Bob Bissen is a vice president in APCO’s government relations practice and is based in Washington, D.C.

The finish of the Duke-North Carolina basketball game last night was amazing. Duke, which had trailed all night, and was down by 10 with less than three minutes remaining, rallied late and won the game on a three-pointer as time expired. As a basketball player and fan, President Obama can take both positive and negative lessons from the game as he looks at his reelection campaign. 

Duke won on the road — they went into a hostile environment at the “Dean Dome” and came away with a win. The president will certainly have to pick up electoral votes in swing states where he currently trails in the polls. And congressional redistricting has not been kind to him, taking electoral votes out of states he won in ’08 and moving them to states where they will be much more difficult for him to win. It won’t be easy, but Duke showed him it can be done.

Duke trailed most of the game — but they led when it mattered most, when the clock read 0:00. The president and his advisors can’t be too pleased with his standing in the polls right now. But once the GOP settles on a candidate and the Obama campaign can start spending their tremendous resources on boosting the president and attacking their opponent, they will be on a more level playing field. And it only matters to him that he has the most electoral votes on November 6. 

The winning basket was made by a newcomer — the three-pointer was made by a freshman, who just enrolled at Duke last August. That was only six months ago. The election will be in just less than nine months. The president must keep in mind that there will be issues that will come up along the trail that have not been considered at this point. Some of those will be introduced by his campaign, while others will likely be a complete surprise to all involved.  

Plenty of the TV audience turned off the game assuming North Carolina was going to win. I turned the game off with two and a half minutes to go, assuming I would get the final score in this morning’s paper. On a hunch, I turned the game back on with 13 seconds left, just in time to see the culmination of the dramatic finish. Listening to sports radio on the way to work this morning, I was amazed to hear how many others did the same, and that was echoed by my colleagues. U.S. election seasons are long (many would say too long, but that’s for another day), and the president and his team need to keep in mind that voters will not be hanging on every word for the next nine months. 

I’m not a Duke or North Carolina fan, and I don’t know who I’m voting for in November, but as last night’s game showed us, I hope the president and all of us remember that the election won’t be over until the last vote is cast.

Most of the Super Bowl commercials are presented with a “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” tone, so to stand out, a commercial has to have a clear, solid message coupled with compelling imagery. In a straw poll of the APCO CR team, a few of those stand-out commercials in 2012 tapped into broader themes of responsibility and shared value. Among the most notable spots (embedded below):

• The Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood, touting the resiliency of Detroit and America sends a powerful message about a domestic corporate giant getting back on its feet. It acknowledges that the daily headlines about unemployment, jobs, training, education and manufacturing actually represent real people facing real challenges in real communities.
• Cause-marketing heavy-hitter McDonalds used its Super Bowl dollars to debut a new Ronald McDonald House Charities commercial, featuring the darling leukemia patient Anastacio.
• The Budweiser “WeGo” rescue dog commercial fell flat—and the “help rescue dogs” web address at the end of the spot felt like an after-thought. Kind of a disappointment from the people who brought us the “Coming Home” spots to honor the troops.
• There were TWO fitness-focused messages: the NFL used some of its own valuable real estate to promote kids fitness with a Play :60 PSA, and Microsoft* Kinect got into the fitness game to promote their product, too.
• You may have also noticed the spot highlighting the NFL’s journey through time to demonstrate the improvements in equipment over the decades and player safety. This one was directed by Peter Berg of “Friday Night Lights” fame and reinforces the League’s commitment to addressing the concussion issue.

*APCO client

Click here to read my unsolicited campaign advice to candidate Obama.

Memo to POTUS Wannabe
From your humble servant
RE: Unsolicited Campaign Advice

Governor Romney –

As Churchill once said, you have reached not the “beginning of the end” but the “end of the beginning.” Your nomination is in sight but not yet secured. Your opponent, with his strengths and flaws, stands identified but not yet bested. If you wish to stand on the Capitol steps this coming January 20th taking the oath of presidential office,  I offer the following bits of campaign wisdom:

• Unleash Governor Romney – The Massachusetts version of Mitt was a moderate politician who brought common-sense solutions to the people of the commonwealth. Mitt 1.0 was a public servant prospering in a tough political arena. The American people, particularly those not in the right wing of the Republican Party, need to see you embrace your former self.
• Focus on job sustainability, not job creation – As president, you will actually have little control over creating jobs. In truth, a number of the policies you support, like free trade, are job “killers” (just ask the American textile, footwear, machine tool and car industries, among others). However, you can use the levers of government to sustain American jobs through tax, intellectual property, education and investment policies. Make this a key part of your platform.
• Pick a tested vice presidential candidate – You have no need to make a statement (Sarah Palin) nor appeal to a minority group (Bobby Jindal) nor seek a running mate to secure state electoral votes (Marco Rubio). But you do need to demonstrate the seriousness of your intent, and nothing says that more than who you select to be your running mate. The senior Republican bench is deep and well known so choose from this universe. Please.
• Define your “distinctness” but enunciate your commonalities – Americans like to vote for their president in direct contradistinction from the man who went before them. We elected a visionary Ronald Reagan over a technocratic Jimmy Carter. We elected a youthful Bill Clinton over an aged George Bush and we elected the next Bush as a uniter over the divisive Bill Clinton/Al Gore. It is not yet clear how you are distinct from this president, and that needs to be defined. Beyond that, we Americans are tired of negativity and division. Find ways to endorse some of President Obama’s policies and objectives and tell the American people that while these are good and should be sustained, you will add a host of other policies that will make America the prosperous nation you believe we all deserve.

Governor, should you follow this advice, we will be calling you “president” next January.

Bill Dalbec is senior vice president of APCO Insight^®, the opinion research group at APCO Worldwide.

In our third annual Employee Engagement study, which APCO Worldwide conducts with our friends at Gagen MacDonald, we chose to focus on the influence of social media on employee engagement in the workplace. Maril MacDonald recently wrote about the importance of executive leadership in internal communications broadly and internal social media (ISM) specifically. But what exactly is internal social media, and how do we know what employees really want?

In our recent survey of 1,000 employees at companies with at least 500 employees, 51 percent of respondents say their company is using internal social media tools to communicate with them. The primary tool employed is an intranet (71 percent of employees say their company has one); but about half have blogs, two-fifths use wikis and one-third deploy Facebook-like sites. Clearly, social media tools are making their way into the internal communications environment.

Drawing on industry best practices, we developed a list of attributes of ISM. Using factor analysis, our ISM Model isolated 21 discrete attributes that characterize the best programs, which in turn combine to form the three major factors that employees look for when deciding whether their company has effective social media internally. Our study found that Quality of Content is the most important aspect of ISM (42 percent importance to the model), followed closely by Engagement & Dialogue (37 percent); Optimization trails in importance (21 percent).

This model can be used by enterprises to assess the needs and design of their own ISM strategies and tools. Enterprises that apply this framework as a diagnostic tool are better able to guide how they design the overall ISM system as well as how they get buy-in from employees, which facilitates usage and engagement.

Done well, ISM has the potential to ease collaboration, make employees feel closer to their employers, aid in employee recruitment and retention, and engage employees who can become brand ambassadors.

How well is your own internal social media strategy aligned with employee expectations? If you’re not currently employing ISM, we encourage you to stick your toe in the water and see what happens – you might be pleasantly surprised!

This post originally appeared in the Diplomatic Courier.

Anyone involved in global business knows that the world is changing at lightning speed. Companies have to be smart, nimble, and increasingly knowledgeable about the policies and politics of their markets. They need advisors who can understand their business, provide a political context to their needs, opportunities and actions, and execute a successful strategy.

As consultants to these companies, we need to have the right resources to provide services in a new economy, and those resources need to be organized in ways that combine first-rate analysis with the ability to act with agility and deliver quality interactions at all levels. While some organizations continue to rely on think tanks to follow trends and shore up their knowledge of a given region of the world, many other companies are seeking support that goes beyond analysis. They are looking for actionable counsel that leverages regional knowledge by fostering relationships, identifying alternative markets for growth, and generally helping the company outline a course of action that accounts for the various stakeholders with whom they work. So while think tanks will always have their role, it is the convergence of the best analysis with the ability to execute in a nimble fashion that has become an important tool in a 21st century corporate arsenal.

Read the full article here.

It’s (nearly) over, I think. Romney’s pulling into a double-digit lead in Florida. Newt is quietly imploding, which many have long anticipated.

The media turned its fire on Newt, with help from establishment conservatives and Newt’s former colleagues, most of whom have been affronted, insulted or somehow done wrong by Newt, who forgets the one rule of Washington that never changes: “What goes ‘round comes ‘round.” (The only congressman of his era that I’ve seen endorse him is ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham, who is serving eight years in prison after pleading guilty to bribery).

At the end of the day, though, Newt has made Romney a better candidate. A few debates ago I told a friend, “Romney just can’t attack Newt. He doesn’t have it in him to pull it off effectively.” But then in the very next debate Mitt found his game (thanks apparently to a new debate coach) and had Newt on his heels to the point that Newt couldn’t come up with comebacks until after the debate was over.

So, in the continuing roller-coaster nature of this contest, it appears, again, that Romney is establishing control. Just how many lives can Newt have?

We’ll see. But I guarantee you one thing: when this is over, when Romney is the nominee, Newt will take credit for making him battle-ready for Obama.

He has to make himself the center of attention somehow.