Our Blog: The Podium

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

*Originally appeared on OpenView Labs, the strategic and operational consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, a global Venture Capital fund that invests in expansion stage technology companies.

“In preparing for battle, I have always
found that plans are useless, but
planning is indispensable.”

- Dwight David Eisenhower

President Eisenhower could well have uttered the same quote about Crisis Communications. Developing a crisis communications plan is more about planning to mobilize for a potential crisis, than it is about writing step-by-step actions for specific pre-ordained scenarios. And this is what causes so many management teams to be confused about exactly what the components of a good crisis communication plan actually are. Here are five “Crisis Plan Essentials” to consider in order to get your team ready to communicate in a crisis.

1) Identify the Crisis Team

It’s important that the right people from the appropriate functional areas of the organization are ready to respond at a moment’s notice to a crisis and understand their responsibilities as members of the team. Along with the CEO and CFO, the team should include key people from public relations, corporate communications, investor relations, human resources, public affairs, sales and marketing. Make sure that at least two members of the crisis team have been media trained. A major crisis is no time to get your feet wet in media relations.

A Halloween Lesson with Apologies to Charles M. Schulz

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

Year in and year out, Linus sits in the neighborhood pumpkin patch trying to impress Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally with a personal introduction to The Great Pumpkin. She forgoes trick or treating to wait for the Great Pumpkin as he “flies through the air and brings toys to all the children of the world.” But every year, The Great Pumpkin disappoints, and as Linus puts it, there’s “nothing compared to the fury of a woman who has been cheated out of tricks or treats.” Now there’s a holiday icon in desperate need of reputation management. Here are three tips to reestablishing a positive personal brand whether you are a fictional cartoon character, disgraced athlete or corporate executive.

1) Determine Your Desired Brand Identity

Before you begin the reputation rebuilding process, decide what you want the essence of your new personal brand to be. Philanthropist? Industry expert? Respected business Leader? After you’ve determined your desired personal brand, develop a strategy to take action and then communicate to your key audiences. For example, in the years after Jimmy Carter’s failed presidential re-election bid, he re-branded himself as a humanitarian very successfully through his work with Habitat for Humanity. As for The Great Pumpkin, I’d recommend taking the same approach as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and finally make good on his toy delivering promise.

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

I recently spoke at the NIRI Fundamentals of IR Seminar on “Media and Communications,” and the part of the presentation that generated the most discussion was on how to conduct “media training” for CEOs, CFOs and other corporate spokespeople. Of course, the most difficult part of media training can sometimes be convincing the executive that they need help. But once you clear that high hurdle, there are three basic steps to help prepare senior management for a successful interview.

1) Establish key messages. Without significant interview experience or preparation, your CEO is likely to a) offer rambling responses to questions, b) divulge too much information, and/or c) miss an opportunity to convey the messages you want to get across to customers, investors, employees or other important stakeholder audiences. Prior to the interview, create three to five key messages and supporting proof points that you want to make sure appear in the story. When you are developing key messages, think about the audience for the particular interview and the points that you want to convey to that specific stakeholder group. Look at it this way: if you were writing the article for the reporter, what messages would you include? Those are the messages that management should use in the answers to the reporter’s questions whenever possible. Politicians often do this very well. For example, earlier this year British Labour leader Ed Miliband famously repeated his position on strikes taking place in the UK in several successive questions during a BBC interview.

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

The firing of Red Sox manager Terry Francona offers a few valuable lessons in crisis communications, especially those relating to the unexpected departure of an executive. For those of you outside of Red Sox Nation, let me offer a little background: the only living manager of Boston’s professional baseball team to win a world series (twice!) is now unemployed after missing the playoffs following a disastrous September collapse. To be technical, Francona wasn’t fired; the team declined to pick up the option on his 2012 contract. While the debate over letting Francona go is an ideal subject for a sports-focused blog, the way the decision was communicated offers two valuable lessons to anyone in crisis communications.

1) Take a Deep Breath: When a decision is made suddenly to release a senior executive, care should be taken to think through the communications timeline. The Red Sox put Francona in front of the microphones the day after the final game of the season for no reason other than to discuss the final calamitous loss. If ownership had even an inkling that the team would be sending Francona on his way, why put him in front of reporters to awkwardly answer questions about his future? To make matters worse, the very next day Francona held a press conference to announce his departure, which was then followed by another media gathering by the Sox brass to discuss the action. Why two additional separate press conferences? The Sox would have been better served to have one well rehearsed press conference (including Francona and the Sox higher-ups) to address the disastrous end of the season and announce that the time was right for a managerial change. In any crisis situation, take a deep breath, think a few steps ahead and plan all messaging and timing of external communications accordingly.

“Lie to Me.” The name of the prime time drama on Fox is a challenge. “Go ahead. I dare you to try to pull one over on me.” The show’s protagonist, played by Tim Roth, is an expert in detecting deception and is hired by corporations, government agencies and private citizens to analyze body language.

We’ve all heard about how valuable body language is in interpersonal communication, but is Lie to Me more fiction than fact? Not even close. The investment community is now using real-life consulting firms like the one in Lie to Me to analyze the truthfulness of corporate executives.

In his 2010 book Broker, Trader, Lawyer Spy, POLITICO White House Reporter Eamon Javers recounts stories of former CIA agents working with major hedge funds and bulge bracket investment banks. Boston-based Business Intelligence Advisors (BIA) is one firm mentioned by name in Javers’ book. BIA, which consults solely for the financial services industry, including institutional investors and venture capitalists, is comprised of former intelligence community agents.

Yesterday afternoon I presented a workshop entitled, “Giving Life to Your Investor Relations Presentation. . . and Your CEO” at the National Investor Relations Institute’s Annual Conference. We’ve all seen bad investor relations presentations. But what makes them bad? The purpose of an investor presentation is to convey the company’s “story,” which is essentially its investment thesis. If the presentation does not succeed in articulating the investment thesis in a memorable way, it has failed.

So how do we ensure good presentation slides -- and success? Here are a few tips:

For months leading up to your S-1 filing, you probably have been singularly focused on creating that massive tome. You have spent significantly more time with your lawyers and auditors than with your own family -- and you cannot even begin to imagine a time when you won’t be spending every waking moment with your bankers. So now that you’ve left the long nights (and great food spreads) at the financial printers behind, it’s time to focus on investor relations. You need to hit the ground running with IR as soon as your company prices its offering, so here are 10 “to do” items before then:

1) Develop your IR website. The IR website must be ready to go live on the day of your IPO pricing. It is most cost-effective to hire an IR website hosting provider, which will develop your site and aggregate content such as news releases, SEC filings and stock data. You also need to prepare additional content for your site such as “Frequently asked Questions,” management biographies and fact sheets. Your website is arguably the most important vehicle you will have to communicate with investors, so make sure it has everything that investors need and expect.

In politics, there is an age-old debate as to whether elected leaders should vote according to the wishes of their constituents, or vote their conscience as the people’s representative. We have seen politicians criticized for using polling too extensively to guide policy (see Bill Clinton) -- and not enough (see Barack Obama). When I worked as a political consultant prior to entering the IR profession, we used polling to gauge the electorate’s opinions on a certain issue – not to change policy, but to determine what audiences need focused communication and how messaging should be used to address misperceptions. And this is exactly how IR practitioners should use our own version of polling – the investor perception audit.

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed about investor perception audits by Broc Romanek of TheCorporateCounsel.net. The podcast is available here. An investor perception audit is a survey of a company’s capital markets audiences – past, current and potential institutional investors as well as sell-side analysts. Typically conducted by a third-party via telephone to protect anonymity, the perception audit usually includes questions about the company’s strategy, prospects for growth, communications, management strengths, and catalysts for investors to purchase stock, among others. Think you already know what they perceive about your company? Certainly, investors and analysts are usually not shy about voicing their opinions. However, many companies are often surprised at the feedback they receive when investors are not speaking face-to-face with management.

Recently, Sharon Merrill Associates President Maureen Wolff and I spoke on “Navigating the New Proxy Access Rules” at the NYSE Euronext’s “Building Blocks for Successful Investor Relations” conference. The event attracted great attendance from CEOs, CFOs and investor relations officers – despite some obstacles getting downtown with the Yankees World Series victory parade taking place at the same time about a block away. Some things you just can’t plan for. As a life-long Red Sox devotee, it was rather painful to hear the million-plus Yankees fans lined up on Broadway cheering for A-Rod and company. Wait ‘till next year I guess.

When investor relations practitioners get together these days, we tend to discuss the same general questions, gripes and concerns: When will we see an upturn in the economy? Why can’t we have a better understanding of who owns our stock? Will the Yankees buy another championship next year? What effect are dark pools having? But one topic that should be getting significantly more attention in the IR world is the inevitable change in shareholder proxy access. If two proxy-related proposals from the SEC are implemented, the changes in proxy access will have a profound effect on the boardroom and board/shareholder communication. It’s time to get ready.

In our media relations work at Sharon Merrill Associates, we spend considerable time training senior management on dealing with the media. To be sure, not all interviews are investigative reporters looking to break the next big scandal. Of course, reporters also are not being paid to write a glowing advertorial about your company either.

Treat every media interview request as an opportunity, not as a threat, and you will see increased positive coverage of your company. Not all of your coverage will be 100% positive, and there may be occasions where the facts in a story are not completely precise. But increased media coverage overall can have tremendous benefits to your sales, marketing, recruiting, investor relations and other critical corporate functions.

Still nervous about speaking to that reporter who called you out of the blue? Here is a checklist to make sure that you make the most of your media opportunities: