Goldman Sachs just turned to Richard Siewert, Jr., former counsel to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, to take the public relations reins.

Obviously, Goldman Sachs felt something had to change.

But they had no way of knowing the firm’s tarnished image would morph into a full-blown crisis.

That’s what happened yesterday when Greg Smith’s op-ed, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” appeared in The New York Times.

What makes the Smith piece so damning is it calls out the decay from the inside looking out with one overriding message:

Goldman Sachs will do anything to make money even if it comes at the expense of its clients.

You want clarity in message. There you go.

Here’s a smattering of the highlights:

… The environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

… Interests of the client continue to be sidelined.

Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

Encouraged that financial analysts see value in hyperbole.

I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?”

I guess what happens in Goldman Sachs doesn’t stay in Goldman Sachs.

Makes for riveting business storytelling.

It’s the type of blistering narrative that is sure to get the attention of clients, prospects, employees, friends and family of employees, and even government officials (no doubt part of President Obama’s Wednesday morning reading package).

So how does Goldman Sachs respond?

If the company views this as a PR crisis, they will utterly fail.

This isn’t about countering Smith’s words with the company point of view and striving to generate media coverage with diffusion in mind. The worse move would be to quickly cobble together their own op-ed as part of a tit-for-tat strategy.

This is a crisis of operation that cuts to the core of how Goldman Sachs conducts business.

Which actually offers a bigger opportunity for Siewert and the PR function.

Assuming Goldman Sachs can put its institutional arrogance to the side, Siewert can serve as a catalyst in shaping the new Goldman Sachs. I touched on this PR utopia before. As the “conscience” of the company, he can clinically identify the decisions and actions that don’t align with the company’s aspirations and core values. Does the company change how it behaves or change its aspirations and core values?

The two need alignment for effective communications.

If the company decides the aspirations and core values need some “tweaking,” keep the current management team.

But if it’s the behavior and actions that need an overhaul, Siewert has the unenviable task of pointing out that the leadership, starting with Mr. Blankfein, needs to change.

Otherwise, the never-ending barrage of negative stories will erode the brand until there is no brand.

We’ve touched on how Apple has shaped a master/servant relationship with the media.

More than a master of storytelling, Steve Jobs carefully controlled “supply” to ensure media “demand” was always there.

This communications foundation has served Apple well over years.

Which brings me to the question posed in the headline:

Does the potential wrath of Apple influence how the media treats Apple?

Let’s rewind the tape to last week’s iPad 3 announcement.

To get a sense of the raw coverage on the iPad 3 announcement, I plugged “Apple” and “iPad 3″ into the Google News engine for March 7 and 8. (Note: This does pull up some pre-launch stories on March 7, but still gets us horseshoe close.)

As you can see below, the search produced 28,900 hits.

Not a shocker that every publication in the free world wrote about the new iPad.

Given the hoopla around the working conditions at Foxconn, which manufactures many of the Apple products, I figured a sizable percent of the stories would include this data point. With this in mind, I plugged “Apple” and “iPad 3″ and “Foxconn” into the Google News engine for the same timeframe.

Only 205 hits came up.

While math isn’t my strong suit - don’t ask about my SAT score - by the best of my calculation a mere 0.7% of the stories mentioned Foxconn.

Naturally, the gadget publications are going to focus on the hardware, but I expected newspapers and business publications to give at least a cursory glance to Foxconn.

Not the case.

Even The New York Times, whose investigative pieces last month triggered the renewed scrutiny, steered clear of the topic.

I recognize this back-of-the-envelope exercise hardly constitute rigorous research.

Still, it does cause one to wonder.

Thanks to cloud computing, social media, the app ecosystem and 3-D printing to name a few, the barriers to bring new consumer products to market keep getting lower and lower.

For the most part, democratizing the act of inventing and allowing more ideas to see the light of day is a good thing. I think we’ve met with more bootstrapped startup ventures over the past couple of years than in the previous 10 combined.

No matter how tight the bank account, today’s entrepreneurs still recognize the value of public relations giving their product a fighting chance for survival.

Again, this is a good thing.

But I think PR agencies need to play a stronger role in evaluating new products and answering the simple question:

Is the product ready for prime time?

Which means drilling down into questions like this:

• How’s the “out-of-box” experience?
• Is the product stable?
• Where’s the differentiation?
• Does it bring a smile to the user’s face?
• Etc.

Increasingly, we’re playing the role of beta testing and taking greater control of our destiny. If we see problems, we’re working with clients to strengthen the product before the official launch. This way, we don’t have to answer pesky questions like, “Why does the app freeze every time I try to attach a photo?”

In a sense, this is the opposite of spin.

But what happens if the product was poorly conceived or suffers from what I’ll call foundation issues?

Such a situation happened earlier this week.

After evaluating the product, the team concluded that a public launch would be akin to walking blindfolded into a swamp while smeared with Nutella.

As is our policy in working with new ventures, we require part of the launch payment upfront to commence work. Subtracting our consulting time from the initial payment left a balance.

And that’s why we just cut a check for $4865 to return to the client.

Note: If you enjoyed this post, you might check out “Storytelling Can’t Help a Bad Product.”

In facilitating a branding workshop last week, it suddenly struck me.

One of the great myths of branding is the big guys get it right.

Thanks to their ample war chests, they can hire the smartest people, maintain an endless flow of M&Ms during focus groups and stockpile creative types.

It’s just not true.

Worse, bad branding begets bad branding. By that, I mean companies look up to these behemoths as role models and mimic their work.

As proof that the big guys can crash a brand, we’ll pick on United Airlines. Here’s a company that generated almost $9B in revenue last fiscal year. Even with the public dings - the guitar story still gets run on YouTube at 11,622,638 views and counting - people still fly United.

The United website proudly announces the page, “Our United Customer Commitment.”

Sounds promising.

Certainly, the brand stewards find this turf deserving of attention.

Yet, look at how the business storytelling plays out -

We are committed to providing a level of service to our customer that makes us a leader in the airline industry.

Now there’s a warm and friendly opener.

If there was ever a time for communications to focus outward (customer), not inward (company), it would be discussing commitment to the customer. Yet, the very first line talks about customer service “that makes US a leader in the airline industry.”

We understand that to do this we need to have a product we are proud of and employees who like coming to work every day.

Again, the words reflect an inward perspective.

And how the hell did the copy make a wrong turn at Drury Lane, pointing to employees who like coming to work.

Our goal is to make every flight a positive experience for our customers.

Nice.

The third line finally brings the customer into the frame.

Our United Customer Commitment explains our specific service commitments so that we can continue a high level of performance and improve wherever possible.

Huh?

I thought that’s what I was reading.

The Commitment explains our policies in a clear, consistent and understandable fashion.

Revealing that United seeks an “attaboy” for communications that are “clear, consistent and understandable…”

We have detailed training programs and system enhancements to support our employees in meeting these commitments, and we measure how well we meet them.

They decided to ask the Six Sigma department to craft the closing graph with a touch of TQC.

Welcome on board United Airlines!

Nothing wrong with the sign off.

It’s the previous words that miss the mark.

The last time I saw copy this bad Toyota was writing letters to its customers to diffuse the uproar over gas pedals sticking.

The big guys don’t always get it right.

It could be that United actually agrees. I couldn’t find the “Our United Customer Commitment” page yesterday, but here’s how it looked last week:

If you have other jarring examples, by all means share them.

If you enjoyed this post, you might check out “Brand Building Requires Courage.”

The latest issue of BusinessWeek offers the feature, “The Adventures of Superfood Man.”

The lead takes from one of those life-is-better-than-fiction moments:

On a good morning in Paradise Cove, Malibu, the water is so clear you can see halibut lurking in the kelp. Little Dume Point rises from its cliffs to the north, and beneath it a few surfers on stand-up paddleboards rise and fall on the swell waiting for their wave.

Darin Olien, who looks like a Tarzan action figure, is talking to a surfer in his early twenties named Igor about the health benefits of alkalinization in the body. He tells Igor, who’s trying to balance his board and blinking back the sun, that 7.4 is where the pH of our body wants to be and that most of our diets are far too acidic, which leads to inflammation and degenerative disease. Red meat is very acidic; coffee, corn, and wheat, too.

That’s the piece in a nutshell.

Teaching the Igors (and Igorettes) of the world there’s better fuel than T-bones and Starbucks. It’s called Shakeology.

Yet, the science supporting the claim is nowhere to be found according to the FDA and nutritionists.

Here’s the part that got my attention.

Mark Blumenthal, executive director of the American Botanical Council (trade group for herbal remedies), answers his own question on how the company justifies a premium price for a concoction that isn’t much better than a placebo:

“Construct a compelling story.”

I don’t think this was meant as a compliment or rallying cry for all business communicators to jump on the storytelling bandwagon.

Just to be clear, business storytelling should be grounded in truth.

But as an academic exercise, let’s evaluate whether Beachbody, the company behind Shakeology, delivers on the “compelling” part of the story.

The core sales pitch comes in two components:

Shakeology^®, an ultra-premium nutritional health shake provides the widest array of nutrients from around the world in a nutrient-dense but low-calorie formula. One that can’t be replicated anywhere.

Wouldn’t call this a riveting narrative.

Part two:

We searched the world for the most potent ingredients your body can easily absorb and utilize, creating a perfect combination of enzymes, prebiotics, antioxidants, and many rare ingredients like adaptogens, Camu-Camu, and Sacha Inchi. Here are all the different kinds of nutrients you’ll get from a single glass of Shakeology.

Camu-Camu?

Really?

I suppose the idea is to mesmerize the potential buyer with exotic ingredients he or she hasn’t heard of.

Next, we dig into the customer testimonials, pulling the one from Caterina P.:

I feel so energized!!!! (Yes, those exclamation points are real energy! :) Drinking Shakeology has given me so much energy-which I used to get from drinking coffee or Red Bulls-not anymore! Throw those nasty things in the trash where they belong and pass me my shaker cup!

One sign that shocked me was how ridiculously fast and strong my nails have grown. I used to wear acrylic nails for years, which forced them to be weak and yellow. They would never grow, and I had a terrible habit of biting my nails and the skin around them. Well, now I get asked, “Are those your real nails?” and I can say yes! I’ve even stopped the habit of biting! So Shakeology can help break bad habits and treat your body well.

Now, that’s “savvy” marketing, striving to touch all the major demographics including women under 40 who bite their nails.

And someone should alert the copywriter that a bunch of exclamation points doesn’t hone realness.

I do like the way they doctor up the nutritional value in such an official manner. Still, the power of the packaging loses something when you’re told:

Keep out of reach of children.

After careful analysis, I have to disagree with Mr. Blumenthal.

The story is not compelling.

I wonder if Igor agreed.