In politics, if you’re not on message, you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… “Handle With Care.”
I used to live in Oklahoma and, while the BBQ is superb and the people there are among the nicest you will find anywhere, they are not great about the occasional snow storm. I think that becomes even more the case as you go south into Texas.
This past week, much of that region were blanketed with snow and millions were left without power, heat and even water.
Residents in Colorado City, a small town of fewer than four-thousand people about four hours west of Dallas, took to social media to encourage their mayor to open city facilities that still had power and heat so people could go there to warm up.
Seems like a reasonable request and if people were a bit cranky, well, who could blame them?
Well, the mayor of Colorado City was also feeling a bit cranky, as you’ll see from his response, posted on Facebook:
“No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a d— handout!”
Sounds like no one should confuse the now-former mayor, Tim Boyd, with Winston Churchill.
Churchill famously said, “Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”
Boyd also went on to suggest that anyone looking for help from the city during the outage was the result of bad parenting.
So, what’s this week’s lesson?
Don’t do that.
Just about everyone can be a jerk from time to time and, for much of human history, there wasn’t a lot of danger in it. Most of us could only offend so many people at once.
But social media platforms have given us the ability to take a self-inflicted wound from a paper cut to an atom bomb.
It’s easy to forget that, to some extent, what you post on social media would have been the equivalent of going on TV 30 years ago to yell about something.
Think of social media as a loaded weapon. Handle it with extreme caution.
If you find yourself ready to react passionately to something – anything – go ahead and write that post, if you must. But for heaven’s sake, don’t publish it until you’ve take some time to cool down.
Have a trusted friend look at it and get some feedback on how it is going to play out.
Even skilled communication professionals test messages before they use them.
#Know your audience.
Know your message.
And remember just how long it can take to repair the damage done by a single misstep.#
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our new YouTube channel.
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