Donald #Trump's Disastrous Announcement Speech

Donald Trump's announcement speech stands as a perfect example of why using a professional speech writer is vital to making a candidate's views coherent to voters and giving an elevated, Statesmanlike tone to a campaign, especially on the Federal level.

While managing and advising campaigns, I've found that wealthy candidates (and particularly, self-funding candidates like Trump) believe they have a "right" to simply spew forth whatever is contained in their brain at the moment. Trump's announcement speech demonstrates why this approach is horribly, disastrously wrong.

The fact that he apparently had a beautifully written, 20-minute prepared speech that he chucked at the last minute tells me he doesn't take professional advice, which speaks volumes about his character and his attitude towards taking advice from others.

How does he expect to govern if he doesn't take advice? Well, he actually tells us: He's going to bully China, bully Putin, bully Mexico, bully the CEO of Ford.

Not that we shouldn't stand up to them all, and the sad thing is that he isn't RIGHT when he says that 'free trade' deals have been detrimental to our economy, but he must bring Congress and the American people along with him. And he does that that with the proper tone and the correct political rhetoric that inspires us to come along with him.

Listening to a blowhard at a coffee shop or a bar blow off steam with irrational "bomb them all" language and simple, but wrong-headed, solutions is one thing, and can easily be excused as the ramblings of someone who hasn't studied any of these issues in depth.

But a presidential candidate isn't simply making thoughtless statements in a coffee shop, he's placing himself into history.

And that makes hearing a self-obsessed braggart make arrogant bloviations from a presidential announcement podium is historically inexcusable.

Unless Donald Trump now gives a series of serious, scripted policy speeches in the coming weeks - which is extremely unlikely - his candidacy is doomed, and it was a long shot to begin with, so he'd better start listening to people.

5 Ways to Fix America's Nightly Network "News"

Network news - news programs shown on the original Big Three networks and other, newer, upstarts - is broken. Below are five examples, and what I believe they need to do to fix their news programs to better serve the American people:

More International Focus - A "world news" program that focuses solely on domestic news is not worthy of the name. And international celebrities getting into trouble or the latest plane crash overseas doesn't count as "news." Americans who are insular and insulated from the news of the world are suddenly surprised by trends both friendly and ferocious when they hit without warning. When that happens, that's a failure of the "world news" programs we watch. Network newscasts must rededicate themselves to covering the entire world.

More International Politics - Political trends are also vital to our full and complete awareness as voters and as citizens. It may not, at first glance, seem important that a new anti-American party is rising in the polls in a nation traditionally friendly to the USA, or that a certain governor was elected in a prefecture in Japan. But if that nation  turns hostile, or if that governor is more hostile to Americans remaining in a military base there than his predecessor, then that indeed is a problem that will have regional and international repercussions. Network newscasts should commit to covering international politics, because it's relevant.

The Weather Is NOT "news" - It's snowy in the winter in the Northern half of the United States. It's a fact. It's not, however, news. It's exciting to show cars skidding off the road, rivers frozen and, in other climes, wet summers, minor hurricanes and tornadoes. But aside from an in-depth analyses of how slowly the aid got there after the storm, or how we are adapting to changing weather patterns, it's not "news." Network newscasts should stop wasting time covering routine and expected weather, and blowing storms out of all proportion.

Less "Special Kid Plays On the Team" Stories - I love the stories in which a young person - who is disabled in some way or is a terminal patient - gets to play on their favorite professional sports team or on their high school team, especially when they actually score for the team! These stories (and there are many of them) are inspirational, interesting, heart-warming, and emotional. Note that none of those words are "news," and are not newsWORTHY. They should exist in a separate show, which I'm sure would get great ratings, but they should not be taking up time in the nightly newscast, crowding out actual news. Network newscasts should leave the "feel good" stories to other shows on the network.

Fewer YouTube Videos - What's truly shocking about today's American nightly "newscast" is the inclusion of actual YouTube videos. ABC News includes these (and the aforementioned "kids play on teams" videos) in its "Index" segment near the end of the program. It literally shows YouTube videos of animals doing funny things, near-miss car accidents and other hilarity, which we can see with better justification on shows like "America's Funniest Videos" or its cable show equivalents. The YouTubization (tm) of Network news must end. 

"If it bleeds, it leads" was the old saying about the nightly news and the local paper. National Network newscasts shouldn't fear though. There is plenty of blood in the political turmoil around the world to quench their viewers' hearts. Demonstrations, corruption, trade deals, hard-fought elections, coups and uprisings, and much of it with consequences for American voters and consumers.

That's one of the reasons why I founded "World Politics News," a news aggregation service that points American readers to the news they're missing on the nightly network newscasts.

American news organizations owe it to us to bring us the world, and to show us accurately and fairly what's happening THERE before it happens HERE. And if they begin to do this again, the nightly "World News" programs will once again be true to their names.

Stephen Abbott
Abbott Media Group
www.abbottmediagroup.com

4 Keys to Building a Positive #Reputation [Abbott Media Group]

Your reputation - how you're perceived by others - is bound up in a host of factors, the most important of which your clients or customers are observing when they interact with you, or when they interact with people who have had dealings with you.

And in this Internet age, even millions who have never dealt with you can form an opinion of you based on what OTHERS who have never heard of you are saying!

So it's more important than ever to take control of your reputation and mold it in a favorable way, because uninformed people and forces well beyond your control will take hold of it if you don't. An like a boat that's left un-moored at the  dock, it will be drawn out by the tides and tossed with the winds whichever way they choose.

What factors will help "tie down" your reputation so these capricious winds can't get hold of it?

1. First to consider is the quality of your service or product. No amount of PR can paper over a consistently horrible product. The job of PR isn't to make a bad thing look great, because people can easily see through a snow job. And that snow job boomerangs back onto you rather quickly. But a great product, well conceived, unique and useful to customers, speaks for itself. The core of a good reputation is something of good repute to give to the world.

2. Similar to the first, the second point is to ensure that the way in which you deliver products or services is professional. It's not enough to have a great product or service. If you deliver it without passion, care and true professionalism, it will still be seen as a "negative." Having great food will bring them back to the restaurant. Once or twice. But a rude wait staff will cause them to forgo the experience again, and lead to bad-mouthing online.

3. How you treat your clients and customers is the third point that can make or break your reputation. Not only will an overworked and under-appreciated staff be less productive, they'll fall down on points 1 and 2 - the quality of the product and the professionalism of how it's delivered to the customer or client. You'll also experience heavier turnover of staff, and dozens or thousands of unhappy former employees again will not bode well for your company's reputation.

4. The final point of reputation is how the public perceives the good you do in the community. Good works is a plus and definitely has value in Public Relations and reputation-building efforts. In fact, it's seen by many as the key tool in the tool bag of Public Relations. While it can be over-used and its value overstated, good works done in the community is counted as a positive and helps "move the needle" towards a good reputation. However, as noted in 1 above, no amount of good deeds (charity and other things that are unrelated to your business model) can paper over a horrible product, poorly delivered, by unhappy or disgruntled employees. And doing charity work as a way to paper over some bad press is transparent, and is easily seen for the fraudulent effort it is.

All of these keys to a good reputation work together to create a positive reputation among your "publics." This includes your current customers, your past customers, your future customers, your employees, local and regional news media, these publics and others online, and those these various groups happen to encounter second- and third-hand.

A professional Public Relations person who is skilled in how to build a positive image for you and your business can reach out to these groups, tailoring just the right messages for each.

Let Abbott Media Group's PR division help you present these to publics that need to hear more about what you're doing!

#SydneyCafe Hostage Drama Showed Power of #SocialMedia

During the ‪#‎SydneyCafe‬ hostage crisis on December 15, once again the power and importance of ‪social media and the Internet as major sources how we get ‪news in the 21st Century was on full display.

It seems with every major event - be it a natural disaster, a political event, an entertainment death, or a terrorist event such as this one - the Age of the Internet shows just how interconnected the world has become, and how events even on the other side of the world can reach out and change us and our attitudes.

While cable news kept to their scheduled, pre-taped shows, millions, like me, streamed Australian TV stations live throughout the world, and we followed frequent twitter and facebook updates, and made many of our own observations, passing along data as it became known.

The dangers and pitfalls of the immediacy of Social Media as a source of news were also on full display.

Misinformation was rife - one online newspaper flashed a screenshot of a supposed twitter feed of an Islamic terror group taking credit for the Lindt cafe attack, only to be discovered later that it was a "parody" account, much to the paper's embarrassment (though the correction was swift - another benefit of instant media.)

Speculation was also rampant, with fears that this was a carefully coordinate attack with others immanent, rather than (as it turned out) a lone gunman who was facing charges in other cases and who was well-known to police and local Muslims as a fake, wanna-be Imam.

But the same could be said of TV reports, streaming from Australia (and eventually from the US) which were desperately trying to fill the air with speculative statements that turned out to be just that.

Coming back to the TV networks in the US, what was shocking was their failure to break in and report the news on what in the US was a lazy Sunday afternoon. FOX News, which seems obsessed with reporting on Islamic extremist terrorism, eventually, hours after the attack began, broke in on a re-run of "Huckabee" to show a rather nervous young woman - whom they had apparently just thrown in front of the camera -  stumbling through the basic facts, before letting an Australian news network stream for a few moments, then back to regular programming. CNN also broke into regular programming, but only for a half hour.

Blame cutbacks or the fact that it was Sunday, but the coverage was inexcusably poor, especially since this could have ended up much worse than it did.

The real winner of the day, in terms of coverage, was Bloomberg TV. With offices in Sydney just above the chocolate shop, the network dominated coverage and broke away with business news and other commentary in just the right balance, proving that there was no reason the older networks couldn't have done the same.

Meanwhile, twitter again, as in the Arab Spring and in other major events, demonstrated the sheer power of crowd-sourced news to demonstrate how well it can inform us.

The world has changed. When will the ‪Mass Media‬ catch up? Only time will tell whether they'll wake up to the changes, or whether they'll go the way of the "Big Three" American networks' news departments: a shadow of what they once were, and irrelevant.

Stephen Abbott
Principal, The Abbott Media Group‬

Also visit: World Politics News, dedicated to expanding our knowledge of politics around the world