How Mark Zuckerberg can prep to be Congress’s ‘whipping boy’

Keep your cool, Mark Zuckerberg, since this could get ugly. Show deference. Take your lumps. Watch your tone. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

So goes a recommendation from congressional experts and predicament communications specialists, who contend a Facebook CEO’s testimony this week before U.S. lawmakers on Capitol Hill will be distinct any open barbecuing a tech billionaire has ever faced, following a cheer over how his social-media height facilitated a injustice of information by a voter-targeting organisation Cambridge Analytica.

It will spin into a feeding frenzy unequivocally fast.– Dan Hill, president, Hill Impact predicament communications

“He’s going to take a ruin of a beating,” pronounced David Fuscus, boss and CEO of Xenophon Strategies, a predicament communications organisation that has coached dozens of executives to attest on Capitol Hill. “And if he doesn’t wish to only be a punching bag, he’s got to find a approach to get his messages through.”

Facebook has revealed that Cambridge Analytica, that had ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, competence have harvested information on 87 million users without their knowledge. In Washington, Zuckerberg will have to answer for that crack of trust in hours-long testimonies.

“It’s a trap,” pronounced Rachel Bovard, executive of process during a Conservative Partnership Institute and a longtime Senate staffer. “Part of a open gushing is being Congress’s defeat child in a unequivocally open way.”

Lawmakers will be entrance during him with questions designed to trouble him and, ironically, to shelve adult Facebook “likes” for their domestic grandstanding, Bovard said.

Joint hearings start Tuesday with a Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees, followed Wednesday with a House Energy and Commerce committees.

Zuckerberg’s group will manager him

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is a member of a Senate law cabinet which, along with a Senate commerce committee, will doubt Zuckerberg in a initial of dual corner hearings. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

He competence already have been practising for weeks. A standard tactic will be to asperse him around ridicule “murder boards,” in that open family strategists try to hit him off-kilter with their harshest questions.

Crisis consultants will expected learn him to scrupulously residence a chair and a senators, and cavalcade him to broach answers yet stammering. He competence be videotaped in a unnatural conference so his group can examination his physique denunciation and scold his tinge if he shows manifest annoyance.

Had he hired Helio Fred Garcia, a predicament communications manager with Logos Consulting, he competence be spending hours in a staged Senate chamber, with actors portraying lawmakers sitting on a high height so he’s forced to demeanour adult while responding — partial of a “power play” of such hearings, Garcia said.

“We’d do a live-fire exercise,” Garcia said. “He gets beaten adult and screamed at — and if we speak like a leader, if you’re prepared, if we concede yourself to get a beating, you’ll get by it OK.”

Zuckerberg competence pull lessons from prior CEO flameouts.

Wells Fargo’s lesson: Own adult quickly

“You should resign,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren admonished Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf during his peppery 2016 doubt over a fake-accounts liaison during a bank. Within a month, Stumpf did only that.

During his hearing, he offering “regrets” for a situation, yet unsuccessful to prove senators with what was deliberate a lukewarm apology. He resisted explanation to systemic misconduct.

There’s a teachable impulse there for Zuckerberg, who remained wordless for days after a Cambridge Analytica revelation. When he finally spoke to a New York Times, he didn’t immediately apologize; later, on CNN, he offering a regular “I’m unequivocally contemptible that this happened.”

That won’t cut it in Congress, says Garcia.

“It has to be an apology, not a ‘regret,’ and it has to be transparent what a corruption was,” he said.

Dan Hill, boss of consulting organisation Hill Impact, calls it a “slow-cooker crisis.”

“They’ve only authorised a vigour to build and build, and it will spin into a feeding frenzy unequivocally fast.”

BP’s lesson: Take your lumps

Following 2010’s Deepwater Horizon blast and oil spill, BP CEO Tony Hayward was ripped for sounding wearied and conceited in his testimony, and for disappearing to answer questions with sprightly “I was not concerned in decision-making” responses.

Hayward was shortly transposed as CEO.

“It won’t work if we go out there like a BP oil executives or repudiate a problem or plea a member of Congress,” pronounced Matt Glassman, a comparison associate during a Government Affairs Institute during Georgetown University.

Zuckerberg needs to “take his lumps” yet holding any rebukes personally, Glassman said. He is a potted plant in a room and shouldn’t sound combative. This isn’t a impulse for him to try to rehabilitate his image. It’s for lawmakers to take their shots, denote their toughness on a issues and beget self-flattering headlines for their voters to see.

“The biggest mistake he can make is to start meditative it’s his stage,” Glassman said.

Congressional hearings are “more about domestic entertainment than policy,” Fuscus said. He shouted a common Washington saying: “The many dangerous place in D.C. is between a congressman or senator and a TV camera.”

Big Tobacco’s lesson: Be clever underneath oath

When a CEOs of a 7 vital tobacco companies swore before a House row in 1994 that they didn’t trust nicotine was addictive, a Department of Justice investigated them for probable perjury after leaked papers seemed to protest their statements.

(Perjury charges were forsaken after a execs argued their use of a word “believe” showed they were saying opinions.)

That did small to relieve a open snub and dread of Big Tobacco. Within dual years, all 7 execs had quit a industry. Zuckerberg can find a approach to be guileless yet “falling on his sword and draining out in front of Congress,” Hill said.

“It’s critical to go out there and be frank and honest and respectful,” Hill said. “But be measured. You don’t have to let Congress expostulate a whole narrative.”

That means pivoting a review to a “forward position” and removing behind to messages about Facebook’s values and how to encourage a audience, Hill said. He expects Zuckerberg will expected be coached on how to anxiety corporate failures, speak about regulating shortcomings and, if he’s in a bind, “run out a clock” on senators with singular time for questions.

Auto execs’ trip-ups and triumphs

Seeking a open bailout in 2008, a CEOs of a Big Three automobile makers blew it before they even done it to Capitol Hill, alighting in Washington by private jet — afterwards pleading for taxpayer money.

“Couldn’t we all have downgraded to initial category or jet-pooled or something to get here?” New York Representative Gary Ackerman asked. “It would have during slightest sent a summary that we do get it.”

On a flip side, General Motors CEO Mary Barra survived a bruising testimony in 2014 about a ignition-switch recall, and stays in her executive purpose to this day.

“She’s a indication of how to take responsibility, how to be authentic, to be real, to not shirk” a scandal, pronounced Davia Temin, a New York-based CEO manager who also prepares them for testimony. “She had a devise to repair it even yet it had been a matter of months that she’d been in a purpose and it wasn’t indispensably of her making. She was brilliant.”

Barra’s tenure of a problem expected helped move a liaison to a tighten in a public’s minds, Temin said.

“Frankly, if we were operative with Zuckerberg, we would move out those tapes of Mary.”

Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mark-zuckerberg-congress-whipping-boy-testify-1.4608132?cmp=rss