By Tracy Olmstead Williams
Olmstead Williams Communucations

For the past two weeks, almost every meeting, holiday party, conference call or chance encounter has started the same for me: “You’re in crisis communications, what should Tiger Woods do?” Any answer I give is already two weeks too late. Tiger Woods broke the cardinal rule of crisis communications — report your own bad news. Why? Because if you don’t, others will be more than happy to do so, often get it wrong, keep it going longer and provide no glimpse of the true emotions of the transgressor. If Tiger had told everything, as painful as that might have been, it would have cut the legs out from under the follow-up stories. Tiger’s postings on his Web site this weekend, although finally coming clean, didn’t give us any emotional connection to him. It’s a step, but it would be far more powerful to see and hear it from him directly.

Richard Nixon wrote the book on crisis management, proving forever that “stonewalling,” his own word, failed even the all-powerful president of the United States. Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, didn’t read that book. Many otherwise extremely successful public figures didn’t either. Gary Hart. John Edwards. Eliot Spitzer. Kobe Bryant. Mark Sanford. Each and every one followed up their indiscretion by fumbling their crisis communications. It’s human instinct to want to deny and cover up.
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