manager, let’s first look to the eternal bright side, at crises ended.

The crisis of the endless televised political commercial is gone, banished in degrees for at least a year, or two or four.

The crisis of smart, capable people publicly emphasizing what’s wrong with each other will creep back into the shadows.

The crisis of the stupid, less-capable people who think rape is something less than a brutal, criminal assault on women will also creep back into the shadows.

The crisis of dominant governance at the hands of white men is easing. With election of the first lesbian senator, Wisconsin Rep. Tammy Baldwin, and wins by women in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, 19 now take seats in the U.S. Senate. That’s a mere 31 or so fewer than should hold seats, but it’s progress.

The crisis of whether gays and lesbians can marry in the state they call home eased by actions in four states, with legalization in Maine, Maryland and Washington; while Minnesota voters denied a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Now for a few crises we must still contend with as a nation.

The crisis of a Republican House and a Democrat Senate refusing to compromise and govern is the biggest. Social media are aflame — as were last night’s exit polls — with demands for collaboration and bi-partisanship. The first big test will be the so-called fiscal cliff, which if Congress and the president don’t agree on will lead to a Jan. 1 rebellion by angry taxpayers.

On a brighter note, at least you’re not a comedy writer, who are surely in crisis this morning wondering why they’ll now have to suddenly work for a living since all that great laugh fodder won’t drop in their laps as easily. Or will it?

A smart, observant friend said the Northeast, the West Coast and the Big Ten went for Obama. [For those of you who don't follow sports, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, are key Big Ten teams.] Indeed. The South, Midwest and non-coastal West preferred Romney. Those are stark geographic contrasts and the American Presidency Project has a relevant map collection showing how the nation’s divisions have morphed over the decades. The blue-red split is a growling crisis.

Crises come and go. As an electorate, we’ve eased a few, but still face many.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

That’s right. Despite millions upon millions of dollars in advertising enriching the likes of General Electric and Disney, only about half of Americans eligible will vote today, whether it’s for Republican Mitt Romney or Democrat President Barack Obama; or for House candidates, senators, or in local and regional contests.

In 1960, when Richard Nixon ran against John F. Kennedy, 63.1 percent of the population voted — which at the time was castigated as poor for a democracy. If America is really the world’s leading democracy, why do 26 other democracies get higher, much higher voter turnouts? Americans love to mock France, but 72 percent of French people voted last time. There is also a direct correlation between voter turnout and percentage of women elected to office. Women are half the population, but only 12 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives is female. The correlation isn’t perfect, but Denmark has 83 percent voter turnout and 37 percent female legislators; Finland has 72/33; New Zealand 83/45.

The easier and more accommodating the voting rules, the higher the voter turnout. Australia leads with 96 percent voter turnout. More on that later.

The percentage of Americans voting in a presidential election stayed above 60 until 1972, when it dipped to 55.2 percent when Nixon crushed  the [later proven right] George McGovern. We as a voting populace rallied to 55.1 percent in 1992 for Bill Clinton against George H. W. Bush, up from 50.1 in 1988. In 1996, we dropped below half for the first time, as 49.1 turned out for Clinton vs. Bob Dole vs. Ross Perot. The presidential elections that followed, 2000 [51.3], 2004 [55.3] and 2008 [56.8] actually trended up.

Today’s turnout is just a guess, but that recent trend is likely not going to last. And here’s the punchline: These are all percentages for presidential years, when the stakes are high, the media coverage rabid and the advertising unlimited. In “off-year” elections, which for individual Americans may be far more important than the presidential races for their states and cities, 37.8 percent turned out in 2010, the most since 1994.

In fact, the off-year gubernatorial, state house, mayoral elections turnout has not exceeded 40 percent since before 1960, averaging 39.8 percent in the 13 elections since. We are perilously close to becoming a nation that elects its governors, mayors and state legislatures with close to one-third of the population.

I’ve said and written too many times that if an invading nation subjugated America and ordered that only 39 percent of our population were eligible to vote, there would be a rebellion.

This is a crisis, a long-brewing, growing crisis of immense proportions that no one outside academia seems to know how to fix. But here are a few suggestions:

1. It’s the internet, stupid. If nearly 1 billion people can safely post all manner of ridiculous and fun and personal content on Facebook and can buy everything from books to diapers on the internet, could America not find safe and secure ways to let 200 million Americans vote via their phones, tablet or computer? Must we really spend interim billions of dollars on computer-like systems standing in school gyms, fire halls and libraries? Cut to the chase. Use Social Security numbers as IDs and let people vote electronically.

2. Make it easier, not harder to register. If you’re a citizen over 18 you have the right to vote. Why must it be so difficult to exercise that right? Show a citizen-validating ID with your birthdate and vote. End of story.

3. “Election Day” is an anachronism. Americans had weeks to elect George Washington over John Quincy Adams in 1789, the first presidential election, and we should return to that. Early ballots are becoming popular in many states. But why not give everyone weeks to vote, with “Election Day” being the last day to vote instead of the first?

4. Emphasize more in school that voting is a right, among many, that hundreds of thousands of Americans died to protect. Emphasize that there are multiple nations around the world still where leaders take office at gunpoint, through intimidation, murder and torture; that billions of people in the world live their lives with no say over who governs them. Surely this is being taught in our schools today, but if it is, the methods are failing and the passion is not being communicated.

This crisis persists because of the irony of ”elected officials.” The people who would have to change this system and counter this crisis of non-voting are the same people whom we elect to govern us and who retain their salaries and multiple perks by getting re-elected to their jobs. And they like the system just the way it is.

Surely if you ask members of Congress — or any other office — if they’d like to see more than 54 percent or 39 percent of their constituents vote in their elections, they’ll say yes. But the truth is they don’t want more people voting. They want more voters committed to them voting. New voters? Immigrants? Lapsed voters? Young voters? Internet voters? Democracy is so messy, isn’t it? Let’s keep it as it is.

That’s the crisis. The gatekeepers to change hold the keys and they aren’t opening the way without a fight. Maybe, like so much in our lives these days, the demands and allure of technology will make internet-based voting a fait accompli in the near future. Maybe all the politicians will realize they can’t hold back the flood any more than network television could stop cable, newspapers could stop web-based news sites or AT&T could only sell rotary dial phones.

But here’s the crux of this crisis: Whomever wins today will only have about five in 10 Americans eligible to vote involved in the process. And that means, given the anticipated closeness of this presidential race, that the next president will claim office with only slightly more than one in four Americans actually choosing him to be president.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

But Bloomberg, who is first and always a capitalist, let the promised millions derived from the New York City Marathon muddle his values — and his crisis management chops. The marathon should have been cancelled Wednesday or Thursday, at the latest. Was there any doubt after the attacks of 9/11 that the NFL would cancel that Sunday’s and Monday’s games out of respect?

And it should have been the same result, nothing begrudging and pressured, in this case for the mayor and the New York Roadrunners Club, the marathon’s owner. Not only out of respect for those who died in Sandy’s wrath, not only because city resources were needed to continue the recovery, not only because tens of thousands of people from Staten Island to Harlem were blistered and raw, but only because it was the right thing to do.

While economic impact figures are always suspect, there’s no doubt that 50,000 runners, their families and New Yorkers who watch the race, spend hundreds of millions of dollars during the weekend. New York City and State, facing billions in damage from Sandy, surely could use the economic Red Bull. But at what price?

In the end, the mayor and the Roadrunners did the right thing, but it felt like a forced decision; it felt like if there had been just a little less criticism they would have gone for it.

Superior crisis management puts perception first. Could the city have managed to pull off the marathon, and would it have brought in money and raised spirits as a triumph of human perseverance? Of course. But would it have insulted the tens of thousands of residents in the Northeast whose lives were upended and turned into a marathon of survival? Yes.

Bloomberg and the Roadrunners make the right call. They shouldn’t have made it a close call.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

For days, it’s felt too much like Katrina, sans President Bush’s indifference and ugly scenes from the Superdome; or the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

From President Obama to governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, leaders managed this crisis expertly, so far. [The idea of running the five-borough New York City Marathon under current circumstances seems a terrible idea, but, if it happens, Sunday's media reports will no doubt focus on how the city came together to help 45,000 runners.]

From a crisis management point of view, let’s look at how these leaders acted and why they succeeded so far:

1. Proactivity. All, especially Bloomberg and Cuomo, got out ahead of the storm, literally. Their somewhat hysterical-seeming warnings, pre-storm, proved dead on after it hit. Preparing and evacuating people, closing tunnels and subway tubes, saved lives. Bravo.

2. Facts. When a crisis strikes, people need facts, they want information. Bloomberg delivered them in three languages [English, Spanish and sign -- with his sign interpreter Lydia Callis becoming an internet sensation]. Cuomo’s team Tweeted details like bingo callers shouting out letters and numbers. Information flowed. Christie hardly slept for days and was all over TV.

3. Accountability. Christie took the prize in this realm, telling the media that regardless of who he supports in the presidential race, President Obama was doing a great job helping the people of New Jersey and streamlining the federal bureaucracy. Bloomberg also kept the key information flowing and demonstrated his no-nonsense approach with moves like only permitting vehicles carrying three or more people to come into the city in the storm’s aftermath. Cuomo placed the issue of global warming and climate change

4. Transformative leadership. Like Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after 9/11, these elected leaders boosted their images and transformed their leadership quotients by succeeding in a crisis. They stood out for putting public safety first, providing decision-making that made sense and positioning themselves as responsible and strategic forces for coping.

5. Demonstrating change and progress. Even the best leaders will fail in crisis mode if they are all rhetoric and no action. Transportation resumption, power fixes, food delivery, public safety presence all showed that utilities, fire and police, federal government departments and National Guard troops were up to the task. The fastest way to end a crisis is to fix the problems that caused it. This may take weeks for the Northeast after Sandy, but progress is clear. The bad situation is improving and the forces for change are moving in the right direction.

Excellent work overall.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Other former football coaches are seen around town, running on trails, seemingly lost and still stunned by how the crisis transformed their lives, like Sandusky’s young victims.

Earlier this week, the university community hosted a three-day meeting on child abuse that featured a keynote speech by kidnapping and abuse victim Elizabeth Smart, who praised the effort.

A visit to State College last weekend, including a Communications Department seminar Friday afternoon featuring three Penn State grads who made it big in Hollywood, afforded ample opportunity to discuss why Penn State’s leadership fumbled and bumbled its public relations and crisis management over the last year. Professors, journalists and former high-ranking employees all weighed in about the scandal that cost Head Coach Joe Paterno, the university president, the AD and a vice-president their jobs and humiliated a great university.

Many of the comments continued to reflect bewilderment. As we wrote at the time, trustees and administrators had only to walk out of their offices and outside Old Main to a building 500 yards away and there knock on the doors of some of the best crisis management experts in America. Penn State graduated the pro who worked on the Tylenol poisonings. Half a dozen professors were more than qualified to help. Never happened.

The university hired and apparently fired a national public relations agency that indisputably would have given effective advice the crisis commanders just as clearly ignored. If they had, the crisis would not linger like Hurricane Sandy.

Much of the blame for this mess and the poor handling of it seems to be placed at the feet of the trustees. Their executive committee is described as an insular old boys club of big C-level egos, all of whom do business with one another. Several close observers described the board as more fitting for a country club than providing powerful leadership needed by a national research institution. The university ran itself and the trustees, many of them political appointees of the state attorney general turned governor who started the Sandusky probe, liked the free football perks and the line on their resumes.

When the Sandusky/Paterno mess landed in their laps — the outsider theory goes — these “leaders” worried far more about their day jobs than the university. They did all they could to blame others while protecting their own hides. They followed the preferred posture of CEOs everywhere and ducked and covered — and not their heads.

There’s so much anger among the alumni that hundreds of people ran for a couple of alumni seats on the board. And at Saturday night’s half-time of the game against Ohio State a great many of the 108,000 attendees booed lustily when new university President Rodney Erickson was introduced. His crime? Accepting without a peep or push back the serious NCAA sanctions levied on Penn State’s football team. In the context of this discussion, therefore, he added fuel to the PR fire and whatever messaging he’s using is an utter failure.

As this crisis enters its second year, one can only hope that an enterprising professor in the Communications Department will undertake a book project that tries to get at the issue of why such massive institutional failure occurred and why the crisis management continues to fail so expertly at Penn State, a university with a superior cadre of crisis experts.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Sandy, the fireworks are hailin’ over Little Eden tonight
Forcin’ a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm July
Down in the town, the Circuit’s full of switchblade lovers, so fast, so shiny, so sharp
As the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the boardwalk way past dark
And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore
Chasin’ all them silly New York virgins by the score

And Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us
This pier lights our carnival life forever
Oh, love me tonight, for I may never see you again
Hey, Sandy girl
My, my, baby

Sandy blasted Bruce fans all over the Northeast, but not everywhere. Monday we discussed leadership, political decision making in a crisis, and it would appear that New Jersey, New York City and Connecticut benefitted from those leaders’ proactivity. Flooded subways, transit and traffic tunnels and hanging cranes are beyond dangerous. Likely their foresight, and smart action by first responders, saved lives.

Aside from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s [another huge Bruce fan] absurd spat with Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford over how many people didn’t evacuate the seaside city, political leaders served their constituents effectively.

For vast areas of Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine — whose residents had the beejeezus scared out of them – maybe not so much. We mean to be gentle here, because what governor or mayor can risk downplaying a storm that then proves worse than he or she predicted? None. Especially on Oct. 28-29-30 with national elections a hop, skip and jump down the road.

Nonetheless, thousands of schools, universities and businesses closed across the broad region based on the proactivity and most didn’t need to.

The other highlight of this crisis, especially for politicians, is how social media allows them to insert themselves and their version of leadership into the maelstrom and come out ahead.

For instance, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has 45,3o3 Twitter followers of his official account, tied to @nygovcuomo. In just the last hour, whoever writes his Tweets put out 53, one every minute. Seventeen hours ago, or at between 8 and 9 p.m. last night at the height of the storm, he tweeted 18 times, one every three minutes.

In one context, the Tweets seem superfluous when you read them; but if they’re the only source of information for people without power, transportation and a warm place to stay, they’re a lifeline.

We can also track the tweets as media and other public officials and office holders pick them up and the illusion is he’s everywhere, leading, pumping out information, helping. In a crisis like a storm — Cuomo no doubt learned from Irene 14 months ago — social media is an ideal communication mode.

Overall, if I were to grade the Northeast’s leaders in this crisis, I’d go with a B+ to A-. Smart work.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

President Obama — more on his potential gains later — and governors Andrew Cuomo from New York, Chris Christie from New Jersey, and several others, took prominent stances on public safety Sunday. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg moved out ahead of even them, taking no chances and virtually closing his city 36 to 48 hours ahead of the storm’s arrival. Utilities – even banks — also issued guidance while the storm was still 500 miles away. Some toll roads waived payments so evacuees could get to higher ground faster.

Leadership, or at least the political attempt at it, is much in evidence. No leader, including mayors, county executives and town supervisors, wants to be seen as less than abundantly prepared. This is all good. A potential killer storm is nothing to pretend about. And given the technology at hand that followed the storm’s development and predicted its path, we’d be foolish not to use the information at hand to prepare.

Will it all prove silly and paranoid? We’ll know by Wednesday. But few can criticize those in charge of public safety for erring on the side of sending out wide alarms.

One fascinating sidelight that has received scant attention is the effect a 24- to 36-hour storm and a powerless aftermath stretching for perhaps days will have on the presidential race. One effect is already clear: On a Sunday and Monday with eight days left until the voting, the storm dominated the media. Add to that an incumbent president’s ability to lead the nation in a time of crisis and Sandy could cast the biggest vote of all in the 2012 presidential election.

Within a week of the election, the storm threatens to silence the Romney campaign and provide the president with hours of knitted-brow television time, news conferences, visits to hard-hit areas and hugs for victims. The president will just being doing his job — even if everyone sees the political upside for him. Were Republican candidate Mitt Romney to try to do the same, he’d be ripped for trying to turn misery into political gain. It’s not fair, but there it is.

Add to that the possibility that some areas of the Northeast could conceivably be still without power on Election Day and this storm becomes an even greater factor in the near future than it might have been.

If it proves completely disastrous and millions are without power for days, the victims’ entire outlook on the presidential election could markedly change. If Obama is seen as fumbling relief efforts — as President Bush was perceived during Katrina — his re-election chances would be dashed. If the reverse is true, he could glide to victory with Romney left to curse his bad luck and the vagaries of Earth’s changing ecosystem.

One thing is certain: Sandy is a crisis and a great many people are dealing with it as effectively as possible during its advent. We can’t predict now who the storm will blow out to sea with it; we’ll know in a few days.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Watch Nike Head Coach Phil Knight’s defiant eulogy for diminished [some would say disgraced] Penn State football coach Joe Paterno last winter and you can tell the man has heart and soul. Nike also has some of the highest-profile sponsorships around and in recent years that heart and soul had to deliberate on and decide when to cut loose a fallen star.

Knight’s nothing if not loyal, especially when the likes of Woods, Paterno, Armstrong, Jones and others brought the company millions upon millions of dollars. And, choice of endorsements is usually tied to their supposed character as much as their athletic excellence.

Armstrong survived cancer, started Livestrong and Nike came up with the yellow wristband idea. Paterno’s rolled-up chinos and throwback black Nike football shoes were iconic beyond college football. The ultimate irony? Nike named its company day-care center after Paterno, who was then caught up in a child abuse scandal by a former coach. These endorsements are bonds more than simple business relationships.

As my savvy colleague Chuck Beeler noted: “When to stick with them (publicly)? When to hold tight (and go dark for a while)? When to cut bait (and how long to wait before doing so)? Do they cut the person lose willing/proactively, or react/succumb to public pressure? It’s a juicy one.”

Juicy indeed. Nike is perhaps the most high-profile athletic sponsor, but down to the local level companies give money to people and organizations so each can benefit from the other’s reflection. This could be a non-profit whose ties to a local athlete sour; or a spokesperson and public face of a company who gets into trouble, potentially tarnishing the sponsor’s image.

There’s clearly no one answer. Nike stuck with Tiger after most of his sponsors abandoned him in the wake of revelations about multiple extra-marital affairs. Nike dropped Armstrong today after he resigned from Livestrong following his decision to plead nolo contendre to extensively documented doping allegations. But it held out for years, implicitly backing Armstrong despite more than a decade of whispered and then shouted accusations of his cheating.

Nike dropped Michael Vick when a jury convicted him of animal cruelty and the NFL suspended him. Nike re-upped when Vick re-joined the league. Remember Kobe Bryant’s trial for rape? He’s now the center of Nike basketball. Shaun White recently trashed his hotel room in a drunken outburst. Did his endorsements disappear?

A lot depends on your product mix and consumer base. A big beer company is going to drop a high-profile spokesman for one DUI than might an edgy line of clothing sold to 21-30 year-olds. An anti-cancer organization might be more willing to keep using Armstrong due to his survivor status and outstanding work with Livestrong than an organization promoting fair play and youth sports. And so on.

With today’s sophisticated polling, no doubt research plays a major role — and should. When does a sponsored athlete or actor become a negative for a company? How much patience can a company show to keep the revenue flowing from an endorsement before crossing the line of moral weakness and outright greed?

Consider the Rolling Stones, the first rock band to use corporate sponsors of their tour, in 1981. Admitted heroin users; multiple affairs, some public, and divorces; a stabbing death at their Altamont concert in 1969. A critic called them “corporate whores.” Nonetheless, their sponsors have included Sprint, Jovan, Budweiser, RadioShack, and Ameriquest, among others. The bad boys of rock ‘n roll actually benefit from the bad-boy image.

Obviously a case-by-case basis works. Nike stuck with Tiger and while he’s not back atop the golf world he’s just below the pinnacle. Paterno’s case never came to trial in a Nike boardroom because he died, but Nike still sponsors Penn State’s football coach, Bill O’Brien — to the tune of $350,000 a year — and the team.

This is one area of crisis management where planning ahead doesn’t really gain you much. It all has to be carefully weighed. Loyalty vs. nature of the crime or bad behavior. Revenue with vs. revenue without. Message sent maintaining the endorsement vs. message sent dropping it.

One aspect of this is sure: Nike, Rolex, Milk, Apple, Go-Daddy.com, and a thousand other brands that favor and endorse high-profile personalities, are surely going to study their character much more closely before signing up, and the out clause is going to have a hair-trigger.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

But in the social media fervor following last night’s debate with President Obama, people are ripping the akward basis for his self-described need to research and recruit qualified women for his administration. No qualified women in Boston businesses? No one at Harvard or MIT or Boston College or Boston University he knew and could hire? He needed to group them like Taliban commanders in a briefing binder?

Here’s just a small sample of the Twitterage.

God‏@TheTweetOfGod

“And there was much sin in Mittsechuseth; for its regent was corrupt, and profligate; yea, and kept binders full of women.” – Genesis 11:14.

LOLGOP‏@LOLGOP

Nothing says classy employer like, “Bring me my binders full of women!” http://www.nationalmemo.com/mitts-binders-full-of-women-problem/ …

Wine Librarian ‏@winelibrarian

I’m still undecided which was more offensive: binders of women, single moms cause gun violence, or equal pay turning into cooking dinner.

So Romney, who recent polls showed narrowing the “gender gap” among women voters, has a crisis. He served the Commonwealth from 2004-07 — not that long ago. Certainly not long enough ago so that the idea of including smart, capable women needed a task force.

What it really did was show how out of touch Romney and those around him were. His recounting of the events said his staff presented him with mostly men for key jobs. To his credit, he recognized the lack of women and demanded that women be included, which they were, to a higher level than any other state government at the time.

And this is why a crisis is so slippery. What Romney eventually did is laudable. How he did it undermined the benefits. And the resulting perception is that he is an out-of-touch white male who had to work extra hard to “find” women.

And, now, it turns out, Romney exaggerated his involvement in Bindergate. Check it out.

What should Romney do? Clarify his position, immediately. Emphasize his hiring levels. Ask some key women from his Massachusetts cabinet to step up and describe how well they worked with him, whether they had access and whether he listened to their ideas and strategies.

And do it immediately.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

As we’ve discussed and addressed several times over the last year, never before in the history of American corporations could an individual, especially such a lowly one, have the power to initiate a crisis that brings a company to its knees and causes catastrophic effects on its bottom line.

You probably heard about the Mixmaster mess in the wake of Wednesday’s first Romney-Obama debate.

During the presidential waltz, Obama credited his grandmother for helping raise him. She died three days before his election.

Moments later, @KitchenAidUSA, the company’s official Twitter account, sent this:

“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’.”

Ouch.

One person, obviously high enough to have direct access to KitchenAid’s Twitter feed on a Wednesday evening, no longer has that access and likely no longer has a job at KitchenAid. And shouldn’t we as observers and consumers and crisis managers realize that this was indeed the stupid actions of one individual and not hold the entire company responsible?

Well, yes and no. On a logical level, sure, we get it. One person screwed up.

But on a more social media/perception level, where most major brands started playing years ago, we blame KitchenAid. Brands now ask us to “like” them, follow them, endorse every burble and bleep that comes from them and generally wallow in their brand essence like lavender in a spring field. The closer relationship cuts both ways. When the company screws up, in a social media context, we tend to take it more personally than we once did.

That’s essentially the social media contract brands enter in to. Think about it. Out of the toaster oven and into the fire.

What did the company do?

The subsidiary of Whirlpool Corp. jumped on the Tweet, deleted it and posted apologies on Twitter and other social networks. From its Facebook page:

“Hello, everyone. My name is Cynthia Soledad, and I am the head of the KitchenAid brand. I would like to personally apologize to President Barack Obama, his family and everyone on Twitter for the offensive tweet sent earlier. It was carelessly sent in error by a member of our Twitter team who, needless to say, won’t be tweeting for us anymore. That said, I take full responsibility for my team. Thank you for hearing me out.”

Smart, clear, fast. Took responsibility. Apologized. All good. Textbook.

Yet do we assign guilt by association? Do we magnify the actions of one person into an indictment of a corporate culture? Surely some people will. Just as Chick-fil-a endured a crisis this summer about its religious-based corporate culture and gay marriage. Just as the skirmish on Twitter between Oreo and AMC showed. One person, armed and emboldened by social media norms, can stagger a company and diminish a brand built over generations.

We can imagine someone’s Tweet accusing the Maytag repairman — who, after all, is not even real – of some vile failure and watching that brand position turn to quicksand. It’s all so strange.

But that’s the world we live in. A crisis can strike at any time, initiated by anyone associated with your company, and you must act instantaneously to block it. And even then you may still take a hit.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

But as a crisis manager, please watch the La Crosse, WI video first and take it all in. Then together, let’s dissect its power to diffuse a crisis; in this case a personal one.

We teach that 90 percent of successful communication is non-verbal. Livingston speaks calmly, but with passion; she engages the viewer’s eye — perhaps something a professional television anchor should do without thinking, but she succeeds at it — no easy task under personal stress; she pushes to the edge of emotion without either choking up or venturing into the maudlin; she stops short of over-doing it. And she speaks clearly, zinging facts and fair conclusions as fast as she can slot each one from quiver to bow.

Bullseye after bullseye.

There’s no wonder that her response to a bullying email about her weight is this week’s Internet sensation. She speaks for overweight people with a dignity and “facts first” approach that’s inspiring at the least. We never feel sorry for her, because she never seeks pity.

Livingston faced a personal crisis, one that threatened, conceivably, to undermine her professional situation. What if the email triggered station management [not to over generalize, but folks known as highly over-reactive] to demand she go on  on some diet during a ratings month? What if her bosses took one email as reflective of a broader dissatisfaction with her appearance and leaped across the logic chasm to conclude more people [ratings points] might not want to watch her unless she loses weight. It’s TV, after all, and she put her challenges in a professional context and described the pain and worry the email caused her.

But congratulations to her, to those same station managers who backed her, to her family [including her fellow anchor husband who stuck up for her first on Facebook] and all the people supporting her. I hope her smack down of the emailer has the same effect on him as standing hip-deep in an icy ocean.

She was real. She admitted with graceful acceptance that there was a lot of her. She joked about her thick skin, literally and figuratively. You just wanted to high-five her.

And she said it best, delivering a punchline message that stuck: We need to teach our children kindness, not criticism. If you sit home at night ridiculing the “fat anchor,” on TV, what are your kids going to do in school tomorrow? In domestic violence circles [more on that later] it’s called “breaking the cycle.”

Livingston marshalled her facts. This is bullying, she said. It’s unacceptable and it’s epidemic, especially in schools. She turned the tables 180 degrees and used her personal crisis as a show ‘n tell for righteous indignation and teachable moments.

In terms of crisis management, she came prepared. While she held a sheet of paper, she did not refer to it. It was a prop, maybe a support mechanism. Maybe she read her comments from a teleprompter — and if she did, that’s fine — but if she did she disguised it expertly. I’d prefer to think she spoke from the heart and delivered her key messages in forceful tones, cadence and impact without reading them.

I had the honor to be in a local audience Saturday where the brother of a woman murdered in Buffalo this summer by her ex-boyfriend spoke about domestic violence. For what is bullying other than a first step toward domestic violence? He spoke with courage and conviction.

He and his family suffered a far more dramatic loss than an injurious email could inflict, though they are merely different ticks on the same ugly scale. But David Wisniewski and Jennifer Livingston fight the same fight.

Civility is not something to laugh at, and kindness is not weakness. As Jennifer Livingston demonstrated it’s courageous, especially in the face of a crisis.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

The bad days started when a passenger on a 30-hour odyssey flight from Paris to New York wrote about the horrid experience on The New York Times’ op-ed page and it spread across social media by Monday. That won’t help attract business people to American’s trans-Atlantic flights. The writer claimed American’s crews are unfit to fly between Europe and the United States.

Then came reports that rows of seats popped loose in some of the airline’s 757s. All this comes with a backdrop of American’s parent company’s reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a labor dispute with its pilots and efforts by U.S. Airways to gobble it up. Did we mention that from 1979 to 2009 domestic airlines lost $67 billion?

Then, Tuesday, a mid-flight scare attracted notice — another law: a company in crisis draws inordinate attention out of proportion to the significance of the additional event — when a plane’s landing-gear jammed after take-off. The Dallas to St. Louis flight returned for an emergency landing 10 minutes later. Passengers were told to brace for a crash landing at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

But it’s a safe guess consumers are finding alternatives to American to reach their destinations.

As Daniel Gross wrote in the Daily Beast, “American Airlines reputation is in free fall.”

When it comes to crisis management, for obvious reasons, airlines are usually among the most prepared and their teams are the best at what they do. They have to be. I’ve heard an airlines crisis management team present its plan and they have it locked down, A-Z, perfect.

And, true to form, American responded to the loose seats issues promptly and factually, providing transparent confirmation and quick explanations. Not that an explanation along the lines of ‘our contractors and maintenance people failed to install the seat clamps properly,’ instills confidence or induces customers to flock back.

No doubt, as my grandmother used to say, this too shall pass. But the demonstration for all the rest of us is how crucial preparation is. American officials decided quickly and properly not to hide or blame someone else for the seat failures. That’s a sign of calm discussion and pre-planning in advance of a crisis.

The media spotlight will swing away from American, probably pouncing on some misplaced lint on Mitt Romney’s debate suit tonight.

Whether American recovers from the kicks to the ribs while it was already down remains to be seen.

For the rest of the flying public, plan for your crisis now, when there is no crisis.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Journalism.org stepped up on the subject as well [thanks to EMA's Peter Kapcio for the heads up] on how mobile will transform journalism.

If mobile is rearranging our lives, along with the journalism subset, crisis management better gear up as well.

The numbers are huge and growing. Some 22 percent of U.S. adults own a tablet, and twice that number own a smartphone [with obvious overlap.] Fifty percent of adults own either/or. And a whopping 66 percent get news daily [one would suggest hourly] via smartphone or tablet.

What does this mean or what will it mean for managing a crisis? Tons.

Good crisis management is first about speed. Disseminating facts fast is the first step. Mobile devices — especially through texts, email access 24/7, Twitter and Facebook — are all about speed. But you have to recognize the gross accessibility to maximize the net opportunity.

Mobile also means easy, quick access to internal audiences — the often forgotten keys to successful crisis control. Colleges and universities, with their obvious internal constituents’ fluency with mobile devices, are in the forefront of such efforts, though they remain far from fluent. Over the weekend, a freshman at Brockport State died and the college effectively used email, texts and rapid response information flows to students, staff and parents.

What the shift to mobile also means is that crisis managers must emphasize not only speed, but brevity and pointedness. If your whole crisis rebuttal strategy comes down to 140 characters that should have gone out half an hour ago, you’d best come to the point.

This is not to say that newspapers, deep magazine pieces and a 60 Minutes interview should be pulled from your quiver, but those can no longer suffice.

Yet mobile prevalence clearly debases the power of those traditional media the same way seeing a front-page newspaper story this morning that you read about online yesterday afternoon does.

It’s too much too late.

We live in the era of first impressions. We rely, whether we fully realize it, on the first word. That first word once meandered out from the three national networks’ evening newscasts, or on the front page of a national newspaper. Today they’re instantaneous, nearly uncontrollable, and might include a damaging picture or video you had nothing to do with and can’t control.

Tough formula for successful crisis management, but a lot more controllable if you understand it, plan for it and emphasize it.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Be sincere.

Goodell and the NFL owners thought they had a winning argument in labor negotiations with the league’s referees, who the billionaire owners locked out through the first three games of the season. Fans and media hated the idea, because they could see where it would likely lead. And it did, right to Golden Tate’s theft of the football and the Monday Night Football game for Seattle against Green Bay a week ago.

Faster than you can say “replay booth” the NFL and the refs huddled over the talk table and hammered out a new deal in time for the men in stripes’ return to the field Thursday night. The refs certainly got a better deal for salary, pension and duration of the contract than before Tate’s “touchdown.” Now the refs can thank that Golden moment for reinforcing their worth.

In the wake of the returning refs, Goodell did “apologize” to fans. But you could just tell his heart wasn’t in it. If you watch the video, the Tate play was just the last straw, Goodell said, it wasn’t the overriding one. Really? They were “this close” to an agreement after 10 days of intense negotiating. The hue and cry and pitchforks and torches around the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters after the Green Bay-Seattle game never happened.

“I believe we would have reached agreement this week, regardless of Monday night or Sunday night or the past weekend,” Goodell said at his post-game news conference Thursday. Really?

The owners and the commissioner’s office got shown up on national television, replacement refs’ decisions called the game’s integrity into question when the wrong team was awarded victory, and the league had to scramble to settle and get the refs back.

It’s as plain as the laces on a game ball. Goodell apologized to the fans. But his heart’s not in it because the NFL didn’t control the outcome. The Seattle Snatch embarrassed the league.

When it comes to a crisis, an apology can often defuse building anger. But that apology must ooze sincerity and scream credibility. Goodell’s was routine at his news conference, almost off-hand. And then he formalized it with a letter to season’s ticket holders.

Apologizing is better than nothing, but as you can see from ESPN’s reaction [link above] Goodell’s wasn’t very convincing and that risks alienating even more people.

Almost across the league’s 15 games since the settlement, fans cheered the refs’ return. I didn’t see or hear any cheers for the league, the commissioner or the owners.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

But yesterday they did, in social media, and AMC came out as a major winner, because of some very worthwhile pre-thinking about how to manage and engage in social media.

Companies, as my social media guru colleague Chuck Beeler noted, should take note of what happened. For most brands, this is a scary world, resulting in layer after layer of approvals and ladder climbing that in the end prevent social media interaction.

So much of social dialogue is spontaneous that winners are nimble and have authority to work independently in these areas. AMC was beautifully positioned, thanks to Shane Adams, its social media commander. And his tasteful and creative responses helped AMC catapult itself and its brand into the rarefied air of Oreo’s 26 million Facebook friends.

You can read the details in the link above. But what happened is that Oreo Tweeted something fun and slightly provocative, asking its social media followers if they take Oreos into movie theaters. Adams caught that [a fact that shouldn't go unnoticed in the retelling], reflected on his company’s policy of no outside snacks, and within eight minutes and with autonomy to do so, Tweeted an answer gently and with a calling a foul on Oreo.

That’s not a North-South Civil War. It’s not even the Hadfields and the McCoys or Obama v. Romney. But in the social media world we’re all still trying to figure out, it’s a smart move to bolster and call attention to AMC’s brand.

“If there’s anything to learn from my story, it’s this: if you are a brand representative in social spaces, be sure that you understand your brand voice. Fight for an amount of autonomy where it makes sense so you can be agile and respond not just to customer service-related questions, but to the pop culture zeitgeist as well,” Adams concluded in a reflective blog post today.

Ditto that if you’re in a crisis. Neither AMC nor Oreo created a crisis – a major act of smart and laudable management by itself — but Adams utilized and characterized an approach to crisis management in the social era that resonates and teaches.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Johns Hopkins, one of America’s premier medical treatment and research institutions, brought to its knees by one employee’s random — if obnoxious — sports comment.

Have we gone too far yet?

The lesson for today is not that individuals will do stupid and insensitive things, or that fans — the diminutive of fanatics, after all — will rip opponents. It’s that in this era of social media, individuals and institutions cannot hide, and the consequences of that are immense.

The fan disparaged Baltimore Ravens’ receiver Torrey Smith’s performance against New England hours after his brother died in a motorcycle accident. She is apparently a rare bird, a Patriots fan living in Baltimore.

“Hey, Smith, how about you call your bro and tell him all about your wi— ohhhh. Wait. #TooSoon?” wrote Baltimore resident Katie Moody, posting as @katiebrady12, as Smith caught two touchdowns in the Ravens’ 31-30 win over the Patriots [Sunday]. The game and the Tweet came less than 24 hours after Smith’s younger brother Tevin Jones was killed in a motorcycle accident.

The fan’s Tweet was individual and personal. No ties to her employer — Johns Hopkins Medical School — were referenced or apparent. But soon enough the person who apparently sent the insulting tweet was discovered and outed and Hopkins decided it had better distance itself from its employee.

This is a warning to all. First, you’d better have a company social media policy and make sure everyone understands and signs it. And second, communications professionals and crisis managers have to be even better prepared for the oddest, most unpredictable problems conceivable.

Hopkins responded:

“Our deepest sympathies are with Torrey Smith and his family. The social media comment that made light of the Smith family’s loss represented the thoughts of one individual. It does not in any way represent the Johns Hopkins community,” said Dennis O’Shea, spokesman for Johns Hopkins, told the Baltimore Sun.

Having preached proactivity and a willingness to be transparent and sympathetic, if not apologetic, as quickly as possible, it’s hard to find fault with Hopkins’ decision. Stay on the side of the angels.

What’s stunning is that Hopkins was so concerned about one individual’s power to tarnish its nationally ranked reputation that it felt it had to respond, presumably, before anyone called for it.

We live in a Brave New World, indeed.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

As serious as those issues are and will continue to be, they mostly live on the periphery of the playing field. The ‘integrity of the game’ seems intact, or did until the crisis caused by last night’s Green Bay-Seattle game.

You’ve probably seen the replays, but officials filling in for the professional referees prevented from working while a labor dispute with the league festers, blew the game-winning call. Dozens of NFL observers in the media in recent weeks predicted this exact scenario. The league continues to play hardball with its top-tier referees, meaning replacement refs, most of whom worked lower-level college games, are doing the best they can.

But in last night’s Monday Night Football game, the one weekly game a national audience watches, they blew the call and Seattle stole a game Green Bay should have in the win column.

This picture tells the story. Two refs standing over the Seattle receiver and Green Bay defender wrestling for the ball issue opposite signals — one proclaiming a touchdown, the other, left, signalling time out, interception or incompletion, game over. The replay seems to show the Green Bay player coming down with the ball, only to have it stolen by the Seattle receiver after they were on the ground and the play should have ended.

No doubt these refs are doing the best they can. Calls need to be made instantly during fast-moving and confusing plays executed by enormous men trying to confuse people on the field. And no one can say that the professional refs would make the correct call either. But the odds are they would have, and thus there’s the crisis for the NFL. Fans are furious.

Social media is aflame this morning with fans pledging not to watch another game this season called by the replacement refs –  not likely, but still indicative of the fix in which NFL leaders find themselves. The NFL apparently wants to keep a lid on the cost of paying the elite refs, even though they would still remain part-time employees. The NFL could likely recoup the cost of a new refs’ contract by charging a dollar more for every jersey sold.

In a league with revenues in the billions, that seems a little miserly. And now the replacements cost a perennial playoff team a win, one that could be the difference between making the playoffs or not, or having home-field ['the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field'] advantage for the playoffs.

Would any other league or sport reach down into the lower college ranks for referees to work the highest levels of their sport? Can you see a FIFA World Cup game called by a college ref? Or would Wimbledon put college linespeople in charge? Would Major League Baseball put in a call to Williamsport for Little League umpires to jump into the World Series?

The pressures on professional, experienced refs is immense and they’re more used to dealing with it. As competent as these college refs are — and let’s acknowledge they have gotten the vast majority of the calls correct — they just aren’t trained to the same level as the top-flight refs, where speed, positioning, anticipation and viewpoint are crucial.

Just as NFL mandarins would laugh if someone proposed sending Alabama, Oregon or Florida State against an NFL team, the game’s guardians must realize that the college refs don’t belong on the professional field.

The NFL needs to step in and settle this labor dispute and end its crisis. The league should also acknowledge the failings publicly and apologize to fans for last night’s fiasco.

A bad call here and there in the course of a game is regrettable. Getting the call wrong, and failing to correct it after a booth review, on the last play of the game so the wrong team is rewarded with the win dissolves the game’s integrity and the NFL’s reputation withers.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

That figurative box, designed by EMA reputation manager extraordinaire Peter Kapcio, has a lid engraved with the words, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

For those who grilled burgers, dogs and salmon all summer, here’s the synopsis, from the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog:

A new controversy has landed Chick-fil-A once again in the PR fryer. A Chicago politician’s statement the fast food chain was no longer giving to groups that oppose same-sex marriage has reportedly angered the Christian conservatives who supported Chick-fil-A this summer when its president reaffirmed his opposition to gay marriage. Civil rights groups hailed last week’s change of heart, even though the company never actually confirmed it — instead, it released two public statements, neither of which made Chick-fil-A’s position any clearer.

The events suggest the franchise may be trying to steer clear of hot-button social issues while it expands in less-conservative regions of the country. In its statement, the company said its corporate giving had for many months been mischaracterized, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reports.

“Part of our corporate commitment is to be responsible stewards of all that God has entrusted to us,” the statement said. “Chick-fil-A’s giving heritage is focused on programs that educate youth, strengthen families and enrich marriages, and support communities. We will continue to focus our giving in those areas. Our intent is not to support political or social agendas.” The three-page statement did not say whether that included gay marriages.

The company’s response, its second in as many days, was posted on its website after Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno announced the alleged policy change. Moreno said the change followed extended negotiations, and as a result, he would no longer try to block a Chick-fil-A restaurant from opening in his district.

Social networking sites lit up following Moreno’s remarks, with many people saying Chick-fil-A had caved to pressure from gay rights organizations.

So much of crisis management is about perception. Chick-fil-A’s position on gay marriage surely angered many, but it likely energized conservatives who may feel the trend lines nationally bending against their position. Now, after its flop, the company may win back some folks who support gay marriage.

But company executives stepped in a cow pie of hypocrisy that could alienate liberals and conservatives as well and net the company double losses.

For most, the initial crisis probably waned sufficiently so the company could have just kept going despite it. A lot of potential customers likely figured they don’t love Chick-fil-A’s philosophy, but recognize its right in a free society to hold it. After that, the purchase decision probably came down to whether a customer wanted chicken or not.

Now the company succeeded only in multiplying the goo on its shoes by trying to play the middle ground and offending everyone with its hypocrisy.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Murphy’s Law of crisis management states: You will have a crisis. It will happen when you least expect it. It will hit where and when you are most vulnerable. You will only survive if you prepared.

A crisis is defined as a serious threat to your or your company’s reputation and is measured by its duration, not its initial drama and intensity. Crises begin when you cannot run business as usual and fades when you return to business as usual.

Now is the time to plan, to prepare your team for the crisis over the horizon. The investment you’d make is relatively small and the ROI is huge. Reputation damage from a crisis can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair, not to mention lost sales, worried employees shifting careers to competitors and increased regulatory and board scrutiny. Crisis training is usually below six figures.

Find a crisis management agency with the chops for your size and category of business, the real-world experience to guide you and then listen to what its experts say.

Now, when it’s calm, is the time to decide who will speak for the company in crisis. Now, when it’s calm, is the time to define and assemble the key members of a crisis management team. Now, when it’s calm, is the time to determine who might have to travel or what communications methods are best. Now, when it’s calm, is when you should create a “black site” web page that during a crisis you can drop over your home page to communicate strictly about that crisis. Now, when it’s calm, is when you define how to communicate internally during a crisis as well as externally with media.

Don’t waste your time, when it’s calm, trying to define your crisis or determine in advance what smelly swamp it might emerge from to shake your business to its core. The possibilities are endless. Crises range from CEO malfeasance and the death of a key person, to product liability, natural disasters, power outages and social media wildfires that may or may not be true.

Do you think the Mitt Romney campaign predicted that a May video of a private fundraiser in Florida would hijack the national agenda for 10 days? No, but it reacted quickly and gets good marks for putting Romney out in public with strong messaging. He may still lose the race because of it, but his campaign team reacted quickly and decisively to detour the stampede.

The old Boy Scouts motto, “be prepared,” rings truest here. Act. Now.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Forget, for our purposes, whether this is the truth or a bizarre view only grasped from the back of limousines.

Delete from our considerations whether he was sincere, speaking off the cuff or just not thinking clearly.

But one aspect of this is indisputable to crisis managers and their charges. It sends a crystal clear message that anyone who speaks to a group of people or media must heed: He said it in private and never thought he’d have to defend it in public.

But he did.

We’ve long known that smart phones, small audio- and video-recording devices and various other modern life denizens — voicemail, texted pictures, emails, tracking bugs, GPS – abound. But we’ve probably never had a more dramatic example of how a secretly or discreetly taken video could stand a presidential election on its ear.

No greater authority than former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer said when he was attorney general, before his downfall for arranging by phone trysts with expensive hookers:

“Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email.”

And Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett offered this sage and blunt proviso:

“When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. You’ll probably do things a little differently if you keep that in mind.”

We can now of course add locations to where one might see one’s comments, including the internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and thousands of other web sites for news, gossip and comment. This is what Romney faced yesterday and today.

To the Republican nominee’s credit, he held a news conference Monday evening, right, when the first glimpses of the video broke, in an effort to explain and defuse the issues he raised. Good strategy. And he followed that up strongly Tuesday with comments to the effect that he had nothing to apologize for and was sticking to his view.

But for many, the damage was done. According to Huffington Post, he said:

Romney sent a ripple down-ballot when a secretly recorded video surfaced Monday of his remarks at a fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. on May 17.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney says in the video. “There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

“My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney added. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Even conservative commentators like David Brooks of the New York Times and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard slammed Romney. Brooks’ column was headlined Thurston Howell Romney; and Kristol called the comments “arrogant and stupid.”

Again, win or lose, people from all walks of life must assume — if they didn’t already — that what they say is going to be recorded. And if you don’t want to see it all over the media, or even on your company’s intranet or your friends’ Facebook page, be careful what you say.

We all say things in private and to friends that would embarrass us if those comments went public, or were repeated to the people we disparaged or gossiped about. While this may be part of our humanity and the foibles that come with it, anyone who speaks frankly and openly risks having those remarks used against them.

For the Rush Limbaughs of the world, that might not be a big deal. For someone who needs 51% of the vote in enough states to provide 271 electoral votes, that’s a huge deal.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

We won’t say which office or client because we like the work, and because this is truly an issue that could arise with any client.

This came the same day that I spent some workout time with a CEO of a prominent Buffalo company. He’s relatively new to the position, having moved up from COO about six months ago. I asked him what had changed. He thought for a moment and said that he’s the same person he was as COO, and he feels his decision-making process and leadership qualities are similar. But now, he said, everyone defers to him and makes it seem like he’s right all the time.

I relay that little story because it bears on the problem at hand. The drive to the top requires many attributes, among them ego. If you can’t envision yourself leading people in to battle — be it war, business, sports, government or innovation — you probably won’t make the sacrifices to get there.

It’s therefore understandable that some CEOs would not want to listen to coaching on how they speak, deal with the media, present to stockholders and analysts and/or come across to their immediate team and to company employees.

This view of the world can be particularly sensitive in the midst of a crisis. We generally suggest that if a company is in crisis, the CEO should be out front if at all possible. If that’s the plan, the CEO better be trained and prepared not only in technique, but facts. No one can fake it in a crisis. Emotions are raw, media is camped at the front door, big stacks of chips sit in piles waiting to be won or lost.

Back to the original question. How do you coach a CEO who thinks he or she is uncoachable? [Unmentioned here is that everyone is coachable, and anyone with even a whiff of self-awareness has to realize experts can help make them better.] But let’s say a CEO thinks he nails it every time. How to change that?

1. Let the out-of-town media/crisis consultant tell the CEO he/she needs more training and give specific reasons and examples why.

2. Show video clips of prime-time players who sucked shoe leather in a particular interview and warn that this could happen to you.

3. Offer a practice session during which likely media questions are asked, and hope the shock of some of the questions and the CEO’s unpreparedness to handle them effectively demonstrate the need for better preparation and training.

4. Media or crisis train the C-level team and keep your fingers crossed that the CEO will see that there are others on his team handling the same questions with greater effect and aplomb than she did. Build on that to teach the CEO and maybe have her defer to the more qualified EVP or communications director.

It’s a prickly problem. Sometimes a so-so CEO is better than an expert communications person simply because of the authority with which the CEO speaks.

I doubt he’s ever been media trained, but watch a video of Warren Buffett some time. He’s the ideal CEO because he speaks to the media and analysts and U.S. presidents as he does if you bumped into him on the street. I’ve had the pleasure half a dozen times one-on-one or in small and large groups to hear him disassemble life’s absurdities. His discourses are fact-based, unvarnished by attempts to cover blemishes and delivered with a light-hearted or humorous tone that cloaks the dagger he stuck in someone’s ribs.

If steps #1 through #4 fail, show your reluctant CEO a Buffett interview and tell him or her you want to train them up to Buffett standards.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.

Now a solidly reported retrospective look at the whole poorly handled mess in The New York Times Magazine by Andrew Rice [thanks to EMA colleague David Grome for the link] clearly demonstrates that the major players either didn’t care about public perception or totally dismissed it.

More than a few large egos played roles for sure. And smart people populated both sides of the debacle. But no one apparently took time to listen to public affairs and crisis managers in advance about the damage that would be done.

Teresa Sullivan became UVA’s president two years earlier, moving over from a top post at Michigan. Defending herself as a incrementalist, she ran afoul of powerful trustees who wanted to see a faster change rate and did not take into account how academia works, even at a public university.

For a school that prides itself as an elite university, public or private, this was the first of many mistakes.

The board forced Sullivan’s resignation, initiated a search for a new president and then in the face of student and faculty fury, reversed itself and re-hired Sullivan.

The whole mess smacked of rushing to judgment, egotistical overlords — especially from some Wall Street aeries — who thought their word was law, and the school’s complete failure to predict accurately how key constituencies would perceive the decision.

From what I can see from Rice’s reconstruction, little or no attention was paid to internal stakeholders — students, staff, professors, state leaders — in advance of forcing Sullivan’s resignation. This is a major no-no in crisis management. If you lose your core constituencies, if in fact your ‘friends’ aren’t with you, you’ll never win a public debate.

Much of the credit/blame for the move to remove Sullivan went to Helen Dragas, scion of a major Virginia Beach real estate family and head of the UVA trustees. Putting aside the correctness or righteousness of her initiative — something Dragas herself never seemed able to do — the point about crisis management is not really whether an individual or institution is right or wrong.

It’s how will the move be perceived? Perception is fluid. You must consider it, respect it, influence it factually and transparently, or it will devour you.

Now UVA will spend years reconstructing its reputation, pay millions in hidden and resulting costs from this fiasco and still move at the same pace it always would have in achieving higher-education reform.

But maybe someone will remember perception next time.

The content of this blog is about crisis management and mismanagement in a digital age. It originates with Steve Bell, who spent 30 years as a journalist for the Associated Press and in four top editor positions at The Buffalo News. He is now Partner/Director of Public Affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising, integrated marketing and public relations agencies, with seven offices in the Northeast and Southeast. Learn more about EMA at http://www.mower.com. Steve’s blog is based on his own opinions and does not represent the views or positions of Eric Mower + Associates.