Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The Major League Baseball substance abuse scandal is an important lesson in how not everything can handled by positive spin. The results of the 20-month investigation by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell is scheduled to be released on December 13, with somewhere between 50 to 80 former and current players to be named as users.

As mentioned in a couple other places, Major League Baseball itself is under fire from all this, not just the players, because they allowed Barry Bonds to go forward in pursuit of one of the most important baseball records there is: the all-time home run record, while knowing he was using performance-enhancing drugs. They did it to increase TV viewing numbers and generate more interest in the sport. Now their negligence is coming home to roost.

How do you handle something like this in business? The answer is to not let it happen in the first place. The use of steroids in Major League Baseball has been known for years. It's not a secret.

While no business can be exempt from having a scandal, as there's no way everything in life can be monitored, it can have policies and testing in place to ensure it doesn't get out of control, like it has here.

But more importantly, we have to have more than policies, we must follow through on policies to give them some teeth and legitimacy.

Negative publicity, in one form or another, will hit most businesses at some time in their exitence. The key is how things were handled leading up to that publicity. Was everything being done to prevent the problem? Was the business following through on existing policy?

When negative publicity comes, you can count on their being investigation into the matter: whether legally or from media. We must operate and run our businesses with that assumption, and also the assumption that our picture may end up on the lead story or a TV news report, front page of a newspaper, or scattered around the Internet.

Reminding our people that actions taken today, could end up resulting in that tomorrow, should be a strong preventative measure for most workers in a company.

Everyone in a company should be taught to picture what they're doing end up in the public eye. If their actions are there, can they live and be comfortable with it.

If we allow something to go on, and it's found out that we've done that, there's no way you can spin the resultant negative publicity. There's no cure for this type of business reputation cancer. The key is to make sure we operate in the highest integrity. The public and customers can forgive mistakes, it's much harder for them to forgive when you're complicit in what has happend; either by commission or ommision. At that time the physicion can't heal himself, it's too late. 

Baseball's going to go through more hard times by taking so long to head off this known problem. The one thing that may save it is that at least they're doing something serious about it now.