Sarah Palin's words hurt her again

One of last week's biggest political pile-ons was the controversy over Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" in defending herself against accusations that her inflammatory political rhetoric (and gun-sight imagery) had contributed to the shootings in Tucson.

Here's the statement she posted online, linked to her Facebook page (the controversial language in question comes at around the 3:26 mark).


Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

My first reaction to this story was to be surprised that we're still surprised by anything Sarah Palin says -- or any word or expression she uses or misuses.

But an opportunity to attack a political opponent is an opportunity to attack a political opponent, so the game was on in the media.

Did she mean to be inflammatory?

Personally, I doubt it. My bet is that she was aware of the expression, but wasn't aware of its origin.

Had she known, Palin (or, at least, her advisors) would have to recognize that using such inflammatory language would do nothing to help endear her to the segment of the American public not already on her side.

In politics, as in public opinion, it's important to keep your eye on the "undecideds" -- that's where you should be spending most of your effort. Your supporters already support you, and people who've decided against you take a lot more persuading to bring on-side; so your most efficient use of resources is to focus on the undecideds.

To knowingly use divisive and hate-fuelled language at a time of crisis does not reflect positive leadership qualities; people who may be shopping for a new leader don't tend to like that. To do so could cost you at the voting booth.

What should she have said once the criticism erupted?

Once the statement was made and the expression on the record, Palin had a difficult choice to make.

Admitting she didn't understand the historical significance of the expression could make her look ignorant (not ideal, for a would-be leader of the free world).

Standing by her statement could give her opponents more material to use against her.

Palin's choice, until this evening, has been option number three: return to silence... which leaves the rest of the world to debate whether she's ignorant, or insensitive, or intentionally divisive.

Tonight, ABC News is reporting, Palin will make her first media appearance since her controversial Facebook statement, on Fox News' Hannity. I'll be interested to see what route she takes; while I think addressing it is the right move, I think she may be a bit late.

If you don't speak, the media will fill in the blanks for you.

If you search Google News for "Sarah Palin blood libel" you'll get thousands of articles.

Thousands, over the space of a week.

While the vast majority of the coverage I've seen on this topic has been critical of Palin's choice of words (even from conservative commenters like former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer), articles like the one by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in The Wall Street Journal last week came to her defence, arguing her use of the expression is appropriate.

But whether or not the usage is appropriate, a good understanding of the public's sensitivities (and even the mainstream media's prejudices, for that matter) would have told a good PR advisor that using an expression like "blood libel" would hurt her more than it would help.

The ABC News-Washington Post poll results released today, suggesting that 70% of Americans disapproved of Palin's response to the Tucson shootings, seem to bear that out.

UPDATE Monday night

Here's audio of Palin on Hannity tonight. The segment on the "blood libel" issue begins around the 15:55 mark.



To my ears, this isn't a statement aimed at the undecideds.

When it comes to public relations, it doesn't matter whether you meant to offend anyone. If people were offended by something you said, you want to take a hard look at your language, and see how you might avoid doing that next time.

It doesn't really matter how many others may have used similar language before you; this is between you (or your organization) and your audiences.

Think about how this works in our personal lives: if someone says something that offends you, how much does it matter whether they meant to offend? Maybe a bit, but not much. If you're going to feel better about your relationship with that person, you probably want your perspective acknowledged, and the person to regret having offended you. What likely won't help is if you're told you are unreasonable to have been offended.

Sarah Palin is so certain that the "lame-stream media" is out to get her that she's betting few people were actually offended by her language. That's a bet I wouldn't be willing to take.

The time to respond to a gaffe is immediately, and the way to respond to a gaffe is with an apology.

If you don't think you have anything to apologize for, you shouldn't do so insincerely; but if that's the case, and you're concerned about public opinion at all, don't re-raise the issue after the initial controversy has passed.

Doing so may just as likely offend -- and alienate -- even more people.

Maybe Twitter's "favorite" function needs a new name

Sarah Palin has been taking some heat this week for an offensive tweet which she appeared to have marked as a "favorite" on her Twitter account.

On Twitter, you have the option to mark a tweet in your timeline as a "favorite," making it easier to find again later -- much like a bookmark would for a website.

Here's Twitter's explanation, from its online "Help Center":

"Favoriting" a tweet can be really handy; I regularly mark tweets I want to come back to later on, usually because they contain information or links I think would be interesting for my students.

It does not, however, mean these tweets actually are my favourites. I might just as easily mark a tweet I disagree with as one I agree with, if I think it illustrates something interesting.

So for me, tweets marked as "favorites" are not to be interpreted as the ones I like most, or the ones I most agree with. Rather, they're tweets I happened to see when it was inconvenient to follow links or to note them in my book for later, and to which I want to return later. That's it -- there's nothing more to be read into it.

In Sarah Palin's case, she is reported to have explained, it wasn't even that: she wasn't aware of the "favorite" function at all, and the tweet was marked by accident. In an email to ABC News' Jake Tapper, which is quoted in The Washington Post's Politics and Policy blog, she said:

"Jake [Tapper], I've never purposefully 'favorited' any Tweet. I had to go back to my BlackBerry to even see if such a function was possible. I was traveling to Alaska that day...it was an obvious accidental 'favoriting,' but no one can mistake that Ann Coulter was obviously being tongue in cheek with that Tweet..."

This explanation sounds reasonable to me - especially since the "favorite" button only appears when you roll over the tweet with your cursor. Even Rachel Maddow, who I don't think anyone would consider a blind supporter of Sarah Palin, agrees.

While Maddow is talking to media who are jumping all over Palin for this, I do think there's a disconnect between what Twitter planned for "favorites" to be and what they have actually become. Tweets we want to save for later might or might not be tweets we particularly like or agree with.

My advice?

Keep the function, but re-name it "bookmark." Same convenience, less opportunity for mis-reading intentions!

You can't hide from your own typos in cyberspace...

...so proofread well.

Note: this is a post about typos and Twitter, not what should or shouldn't be built at Ground Zero.

Mediaite ran a piece yesterday about a message Sarah Palin had tweeted earlier in the day.

The story says it appears someone inside Palin's camp recognized the vocabulary error (i.e., that "refudiate" is not a word), and the tweet was quickly replaced on Palin's Twitter account with the following:

While deleting the original tweet was the best thing Palin could have done under the circumstances, the quick action didn't stop many, many people (like comedian Andy Borowitz, below) from having fun with the error.

If it was deleted quickly, how did so many people see it?

Programs like TweetDeck download tweets in close to real-time, meaning that once you've tweeted something, it's likely been downloaded somewhere.

Once it's been downloaded, the TweetDeck user can save the tweet indefinitely -- and can post a screenshot that will last long after you've deleted the original from your Twitter account.

I've experienced this myself: I recently published a tweet containing an error, recognized it immediately, logged in to twitter.com, deleted it and published a new one... but not before one of my followers had re-tweeted the original to all of her followers.

Luckily for me, there are fewer people in the business of catching and ridiculing my mistakes than Sarah Palin's.

Proofread, proofread, proofread.

The moral of this story, of course, is to make sure your message is correct before you hit "send."

To do that effectively, you need to be able to spot your own error as such; so I'm not sure that even extra-careful proofreading would have helped Sarah Palin this time around (see video below, about 1 minute in).

But still.

Proofread. It's good for you.

And if you have a tendency to invent words, have a friend proofread for you, too.

Sarah Palin: going rogue again?

On his CNN Politics blog this week, Peter Hamby reported that Sarah Palin has decided not to immediately replace her media spokesperson, Meg Stapleton, who has resigned effective the end of this month to spend more time with her family.

As a professional communicator who left a challenging (OK, not quite that challenging!) corporate position so as to be able to spend more time with my own young daughter, I completely understand – and admire – Stapleton’s move.

What I don’t understand is the second part of this story: that Palin has decided not to immediately replace her media spokesperson, since, in the words of a reported “source close to the Palin family” mentioned in Hamby’s post, “the family, which takes pride in their Alaskan identity, are comfortable speaking in their own voice.”

Bad move.

The, let’s call it, “difficult” relationship between Sarah Palin and the mainstream media is no secret. She clearly feels the media are biased against her, and the media clearly enjoy exploiting every contradiction and foible she exposes.

But can she just decide to “go rogue” and refuse to play ball?

Glynnis MacNicol weighs in on mediaite.com:

"Crafty or crazy? Palin is, obviously, one of the most talked-about women/politicians on the planet, and a lot of that talk is not nice. I suspect “responding in her own voice” actually means one of two things. Palin has decided that answering questions from actual reporters is very last decade and is either going to let a combination of her Fox analyst appearances and the take-no-prisoners Fox News PR team speak for her (one can dream). Or! She has concluded, and not without good reason, that her one-way Facebook mouthpiece is all the public access she requires. It’s worked so far. Why bother with the fourth estate at all when all you need is a catchy Facebook note to derail an entire health care bill."

Well, I think that might be an option if you only ever need to reach people who are already listening to you. Palin’s following on Fox News and Facebook is inarguably considerable – but if her agenda includes any kind of debate at the national level, she’ll soon find that you can’t make much progress increasing the size of your following when you only ever talk to the people already listening to you.

Reality check interlude: we have to remember that Palin’s camp hasn’t said she doesn’t intend to talk to the media at all – just that she’s not “immediately” replacing the spokesperson who would facilitate making that happen.

If Palin does indeed want to persuade Americans to see the world as she sees it, and to support her as she works to make changes at the highest levels of the government, she will need to gain some support from people who don’t support her now. Those people may not follow Fox News, and are unlikely following her on Facebook, unless they do for entertainment value.

Social media has indeed been the catalyst for an evolution in public relations, as it allows organizations (and political figures) to talk directly to their audiences better than ever before. But the beauty and the challenge of social media is that it requires you to have access to your audiences before you can talk to them. They have to self-identify as being interested in hearing from you, to a degree at least, or their friends have to.

If you want to reach people who don’t already agree with you, or who aren’t aware of you, you need to go where they are to reach them.

And, like it or not, Ms. Palin, many of them are consuming mainstream media.

Timing is everything

So I unplug for a sunny long weekend with my family and come back to learn that... Sarah Palin has resigned as Governor of Alaska?

Interesting, in many, many ways. In case you missed it, here is her rather lengthy and rambling speech.



There’s lots to be said about Palin’s approach and messaging in this speech, and about her overarching political strategy in general – but I’ll leave that to the pundits. What interests me here is her timing.

Governor Palin made this announcement in a “hastily-called news conference on Friday” according to a Canadian Press story outlining some of the speculation around the reasons for her resignation: is she just tired of being a media scapegoat? Is there some further ethics scandal about to break? Is she gearing up for a run for President in 2012?

Or, as she puts it, is she just planning to do more for Alaska from outside government – whatever that means?

In PR, if you want your announcement to be seen by the largest possible percentage of your audience, and if you have any control over the timing, you choose your announcement time based on:

1) When the most media are likely to be able to cover it (i.e. not really early in the morning, or too late in the day, or on holidays or weekends, when newsrooms are on skeleton staff)

2) When your audience is most likely to be watching/reading the news (i.e. weekdays more than weekends... and not on holiday long weekends)

You’ll notice that not a whole lot of substantive announcements come out the week of Christmas – people are spending time with their families, and are far less likely to be reading the paper or watching the news than they would be on, say, a Wednesday in mid-January.

So why did Sarah Palin choose to “hastily” call a news conference on the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend to make her big announcement? Some possibilities:

• She was expecting a lot of conjecture about potential new ethics investigations and unflattering reviews of her track record in Alaska, particularly in the time since her brief run for the Vice-Presidency in 2008 – and wanted all that chatter to happen when most Americans were outside in the sunshine, eating potato salad and enjoying fireworks with their families; or

• There really is something coming down the pike (and I’m not necessarily suggesting wrongdoing – it could be something personal, or family-related, or health-related) which she’d rather not deal with as Governor; or

• She didn’t give the timing any thought; or

• Some other rationale that she and her advisors (and maybe observers more sophisticated than I) understand.

From where I stand, this looks like an announcement intended to be made when as few Americans as possible would be listening – and, I have to add, that might indeed have been the smartest PR strategy. But then again, if there’s anyone on the U.S. national stage whose PR decisions have consistently surprised me, it’s been Sarah Palin.

I’ll be interested to keep watching, despite myself.


On a related note, my advice to Letterman for tomorrow night’s show: just say “Sarah Palin” and wait for your audience to roar.

UPDATE - Monday, July 6:

On Anderson Cooper 360 tonight, I heard a Palin supporter explain that she'd made her announcement on the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend as her way to "declare her independence from politics as usual." Amazingly, I don't think he was kidding.