700 Thirteenth Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20005

Phone: 202.347.0773
Fax: 202.347.0785
info@cassidy.com

Check out Cassidy CEO Marty Russo’s commentary on the Obama lobbying rules over at National Journal’s Under the Influence Experts blog.

Here’s a taste:

There are perhaps no terms more widely used, nor more poorly understood in Washington than “special interest” and “lobbyist.”

Almost all “special interests” have lobbyists. Fortune 500 companies and small town teachers, policemen and firefighters have lobbyists. Doctors, lawyers, and shift workers from most manufacturing plants have lobbyists. For that matter, even the federal government has lobbyists, every agency has one and the White House does too.

And keep in mind, one person’s “just cause” is another person’s “special interest.” The role of government decision makers is to balance the widely varied interests of people from differing backgrounds and make decisions in the best interest of their communities, states and the country.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal carries a fascinating look at AOL’s new business model.  Here’s the heart of the model (the full story is behind Rupert’s pay wall):

AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors.

Instead of waiting to sell ads until an article or Web video is produced, AOL—which has scores of niche sites, such as beauty and fashion site Stylelist, in addition to its AOL brand—says it plans to offer marketers the chance to work with its editorial team to create custom content.

Media buying types showed some initial enthusiasm for the approach:

Nick Brien, CEO of Media Brands, a media buying and planning unit owned by Interpublic Group*, says AOL’s model is a fresh approach to marketing. “Clients like that way of thinking,” he says. But he stresses the importance of disclosing to readers when a marketer has paid for content. AOL says it plans to make such disclosures.

It remains to be seen if this will be greeted with equal enthusiasm by the news consumers and by public policy types.  It seems that there are some pretty interesting issues raised by all this.

This is the part that seems most likely to draw the scrutiny of regulators and legislators:

But analysts say what may set AOL apart is the new technology powering its system, which can tap massive amounts of data on consumers’ Web-viewing behavior to learn what’s on their minds. It also has access to online ad-sales data from its own sites and thousands of others on which it brokers ads.

* Cassidy & Associates is also an IPG company.

University of Miami Law Professor Michele DeStefano Beardslee has just released an interesting study on the role of corporate lawyers in managing public controversies surrounding litigation.

Among her findings:

Given today’s savvy media culture, “no comment” is no longer a viable strategy. Nevertheless, there are small indications that some corporate lawyers are adapting to the new environment by helping their clients manage the public relations impact of their legal controversies. However, up to now there has been little systematic evidence gathered on this new trend and its implications.

Of course this begs the question, are the attorneys really the person best situated to be managing the public relations elements of the strategy?

As a general rule, attorneys are focused on a much narrower set of risks.  Getting a process established where the entire range of interests can be debated internally in an informed manner, by a group with the right skill sets, is key to getting the best result for the business in crisis.

In any given crises, there may legal risks, reputational risks, business risks, and the risk of of drawing additional scrutiny from legislators or regulators, all which should be factored into the strategic decision making.  Legal factors must be considered, but sometimes the perfect legal strategy-too narrowly defined–needlessly exposes the business on other fronts.

This same problem is magnified when the crisis is happening outside the formalized processes of a court case where instead a business has drawn or is likely to draw the scrutiny of a regulatory body or the Congress.  In deciding on a strategy, the key is to get the right skills sets in the room, where people who understand the entire array of tools that are available in managing the crisis can weigh in.

A study of these broader questions, that didn’t necessarily start from the presumption that this responsibility rests solely in the hands of corporate lawyers, would produce more informative guidance for business decision makers.

Today’s NY Times reports that News Corporation has begun early stage negotiations with Microsoft to remove its content from Google search results and intead make it exclusively available via Bing.

News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, has engaged in early-stage discussions with Microsoft about a pact to get paid by Microsoft to remove its news content from Google’s search engine and be available on Bing, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously to discuss confidential negotiations.

It doesn’t take much extrapolation to imagine how this could have major implications for Google and its business model and for how lots of regular folks use and think about the Internet.

Given this information, Murdoch’s public musings last week make a whole lot more sense.

The Hill reports that there is a major push underway by the nation’s mayors to increase their share of any future stimulus measures:

The nation’s mayors are pressing lawmakers to send more money directly to cities if Congress passes a second stimulus, arguing joblessness is often concentrated in metro areas.

The lobbying push could reprise an earlier battle with state governors over control of federal dollars.

“Our message is, if you are going to do this, make sure you focus on the cities,” said Tom Cochran, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

This sets them in direct tension with the governors.  

Note to Tom Cochran of the U.S. Conference of Mayors:  Though the point may be legitimate, by November 19th, the Halloween quotes should have long since been put away for the year.

“The problem with the stimulus money out there is it did not get into the cities where the unemployment is,” Cochran said. “During Halloween, the unemployment monster was looking everybody in the face.

Yesterday, Gregg Hartley, the Vice Chairman here at Cassidy & Associates, tweeted his frustration with a New York Times story regarding a Cassidy client.  The Blog of Legal Times put up a post about the tweet and cross- posted it to Law.com.

This morning, other bloggers, including the folks over at The Business Insider,  picked up the topic and began a discussion about how social media should be used in the advocacy space.

Maybe this is just a mini-controversy fueled by someone tweeting out of frustration over what they saw as unfair treatment of a client and the press being curious because it happened to involve a fellow journalist.  Then again, in the new- Washington of President Obama, perhaps more and more advocacy will begin to take place in the public domain.

Isn’t that a good thing?

Washington Whispers has an interesting item about the Club For Growth’s fear that recent research grants, funded by President Obama’s stimulus package, demonstrate a conspiracy in support of soda taxes.

A recent study by two marketing professors suggests that non-profits that lend their name to corporate social responsibility efforts must do so carefully or risk putting their own brand in peril.

“Our results suggest that some CSR initiatives may produce consumer inferences that are wrong but desirable for the company,” says Stacy Landreth Grau, associate professor of marketing in the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “And these inferences can have potentially negative consequences for the nonprofit.”

“Explicit Donations and Inferred Endorsements: Do Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives Suggest a Nonprofit Organization Endorsement?,” by Amanda B. Bower, a marketing professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and Stacy Landreth Grau of TCU, appears in the Fall 2009 issue of the Journal of Advertising.

It’s now obvious why businesses seek such arrangements but also equally obvious why such arrangements should be carefully structured and managed to prevent consumer confusion.

Mark Drapeau, over at O’Reilly Radar, brings a private sector example into the discussion about what public sector social media engagement, or Government 2.0, should look like.

If a goal of Government 2.0 is to provide citizens better services, and a strategy towards reaching that goal is to use social media tools to communicate better with citizens on multiple channels, it seems to me that listening and responding better to comments and complaints would be a great tactic.

In some ways, this is very similar to the point Clemo made in the comments to the post about about Twitter use by Fortune 100 companies yesterday.

Ultimately, to be truly successful, these tools have to be about helping people accomplish what they want to accomplish, not what the companies behind them hope to achieve.

Has anyone seen any particularly good or bad examples of the use of social media tools by the federal government?

So how are efforts at big companies to utilize Twitter going?  Not that well, according to a recent study by Weber Shandwick.    The study suggests that among the problems–too little to say and not enough personality are the obstacles to greater Twitter engagement.

Too little to say and not enough personality, huh?  It obviously wasn’t a study of politicians.