Tan Hong Ming's crush

What a brilliant video:



I would point it out as a great use of video by a nonprofit, but the tag says Petronas, which from seconds of research looks like an oil and gas company. Wonder what's up with that?

Framing A Social Change Message

How target audiences view your issue depends in large measure in how you "frame" it.

People use mental shortcuts to make sense of the world. Since most people are looking to process incoming information quickly and efficiently, they rely upon cues within that new information to signal to them how to connect it with their stored images of the world. The "pictures in our heads," as Lippmann called them, might better be thought of as vividly labeled storage boxes - filled with pictures, images, and stories from our past encounters with the world and labeled youth, marriage, poverty, fairness, etc. The incoming information provides cues about which is the right container for that idea or experience. And the efficient thinker makes the connection, a process called "indexing," and moves on.

Put another way, how an issue is framed is a trigger to these shared and durable cultural models that help us make sense of our world. When a frame ignites a cultural model, or calls it into play in the interpretation, the whole model is operative. This allows people to reason about an issue, to make inferences, to fill in the blanks for missing information by referring to the robustness of the model, not the sketchy frame.

This quote comes from FrameWorks Institute, which is devoted to the science of how audiences take in and process new messages. Check out their issues page for important suggestions on your issue and other excellent tools located on their website.

(Image via Frameworks Institute)

Presidential Press Conference

This was a precarious stance for Obama to take in the currently venomous climate toward Wall St.

As usual, the President talked to us like adults and asked us to behave accordingly. And he's right. But from a public relations perspective, he risked sounding sympathetic to a class of investors that have become public pariahs. And his comments came one day after he proposed a bank bailout that some people have characterized as a hand-out to the rich.

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Certainly the administration knows that any effort to temper public enmity towards Wall St. could make the President sound too conciliatory in an atmosphere where the electorate wants revenge. But this only underscores the depths of Obama's predicament: If he fuels that populist anger, he raises political barriers to the additional money Congress will need to authorize to aid the ailing economy.

So Obama has opted for a message of peacemaking. And he probably figures that Republicans can hardly quarrel with Obama's remarks, since they, too, need to make nice with their Wall St. base.

The prediction here is that Obama will pay a short-term price for his "don't demonize" remark, after the media finishes dissecting every word of the speech. The media began rumblings last week that Obama might be out of touch with the intensity of the public's spite, and unfortunately, his comment Tuesday night could be misconstrued as more evidence of that myth.

What is perhaps most admirable here, is that Obama is his message mavens are hardly oblivious to the criticism such remarks might provoke. But that hasn't deterred the President from saying what's necessary in a world of adults.

Bonus Coverage

Today's top story represents one of the rare instances where the fledgling Obama Administration has struggled in the face of an emerging storyline.

Obama's message machine hummed like a Corvette (prior to GM's collapse) through the campaign and into the first six weeks of his Presidency. But when the public blew a gasket over AIG's plans to award misfits with bonuses, the administration appeared to be backtracking. As a result, today's storylines characterize the administration as out of sync with the public, rather than in control of the situation.

What could have been done differently?

Set Expectations

From his acceptance speech on Election Night through virtually every publicly utterance since, Obama has tried to prepare the public for a prolongue economic slump. Strangely, that kind of perception-shaping was neglected in the case of AIG.

This predicament underscores the importance of setting expectations and releasing bad news on your own terms. We're learning today that the Administration knew about the bonuses for months. It would have spared itself some damage if it had disclosed months ago that 1) the bonuses were planned; 2) it would be legally difficult to derail them; but 3) the administration would do everything it possibly could to outmanuver the lawyers and stop the gluttony at AIG.

Had that transpired, recent stories might be focused on and administration fighting to keep greedy bankers in check, rather than an administration giving greedy bankers a government check.

Practice Message Discipline

Perhaps because it didn't anticipate the intensity of the public wrath against AIG, Obama Administration members exhibited a rare display of mixed messages over the past 48 hours, alternately expressing resignation to the bonuses and determination to undo them. From the NY Times:

Still, the president’s directive to his Treasury secretary to “pursue every legal avenue” against the payments seemed to conflict with statements over the weekend from the Treasury Department and from Lawrence H. Summers, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser in the White House, that the Treasury already had reviewed its legal options and concluded the administration had no power to stop the payments .

“We are a country of law,” Mr. Summers said on ABC-TV’s Sunday show. “This Week”:There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system,”

Unfortunately, by getting behind the story, today's coverage has focused less on the substance of the President's proclamation than the political expediency that informed it. That threatens the authencity of the message.

With today's statements, Obama may be well on his way to regaining control of the message. But for a day, at least, it appears that the Administration paid a price for bankers run amuck.