Unspun

Unspun has just finished the book Nail ‘Em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities & Businesses by Eric Dezenhall. It is agood book, written crisply, with sincerety, and contains a gold mine of insights into the the Culture of Attack plaguing America (and elsewhere).

Dezenhall’s viewpoint is honed in the trenches when he is defending his cients against attacks by individuals, NGOs and other organizations. It is not at all a genteel world. His main premise is that there are many people out there who would, attack your business, personality or company either out of malice or out of a need to get attention.

In such attacks, if they look like they have “legs,”there is little choice but to mount a counter attack. He makes a very engaging distinction between PR , which is the art and science of persuasion, and crisis management which is the art and science of disuasion.

When businesses come under attack, you need to pull out all the stops to dissuade the attacker if you want to survive. Dezenhall speaks from the trenches where there are some very nasty people indeed.

He also speaks of the difficulty of businesses to comprehend that the world outside does not rust or like them and that the only way to dissuade an attacker is a counter attack rather than appeasement. In the event of an attack, Dezenhall says with great prescience, you need to defuse attacks on visceral emotion, not reason.

Though Dezenhall speaks of the Culture of Attack in America and draws his examples from his native country, the points he makes about these issues tanscend boundaries. The Culture of Attack is also prevalent in Indonesia. A media given more to entertainment than investigation is as prevalent in Indonesia as it is in the US.
Dezenhall is at all times pragmatic and realistic, to the point that he sounds Machiavellian. This book should be required reading for all business people who are crisis-aware and to all PR people who help their clients confront crisis like situations. It’s available online and was on sale in Kinokuniya at laza Senayan – but I think I bought the only copy they had. There’s always Amazon.com.

Here’s an example of a couple of “disuasive facts of life” as written by Dezenhall:

Defuse attacks on visceral emotion, not reason. Targets must know and communicate the facts of their case but not rely on them. The public responds better to emotional cues than it does to facts…..

or

Driving up positives alone – image building – won’t reduce the negatives being alleged. Audiences don’t appreciate benefits unless they are convinced that the risks aren’t serious. Image-building campaigns assume that everybody likes a target’s goodies as much as they do. It’ a dangerous assumption. Tragets can’t hide from the fundamental allegation at hand and must be prepared todrive down the negativs with a defense that includes contrary evidence, a roadmap for improvement, or discrediting their attacker…

(In Indonesia this applies especially to targets who are prone to resort to advertorials extolling their CSR activities when they ar, for example, being accused of pollution and causing widespread illnesses).