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CoSIDA CONVENTION 2011: MARCO ISLAND

June 27, 2011

Benjamin Porritt

MARCO ISLAND, FLORIDA

JASON RICH: I'm Jason Rich, assistant athletic director for communications for Siena College and a member of this year's CoSIDA planning programming committee. The theme for today's programming is gaining Influence Within the Intercollegiate Community. As the SID's role continues to expand and evolve and our universities become more and more cognizant of the importance of our positions, the committee felt it would be helpful to provide some professional strategy to help position ourselves as the communication leaders and the go-to people within our athletic departments and universities.
This morning's panelist is the perfect person to get us started. Ben Porritt has counseled and developed strategies for major national campaigns, both corporate and political. He was the public face of McCain/Palin campaign, serving as the national spokesman and senior advisor to the candidates during the 2008 presidential election. Porritt is a partner of Outside Eyes, a consulting firm specializing in public strategy and crisis management. He serves as a regular on-air contributor for MSNBC, Fox and ESPN and is professor crisis communications at the University of Miami. Porritt is regarded by many political and corporate leaders as one of the nations' top crisis media experts and has handled high profile cases, including the biggest indictment in the history of the U.S. Government, Major League Baseball's steroid cases and multiple NCAA investigations.
Prior to joining Outside Eyes, Porritt worked for President George W. Bush as a campaign spokesman and the press secretary to the United States house majority leader, a position defined by the New York Times as the third most difficult in Washington, D.C.
Prior to his service on Capitol Hill, Porritt served in the communications department for the Department of Justice and was the deputy press secretary for the 55th presidential inaugural committee.
Porritt also served as a spokesman during the 2004 presidential campaign and managed the presidential debate war room. Prior to working on the campaign, he worked in the West Wing of the White House for President Bush's communications department.
He earned a masters in business administration from the University of Southern California and a bachelor of science in political science and history from Bradley University. Let's give a big CoSIDA welcome to Benjamin Porritt.
BENJAMIN PORRITT: Good morning. Thanks for having me back here. This is actually my third year at CoSIDA. Not a lot of you guys probably remember my first year, which I was slated in the last spot, the last session of the last day in San Antonio, so I didn't get a chance to meet a lot of you. But since then I've had a great opportunity, and this is a week that I look forward to and I've gotten a chance to know a lot of you and certainly gotten a chance to work with a lot of you over the last few years, and I'm grateful for that, so I'm glad to be back here.
This is a little easier than San Francisco for me. I live just east over here in Fort Lauderdale, so it was a quick trip. I'm glad to be here and I'm glad to be kicking off the theme of the day, which is gaining influence.
The question that we so often ask is how do we get a seat at the strategy table because that's what we all want. Every one of us wants a seat at the strategy table because at one end of the spectrum we want to know when we come into work at a minimum what we do is met with respect, is seen as necessary or as certainly looked possible as valued.
But at the other end of the spectrum, a lot of us have ambitions to be something different. We not only want to be seen as strategists, we want to be seen as somebody who counsels our athletic director or the leaders of our university. For me I want to be seen as somebody who counsels my clients in a high-profile, high-stakes situation. And I think it's that end of the spectrum where we don't just want to be strategists but that we want to effect the strategy and the direction of our department. So I hope to kind of hit on a few things to help us do that.
And I know that this isn't about job titles, and it's more about talent and more about opportunity, but I do think it's kind of interesting for me when I think back on some of the things that I've done, I hate when people put me in a box. There's nothing I cringe at more than when somebody introduces me as the PR guy. I can't stand it. It's one of those things where I do so many different things to try to tell people I'm a consultant, I'm a strategist, I'm a crisis manager, and they're like, hey, this is Ben, I want to introduce you to my PR guy. I'm thinking, that's not what I do.
But people put us in boxes. The only thing that's worse than being the PR guy is when somebody considers you to be the spin guy. You know, when you sit in these meetings on a daily basis and they're like, hey, Ben, here's how we want to say it and why don't you go ahead and spin it and make it sound real good as though we're somehow one step above a car salesman or some kind of sophisticated liar. We all know based on crisis management that there's no such thing as spin.
But I have been fortunate to advise -- I have been fortunate to have a lot of seats at the strategy table, although that doesn't mean that I continually get that seat. I've advised presidential campaigns, I've worked for President Bush, I've advised internationally recognized brands, but every time I engage into a new project or get hired by a new client, I have to reprove myself each and every time, and I have to re-find and reposition myself at the strategy table, and the reason is because that the strategy table is more an unorganized game of musical chairs than it is assigned seating.
I don't think it's something that any of us can stake a claim to. I think it's something that you have to earn repeatedly and continually prove yourself.
Just a little story, when I left in 2008, I took a leave from Outside Eyes to go to the McCain campaign, and one of my biggest fears was that I would go to the McCain campaign, I'd never be heard of and never would be part of situations, that I'd simply be a spokesperson and I would not have a seat at the strategy table.
It was probably more my insecurity than it was anything else at the time, and my business partner, who is one of the smartest people I've ever met and my mentor, he told me you just want to get in the room. You just want to be even on a equal playing field as everyone else because as soon as you get in the room, and this goes for all of us, as soon as we get in the room, talent rises to the top, whether you're an athlete, a CEO, whether you're an SID or an athletic director; as long as you're in that strategy room, you have an opportunity to show your talent and that will go to the top.
And so that's all we're asking for is kind of an equal playing field, to be seen as what we do as having a level of respect but getting an opportunity to advise the direction of our organization, and so I think that there are a few ways to do that, and I'd like to outline four of them.
The first one is I think that we can no longer simply do the jobs that we're tasked to do. We can't simply be sports information directors, and we can't simply be communicators. We have to be more than that. I think human beings, like I said earlier, are categorical by nature, so my clients, your bosses, athletic directors, whatever they are, love to put us in a box. They love to give us job titles with job descriptions so they can say to somebody, this is Ben, he does this, this and this, as though that's the only thing that we're capable of doing.
So human beings are categorical by nature, but I want to tell you I think that is as short-sighted and as stupid as anything can be because it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense for an athletic department, it doesn't make any sense for a real estate company, it doesn't make any sense for a public relations firm, it doesn't make sense to box people in. And here's why. Because if you take your organization, you guys are interacting with the exact same customer base as your ticket office is. You guys are directly engaging via social media the exact same fan base that your athletic director is soliciting money from and speaking to on a weekly basis. You guys are coming up with the messages and crafting the language that your marketing department is going to use for ads and promotions.
So there's no reason why you guys would simply be put into a box and could only be seen as doing one thing, when you're interacting with all of the same audiences that everybody else in your department is working towards. You guys all have the same goal. It would just seem to make sense that you guys would work in an integrated fashion with everybody else. And I think that it's impossible for us nowadays to simply be a sports information director.
If you think of newsrooms today, they're getting smaller and smaller because of budgets and resources and things. You have sports reporters covering City Hall and City Hall covering baseball, and it's a confused mess, but it's an opportunity for cross-pollination where everybody has an opportunity to learn what everybody else is doing.
I often think of the term, and maybe you guys have heard it, a business phrase called siloing. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's a business phrase where you build walls in organizations between different departments. So on a university level, and I've seen this firsthand, where the university side is completely separate from the athletic side. That doesn't make any sense. I think that you see it within athletic departments where the marketing side is completely separate from ticketing and ticketing is separate from the athletic director.
Now, many of you might not have that problem, but I guarantee that some of you do, and siloing is the second leading cause of death in any organization in the world, second behind money. And the reason is because it doesn't allow people to work in aligned fashion towards the same goals each and every day. That's a big problem.
So how do you do something outside of just being a communications director? Well, I think that for the way that it's worked for me is that every meeting that I enter into, I come prepared, backed with data and case studies. Every time I engage a client on a new project or a new meeting, I know that a lot of things that I bring up are going to be met with resistance, and I'm sure that you guys are the same way. If you bring up different ideas or if you have ways that you can integrate the SID or the communications department with the ticketing office or whatever you see, I guarantee that there's going to be a lot of people who resist that. People don't like to add extra work and they certainly like to resist change.
So how do you do that? Well, to me if you are backed by data-driven information and case studies, there's nobody in the world who's going to have the confidence to stand up to the points that you make at meetings. Let me give you one small example. About a month ago I was meeting with a client and I knew one person in particular was going to resist anything I said, so I put together a case study. I'm not talking five pages, I'm talking three sentences based on one article I had read on a marketing plan that I thought would help this specific condition. And it was all based on the surge of P90X. I had read this article about this P90X, about what it was doing, and I thought I'd steal a few things from that article and give it to my client.
If you enter into a meeting full of research, backed by data-driven information and you provide a skillful tone and you're polite, there's not going to be one person who can resist what you're saying. And if you take initiative on certain plans, then you're not just going to get a seat at the strategy table, you're ultimately going to move into driving the strategy. And I think that that's where a lot of us want to be.
And so I'm not saying that we have to have intimate knowledge into what all of our colleagues are doing, but we need to know different ways that we can work together with the resources that we have with the other agents inside the athletic department.
So I'd say the first thing that we can do in order to get a seat at the table is to make sure that we are not simply communicators. They often say that for people in my business, when you're consulting with a variety of clients that we have to be able to give as much business consultation as communications consultation. Now, I'm not 100 percent -- I don't know how to do the financials of a company or anything like that, but I can play along and I can provide data-driven information, and it works. I've seen it.
And at the same time you have to not -- you have to work outside of your bounds of communication, I think, and there's a paradox to this. I think that we have to be an expert at something, right? So I know that there's a little paradox there. I'm telling you don't just be communicators but be an expert communicator.
Communications, and I say this all the time, if I had drinks with you last night on the patio, you probably heard me say that communications is the hottest commodity in business. Every one of us who are handling public relations, sports information, crisis management, social media, it's the hottest commodity in business. Ten years ago it was anybody who could cut the bottom line and could do financials. It's not the same anymore. People need skilled communicators, and you want to know why? Because there is no margin for error in communications.
Organizations can be torn down in 24 to 48 hours, 24 to 48 hours. I think that we've seen examples across the NCAA. We saw a recent example in politics with the Congressman from New York. We know that these examples exist, and being an expert certainly helps you establish yourself as an industry leader, it allows you to help others inside your department. You become a trusted resource. You gain access, whether it's to your strategy table or other meetings. You connect with others in your department.
And the chances are that you're not going to have to search real hard to find what you're an expert at. I can tell you what I am not good at. I am not good at social media. Now, I understand it, I understand the need for it, I understand that everybody tells me you've got to learn it, you've got to learn it, and I think to myself, I don't want to learn it. I know how to do it, we have our campaigns that we run that all have that as part of the campaign, but I have to bring in other people to be the expert. That's not what I'm good at.
Many of you might be experts at social media, and I think that that puts you in a position to be a useful resource in your department. For me, what I'm good at is I have an intimate knowledge of how the media works for my clients, many of the athletic departments that I've advised over the years, I have an intimate knowledge of how reporters work. I can tell you the questions that they're going to ask; I can tell you the angles that their stories are going to take; I can tell you from start to finish exactly where their story is going to go.
Many of you are the same way. Many of you are better at developing messages and crafting messages than anybody else. All of these allow us to do something completely different.
I think that we often hear this phrase that we have to become well-rounded, that we have to work on our weaknesses, and just like I think putting people in a box is kind of stupid, I think that this idea that we have to work on our weaknesses is kind of silly. It doesn't make any sense.
We're not going to get anywhere in our career and we're not going to get a seat at the table because we improve the things that we're weakest at. We're going to get a seat at the table because we're good at something, and that's the thing that we want to make sure that shines through.
A couple good quotes I just wanted to share with you. One is from General Wesley Clark, and he said, "I never met an effective leader who wasn't aware of his talents and wasn't working to sharpen them."
I had a business schoolteacher who used to always say, "If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you'll never be great at anything." I think in general in our industries and in society, people want us to be, like I say, well-rounded, but the truth is that I think that just makes us mediocre. We want to make sure that we are an expert at something, because remember, all we want is to be on an equal playing field, and when we get into the strategy room or we have an opportunity to show what we're good at, our talent will rise to the top.
And in one case our talent is preparation, making sure you're not simply a communicator when you go to meetings, that you have an understanding of what everybody else does; and on the other hand, our talent comes through showing our strengths and using them to assist the department and the direction that it goes.
So those are the first two things.
The third is I think that we often times fail to ask ourselves a very simple question, and I try to start every project that I engage in by asking one question, which is, how can I add value to this organization? And in order to add value, you have to know what the goal of the organization is. And I can tell you with most every single organization, the goal is the same, whether you're nonprofit, whether you're an athletic department, whether you're a business, whether you're a presidential campaign. The goal, first and foremost, is money. You cannot operate without money.
And I think understanding what the goal is allows you to answer the question, how can I add value to the department. We don't seek a seat at the strategy table because we want to go to more meetings. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants more conference calls and nobody wants more meetings. We want less of that. But we seek a seat at the strategy table so we can begin an upward climb to understanding what our boss or our athletic director or our client wants, and that's why I think we have to be able to answer the question as money.
I recently spoke to a Big 12 athletic director, very well respected, a wonderful friend of mine, who said the biggest difficulty that he faces on a day-to-day basis is trying to find enough opportunities to secure funds. He talked about the difficulty it takes to be competitive. He talked about the idea that you have to pay coaches multimillions of dollars in order to keep them, in order to stay competitive.
Now, I know a lot of you guys are not from Big 12 or even D-1 schools, but that doesn't mean that the goal isn't the same. That doesn't mean that the value add isn't creating money.
Another good example is that President Bush used to say when he took over the Texas Rangers that he would ask himself one fundamental question. He would have a stack of items and projects to do, and instead of engaging mindlessly in trying to get as much work done as possible, he would ask himself how does this project add value to the department or to the Texas Rangers. And if it didn't, he didn't weigh in on the decision making process, he didn't engage on the project, and he didn't even accept the task as his own; he delegated it to others.
Now, I know that all of us don't have the same liberties that a CEO or an owner of an franchise has, but we do have the ability to recognize different opportunities for our department. And I think that you're going to spend the next few days here learning from your other colleagues. If you walk through this exhibit section, you find dozens of opportunities for your department to make money.
Now, I've met with a ton of you guys and I've offered my services to all of you guys, and the first thing out of your mouth is well, we have budget problems and I don't think we can hire you. I'm like, that's all right, I've got it, I understand it. But ask yourself this question before you ask about budget and budget concerns. When you talk to these groups out here, ask them, is there a way that we can make a profit out of this, is there a way that we can buy your service and that we can make money on it; and they're salesmen, they're going to tell you that.
But I think that's the one thing we often miss. We often get so constrained by resources and budget that we don't even look beyond to the opportunities. So I'd ask yourself a fundamental question. How do you add value to the department? Find ways to bring in revenue, and this doesn't have to be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you bring in $10,000, I will guarantee you your athletic director takes notice. I'll guarantee you that he invites you to the next strategy meeting. I'll guarantee you that he recognizes you for your success.
If you sit in these meetings the next few days and talk to people and you're like, well, that's not what I do, that's not really what I want to do, that's okay. But I can guarantee that you're not going to be in the strategy room. That doesn't mean that you won't be there ever. That just means that you're going to miss opportunities to be in there.
Think to yourself, how can we engage fans with promotions or ideas? How can we get fans in the seats? How can we build online programs that will enable us to sell advertising? Is there a way to cut our budget? Everybody is into cutting spending right now. Can we get rid of specific big expenditure items that maybe we don't need anymore? Is there a way to monetize some of your Olympic sports that typically aren't profitable?
I talked to one of your colleagues earlier this week and he told me that he had started an online program where parents and fans can pay money to watch a lot of their Olympic sports. Sounds like a good idea. He's bringing in $10,000 to $20,000, I don't know how often, per year I would imagine, but it's something that at least puts him in the conversation.
So remember, we're just looking to be on an equal playing field, and in this case talent rises to the top by answering the question how can I add value to the department.
So the first thing is making sure that you're not simply a communicator. The second thing is being an expert at something, being a go-to resource on something. And the third thing is answering the question, how can I add value to my department.
I'd say that the fourth thing, and a lot of people might roll their eyes when I say this, and it's kind of embarrassing to say because we're all in public relations, but the idea of self-promotion. The other thing that your colleague said this week is that your job is promote everybody else but that nobody is promoting what you guys do, and so I think that the idea of self-promotion, it makes sense because all we do is promote others. We promote our athletic departments, our athletes, our coaches, my clients. We all do that.
But I think it's kind of funny, though, because as public relations people when a public relations person or a communicator is in the headlines or gets recognized, everybody rolls their eyes and is like, self-promoter, that guy is a self-promoter, and I do think there are people who are obnoxiously involved in self-promotion. When I worked at the White House, we had one guy, everybody knew his name. I wish you knew him because you'd all laugh along with me. He was in everything from People Magazine's Top 50 Most Beautiful People -- he's a White House staffer -- to profiles in the New York Times and the Washington Post. I mean, he was everywhere.
And I worked for the communications director, and every single time he was in one of these magazines, my boss would roll his eyes and he'd kind of laugh, but it was really annoying to other people. It's as though public relations people aren't allowed to get promotion.
And I think that that's kind of funny. Now, I do think that it's a delicate dance and a delicate balance. But I don't think that we have to look at promotion and self-promotion as simply getting ourselves headlines. It's kind of embarrassing. It's kind of embarrassing when you have to make calls and be like, hey, you want to cover this story? Who is it about? It's about me, but trust me, it's a really good story.
But the reason that you have to do it is because the work that you do in a working environment is not going to distinguish itself a lot of the times. We have to distinguish ourselves because it's like a tree falling in the forest. All of our work, unless alerted to others, is not necessarily going to be recognized.
You know, as a consultant, I am constantly -- I'm forced into finding ways to prove the worth of my company to the clients that we represent, not because we don't do good work but just because they need to know it. And so here are a few things that we do in our organization that I think are the least cheesy ways to promote yourself.
First is distinguish yourself in areas of emotional intelligence, and I'm not trying to sound like a psychologist. I actually mean this. What do I mean by emotional intelligence? I mean be seen as the person who is adaptable, who is innovative, who takes initiative, and who is reliable. I guarantee that if you are the person who is adaptable or easy to work with, if you are the person who takes -- who is innovative and who is willing to work with other departments and say, absolutely, we can work with you, we can find ways to make your group better, people are going to want to work with you.
If you're innovative and you're constantly coming up with strategies -- don't just say, hey, I got this great idea in a meeting; put it down on paper, and it doesn't have to be long. I don't write anything more than one page. It can be a one-page memo that you send around. People are either going to buy into it or they're not, and my philosophy is that you have to come up with a lot of bad ideas before you come up with a good one, and if you do, people will take notice and they'll consider you innovative, and ultimately the person who puts the plan down on paper owns it. They're going to be responsible for it and they're going to get recognition for it, so own the areas of emotional intelligence in your office.
The second thing is what we talked about earlier; define your specialty. If you are the -- I always go back to this, I don't know why, maybe because I'm insecure about social media. If you're the social media expert, people will recognize that, people will know that, people will see that. But you also have to let them know. You have to let people know, hey, I heard that you guys are running that promotion; I think we can add a lot of value. Do you have 15 minutes to meet about it? Here's what we would do with social media. It's that simple.
I'd say the third thing in self-promotion is be seen and heard at work. I think it's easy, and I do this all the time, to get into a monotonous day-to-day working relationship with our colleagues. You go sit in your office and say, I hope nobody bothers me until 10:00. I don't want to look at anybody, this is terrible. And then by lunch, you're like, I hope somebody doesn't ask me, I can't go to lunch with Sally today, she talks about her kids.
I do that all the time. I have a handful of people that I constantly go to lunch with, and I think, all he's going to do is ask me to help fundraise, and I don't want to do that. I get all that, but you've got to be seen and heard at work.
When I started at the White House, what I did -- I get the difference, I was only 22 or 23, had no pride, I was excited, and all I would do is email everybody inside the communications office and say, hey, do you have 15 minutes? I want to learn what you do, how you do it and how I can work with you. 15 minutes, everybody has 15 minutes. You sit down with them, they get comfortable, you build a relationship with them, they automatically like you because you're asking them about themselves and then you build that relationship.
And then the second thing I did is I said, okay, let me look outside of communications and let me find how I can sit down with all those people and ask them the same questions, what do you do, how can we help, let me understand that, and people love it. And it was the best way for me to be seen and heard at work.
And then I'd say the last thing as far as self-promotion is you have to brag about yourself, and you have to do it in ways that doesn't look like you're bragging about yourself. Now, we have an office -- my office at Outside Eyes, if I go on MSNBC or Fox or even ESPN, we have a staff email because we run -- when we run campaigns we set up a war room for all of our clients, so people get emails saying Outside Eyes War Room. So when I go on television, everybody that I'm looking to impress, get in front of, who are my clients, I send them an email, and it doesn't come from me, it comes from a staff member, Ben Porritt will be on MSNBC to talk about the 2012 presidential election. It's a lot better than me saying I will be on TV at 12:30 p.m. because that's embarrassing.
You have to do things that make it look like it's not coming from you. I was the one that said we have to do it because people take note. The things people are most jaded about people think are a big deal. So you have to show people what you are out there to do.
Also you have to develop records and show reports. I'm sure that the idea of reports to everybody in this room, including me, makes you sick to your stomach. How many times do we think, I don't have time to do reports. I hate reports just as much as you. But something as simple as bragging about a successful week -- this past week one of my clients in California, we had the most successful week that we have had in six months, and all I did was I sent an email, and you guys can do this to your athletic director because if you don't he won't know, and all it said in the subject line was "very successful week," and I put in there, John, I just wanted to let you know that we had an incredible week. Here's what we accomplished, and then I bulleted out, put something very simple like just thought you'd want to know, we're excited about next week, hope to talk to you soon.
Their immediate response is going to be, great to hear, glad you let me know. They might forward it to others and say, look at what Outside Eyes is doing. It's a good way to show what you're doing, and if you do that on a month-to-month basis or if you do a six-month report, hey, this is what your sports information department is doing and you send that around to your colleagues in marketing, ticketing at the university side, they might not read the whole thing but they're going to take notice and then they're going to want to be a part of it. They're going to say, hey, I saw where you helped so-and-so; do you think you guys can do that for us; and the answer is absolutely.
Because the key is that we want to be seen as necessary at a minimum, and as a maximum on the other end we want to be seen as strategists. We want to be driving the department, the direction of the department, and remember, all we want is a seat at the table and to be playing on an equal playing field with our colleagues. We want to be respected at that level. And once we get there, talent rises to the top. And talent is all of preparation, being seen as someone that's not simply a communicator but being seen as an expert of something, answering the question of how do you add value to the department, and then once you've done all of that, finding ways to promote yourself within your organization so it looks as though you're simply sending out basic information.
So I would say that those are the four key ways that have worked for our company, that have worked for me in my career, and I'd love to take questions and kind of -- if you guys agree with that or disagree with that, and I know that I don't have an amazing working knowledge of an athletic department like you do, but I've worked in every organization from a presidential campaign, the White House, my own firm, PR companies, which are not my favorite, and I've worked with athletic departments. So I have kind of a baseline knowledge of what you guys do, but I'd love to hear questions from you guys or ideas that you guys have about how things can go. And if you disagree with me on anything, I love to debate, so bring it.

Q. Can you talk us through something that you encounter that initially media consider to be a real negative and how you got through that? It doesn't matter what the subject was, something that you had to kind of internally with your group turn around and then get the media to look at it a different way.
BENJAMIN PORRITT: Yeah, I would say that the media does not forgive two things, and when I say the media, I think of America, we don't forgive two things: We don't forgive liars and we don't forgive pedophiles. That's it. All of my clients lie to me, every single one of them. Every client that I've had on a crisis level has started out by lying to me. And often times information is released that's a lie, and it's plainly a lie. Think of the Congressman, think of a lot of NCAA schools. It's a bad problem. And I've had to go out there and I've had to sit down with the media and let them know that this was not true, this will never happen again, and here's how we operate.
And so I simply am as transparent with reporters as I possibly can be. To me I think that turning things around with the media can only happen in one of two ways: Sitting down with them off the record -- I was telling a couple of you guys last night, I do 95 percent of my work off the record now. I don't even like to talk on the record. It's not even worth it because I can get so much more done and I can shape the media's perspective off the record and I can change their opinion of things. I can shape a narrative. I can let them know, this is what you reported. I understand how you got that information, but here's the truth.
So the best way that I know how to do things and turn things around with the media is simply by being transparent with them, talking to them off the record. Just because they're members of the media doesn't mean we have to answer their questions and it doesn't mean that we have to play on their playing field. When the media works with us, I mean, we can control the debate. So the best way to turn things around is simply through transparency.

Q. You talked about self-promotion. Is there a way that we can do that on the buddy system? How can we promote other people maybe in our conference and then they can do the same for us? I think that would be a little more palatable to most of us.
BENJAMIN PORRITT: I think that this is a good example. I think that if you talk to the people who are putting this event together each and every year, if you want to be promoted within your industry, which is sports information directors, then certainly you want other people who are in Jason's position and Joe Hornstein's position and Larry's position and all these other guys to simply say, hey, we've got to get this guy on our panel. All it takes is for you to go up to that person and say, we want to participate, I want to be part of this group, I want to be seen, I want to be heard, and they're going to say I completely understand. Really it comes down to the basic question of asking. I think often times you have to ask.
I saw something the other day, a marketing firm that I work with in Fort Lauderdale does consulting for the Florida Panthers, and they were out there doing something very special with tickets, and so then they contacted the NHL and had the NHL send out a Tweet to all of the teams saying everybody needs to take notice of what the Florida Panthers are doing today. So everybody had an opportunity to see that.
And I think that that's probably the best example I could give where you can work with your conference offices to say, this is what our department is going to do today; would you guys mind sending out a Tweet to all of the Big 10, Big 12, whatever your conference is, schools, to say take a look at what this university is doing, it's a great opportunity for you guys to follow suit. That would be the way that I'd do it.

Q. I'm in a situation where I have a new president who was just hired and I have a new athletic director who will start in two weeks. What are some ways, maybe some tips, to getting into that knowing that I have two bosses who are new to my university and new to what we do?
BENJAMIN PORRITT: That's a good question. And I think that this is something, like I said, I go through all the time because I have new bosses each and every week. I wish each and every week, probably more like each month, and those just come from different clients. But I think that the first thing that I would do is I would sit them down and say, I need 15 minutes of your time. I just want to let you know where our department is headed, some of the things that we have, what do you need from me, would you like to see what we're doing over the next six months, and they're going to say yes to all of them, so you have to be prepared to do anything that you ask them.
But I think that a simple conversation where you sit down and with them and say, this is what my department has always done, this is what we're starting to do because he doesn't know, so anything you say at that point is news to him. So I mean, you can pretty much go to him and say, this is what I do, this is how we do it. We would like more responsibility, we want to work with you to find ways to bring in revenue to reach your goals because we think as communicators that we have the opportunity to work with everybody in our department. We are not just sports information directors.
I think just a preemptive strike. I would meet with them before they ask to meet with you because once they meet with you then they're going to be asking questions. You want to meet with them and you want them to say, okay, so what did you want to talk about, and that gives you the opportunity to say, I have three things: I want to talk to you about how we can help you bring in revenue, which is going to be music to their ears; I want to talk about how we can help everybody else; and then I would say, if you know there's specific problems, we've had these problems in the past, I want to work with you to break down those barriers.
The number one problem I see with athletic departments is there is a silo between the university side and the athletic department side, and I think that if you can figure out a way to bridge that gap, then I think that you'll certainly be looked at from your new bosses' perspective as somebody who's going to be valuable perspective to the table.

Q. When you said siloing was the second leading cause of death, can you expand on that?
BENJAMIN PORRITT: When I say siloing is the second leading cause of death, it's partially my opinion, but I've done a lot of research based on business school. We used to study organizations, and really what it comes down to is culture, what it comes down to is morality, and I think all of these things really stem from siloing. I think if you look at organizations like GE and Disney, which are amazingly successful, or the ones that completely fail like the U.S. Government, I think it's because -- I think it's simply because there is a divide in allowing us to work together.
Think about the U.S. Government before 9/11. None of the departments communicated together because law prohibited them from doing that. If you don't have the ability to share information, you don't have the ability to work together. If you don't have the ability to work together, there's no chance that you're going to make your goal.
The other thing is that siloing tears down people's morality because the first thing that it says is that, yeah, we'd like to do that but it's never going to happen, and then you become monotonous, you don't do anything unless it's been done in the past, you're not innovative, you don't care. Sometimes it's hard to look at yourself in the mirror, you don't want to go to work, it's terrible, and it causes a culture and environment that's not fun to work in.
And so when it comes to money, that's an easy -- that's a no-brainer. If you don't have money, you can't operate, and if you don't have the tangibles of culture, positive morale and organizations working in integrated fashion, you're never going to succeed. So when I say it's the second leading cause of death, I believe that based on studies that I've read.
I don't know if you were to read a statistic today if that would actually be -- if polls would show that, but that's based on organizations that we've studied. That's what we always used to say in business school, and I went to University of Southern California, so if anybody is here from there, then you can stand up for that school.

Q. What are tips for being in the middle of a crisis, we need to bring in someone to look at it, and you're the boss, and your university administration is saying, you solve it.
BENJAMIN PORRITT: I think that there's two ways to answer that question. I spoke with a university last year that was going through a huge crisis, and frankly I thought that they handled it as well as anybody could have handled it. And so they clearly didn't need to bring in anybody. So I think the first answer is if you need to bring somebody in, it becomes very obvious.
Two things: I think that there are a number of examples that are happening right now in the NCAA, in the Congress, that are as poorly handled crisis situations as I've ever seen in my career. And the reason is because there is a divide between the administration and the communications. There has to be, because nobody is operating under the assumption that the media is going to find out everything.
So I think that the one thing that you have to say to the people above you is, we're not operating under the assumption that everybody is going to find out everything, and when people start to say this internally, when people start to worry about keeping their jobs, then you know that the strategy is not going to work. You know that.
So the first thing is making sure that the process is working, and if it's not, then you have no choice but to bring somebody in, because people need advice. The reason that we call our company Outside Eyes is because you need outside perspective.
Okay, so I said two points. The first is making sure that the process is working, and if it's not, you have to simply say, everybody is going to -- you have to be the one to walk in there and say, if you don't bring somebody in, people are going to lose their jobs. It's only going to get uglier. NCAA investigations are difficult because a lot of you schools are hamstrung by what you can say publicly. But that doesn't mean that you can't say anything publicly. That just means that you have to be innovative.
So the first is make sure the process works.
I would say that the second thing is I completely forgot what I was going to say. (Laughter.) That's kind of embarrassing.
The second thing is frankly we need assistance. I think that the reason that there are companies like ours is because we do have a specialty in something, and I think that often times when you bring that up, people are going to be met with budget concerns, and you have to weigh risk versus reward because with crisis comes risk of long-term value. I can tell you right now, if a crisis hits and you're not able to bring somebody in and everything ends up worst-case scenario, everybody is going to lose their job and you're scarred from that point forward.
So I think that you have to look at it from a risk-versus-reward ratio, and if the risk outweighs the reward, then you kind of have to say, the heck with budget concerns, we have a real problem.
One of the BCS systems I thought had an incredibly smart idea. About two months before they knew a crisis was going to hit, they solicited proposals from four organizations. Mine was one of them. It came down between our group and another, and we lost, but that's okay. I thought that the way that they prepared knowing that a crisis was about to hit allowed them to talk to their superiors and say, we've got to bring somebody in, this is going to come down the barrel. We need to get ahead of you. Once we get ahead of it, we can make it go away. It comes down to short shelf life, and you want to make sure that crises go away quickly. So risk versus reward, making sure that the process works.
I'll just give you an example of one other client. It's actually interesting. It's an insurance company, and they build crisis teams for all of their clients, and it has a legal team, it has a public relations team, it has a couple other aspects, and they put us on a very small retainer so that when a crisis does hit with one of their clients, we're immediately familiar with their organization, what they do. We can get brought in at a moment's notice and handle that.
And you might think to yourself, with your athletic director, one of the things that we'd like to do is build a crisis team. That doesn't mean that you have to pay them. That means it's a group of people, you can give them a fancy name like crisis board or whatever you want to call them, and people will get a kick out of that because it brings them closer to your organization, which they want to work with, and it might give you the opportunity when a crisis hits to simply say to your superior, we have this team, now would be a great time to bring them in.

Q. You said in the first 24 to 48 hours you're seeing organizations taken down in this marketplace. What's the biggest mistake you've seen communicators make in that time and how can we -- what advice would you give?
BENJAMIN PORRITT: So we're doing crisis management later this afternoon, so you'll hear me repeat these things, but there's no margin for error in communications. There's no news cycle. I think I was here last year, and there was still a news cycle. There's no news cycle.
But the number one problem that communicators -- number one mistake that communicators make, and I'm thinking of a communicator as someone behind the person, so whoever advised Congressman Weiner from New York or whoever advised -- I advised Alex Rodriguez; I would consider myself the communicator. The number one mistake that we make is that we allow our clients to go public with information that we know in our gut is not true, we know that.
I guarantee that when there's a crisis that hits, it's easy to tell when people are lying, and we have to act like an attorney in one sense. If you're an attorney, you would never allow your client to sit on the stand and commit perjury. You'd never allow that. And so if you want to be seen at the big boy table and you want to get respect, you sit down with your boss in private and you say, I guarantee that this isn't true; if we go out into the public and say this, it is going to cause havoc. It's going to wreak havoc, it's going to make the story continue. There's three ways that this story is going to come out; one is through reporters; one is through time; and one is through our own voice. If we tell our story in a truthful way, then everything is going to end quickly, I guarantee it, because there's case studies all the time.
That's when you bring in a case study and you say, I can tell you what didn't work with Congressman Weiner and I can tell you what worked with Alex Rodriguez. Those are the case studies. You want to lie, you'll end up like Barry Bonds. You want to tell the truth, you'll be like A-Rod.
To me the number one mistake communicators make, whether it's a question of confidence, boldness, relationship with our president or athletic director is we allow our superiors to go out there knowing that what they're going to say isn't right, and what do we do, we go back to our offices and say, I don't know about this, I just don't think they're telling the truth. You have to say that to them.
There's a level of boldness that we have to have. If you get fired for telling the truth, who cares. It's better than going down with the ship.

Q. You said you do a lot of your work off the record when you're talking to reporters. How do you determine what should be said off the record and developing that trust?
BENJAMIN PORRITT: That's a good question. I think that as communicators we are using outdated tactics all the time. We're so quick to adapt Twitter and Facebook and all these new things, but we're still like, okay, we need to send out a press release. No, we don't. We don't need to send out press releases, statements. We can still use those, but we are using outdated tactics, especially in times of high stakes, high profile.
When it comes to building relationships with reporters, this is in my opinion a communicator's job. So if I take a project in Los Angeles, the first thing I do is I fly out to LA and I do a round of meetings with reporters to get to know them, to let them know that I'm going to be a resource to them, to let them know that I am going to provide them with really good information that they can report before anybody, and that usually takes care of the questions of trust. If they can get good information from you, they're not going to burn you.
I gave a reporter from Bloomberg a story the other day that was so good. I loved it. It was one of those, when you read it, it's like, this is perfect, I love it. There's no way he would ever burn me. I gave it to him off the record. I said, I don't want my client's name attached to it, I don't want my name attached to it, and he said, perfect, and he ran with it.
So I think what I determine to be off the record and on the record is there's no reason for me to talk on the record, and I think that there's no reason to just casually get on the phone with a reporter anymore. They all have their stories written by the time that they talk to you. They're looking for one sentence to fill the void, and so just talk to them on background. Figure out the angle before you go on the record. Figure out exactly the story that they're going to write, and then once they tell you that, be like, okay, so what do you need me to say, and they'll say, what I'd really like you to say is this. Be like, that's not my message, here's my message. Don't answer a reporter's question just because they give it to you.
So I start every conversation that I have with a reporter on background at a minimum, and I always say that this gives me the opportunity to speak freely without fear of being, quote -- and I simply say, are we on background or off the record, however you want to say it, and once they agree to that, then you simply engage in a long, lengthy conversation. And they'll let you know when they need something on the record.
But until they let me know that they really need something on the record, there's no need for me to give it to them because it just fans the flames in a crisis situation, or then people write stories and you're like, John, I was just talking to you. I know, but we were on the record and I had to write a story.
Every conversation I engage with a reporter I do off the record, unless you've worked with them for 20 years and you're having dinner with them. You have to kind of be the judge of how good your relationship is.
I was telling the crew from Kentucky last night, I've actually never been -- I've never been screwed over by a reporter. I've never had a reporter break trust. Now, I've made mistakes and said things on the record when I shouldn't have, and I was like, dangit, why did you print that? Well, because I told it to them. It was my fault. So I've never lost that trust with a reporter because I'm always very careful about talking off the record.
And I do the same thing with blogs. I love working with blogs, and I'm sure that many of you guys have to do this. One of the things that we implement almost every time we engage a crisis client is a strategy called expanding the coverage zone. In a lot of cases you only have one or two newspapers that cover a big story. Well, I need more people to get news out than that, especially if those two organizations aren't going to take news from me. So I'll sit down with bloggers, I'll meet with them and I'll say, I'll treat you like a reporter if you act like one. That's what they want to be. I want to know what rules they operate under. Do they operate under off the record, on the record? Are they willing to let me send them information without ever being attributed? Absolutely.
So I do the same thing with blogs as I do with reporters, and to this day I have not had problems with that, and I think it's just a matter of being careful. Now, there's been times where I don't know if I was careful enough and I call them back, but that's how I do it. Every conversation I have is off the record until it's necessary, and I think that's more important to do that.

Q. Talk about the use of the phrase "no comment."
BENJAMIN PORRITT: That's a good question. The answer is, any time I deal with an attorney, any time I deal with an attorney, they say, can't comment, can't say this, can't say that. I'll give you a funny story. I have a client who is one of the No. 1 neurosurgeons in the country, just lost his medical license. He went from having zero claims to over 200, so the guy is either a butcher or there's something political about it.
His lawyer's strategy is to not comment and to let the legal process work out. So over the course of 250 years to try 250 complaints, my client is going to go bankrupt and his reputation is going to be forever destroyed. So I can't allow that to happen. So when I sit down with an attorney, I say, do you think your strategy is working. People are going bankrupt, people's reputations are going to be completely destroyed and people are losing their jobs.
So if you want to say, no comment, then I have to let you know that you're not in control of the PR strategy. And again, the only way when we're met with resistance is to show them examples. And there are so many examples of people who don't comment, and one, you immediately look guilty, your reputation is damaged. And when I've worked in NCAA investigations, here's the biggest problem that you guys face, is that the NCAA doesn't allow people to talk about investigations. I understand it. I worked for the Justice Department, which is like the worst place for a communicator to work because it's full of attorneys. And all they say every time is can't comment on that, can't comment on that, it's an investigation, can't comment. Then you have to find a way to shift the debate or the school is going to go downhill.
I'll give you an example: A school, and this is a couple years ago, going through a basketball problem, could not talk about the investigation on the record, and I said, well, you're just going to get dragged through the mud and everybody is going to assume you're guilty. So his question was, what can we do, and my advice was simple. I said, you need to shift the debate. You need to say something, and this is what I would advise everybody if you've gone through an investigation, is say, we would like to share with you all of the information that we can, and we will. The process is the problem. The NCAA doesn't allow us to talk about investigations. We need to work with -- like you need to find ways to work with the NCAA in order to get information out there.
You need to find ways to show transparency, to bring in reporters, to talk on the record, and it comes as a matter of convincing your superiors and the lawyers.
One of the things that we do on crisis is that the first meeting that we have we do not allow attorneys in the room. It's like a prerequisite for me. If an attorney is there, I don't want him to be part of it.
Now, we'll meet with the attorney. I don't want to ruin relationships. But I need to be able to tell my client that he's not hiring me for legal advice and he's not hiring me as an attorney for communications advice because they're going to be wrong every time, and it really comes down to backing up your information, making your statements with data-driven case studies and saying, well, if you don't want to communicate then you're going to end up like this person, and they lost their jobs.
My guess is that they'll listen pretty quickly after that. It's persistence. And it's not easy; it's the hardest thing to convince your client. But you have to say, point blank, and a lot of it just comes from being bold, you have to say point blank that strategy doesn't work, it's been tried, and that's kind of what it comes down to.

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