Michelle Jordan believes Martha Stewart might have saved herself a prison sentence, or at least served less time, if she had owned up to selling stock on an inside tip. "From the beginning, she denied any wrongdoing," says Jordan, who is the principal and founder of Jordan LLC, a strategic communications consulting firm in Newport Coast, Calif., that specializes in reputation and crisis management. "As a result, her recovery in the court of public opinion took much longer than it might have."

On the other hand, Jordan says Michael Phelps, the Olympic gold medal swimmer, handled the negative publicity just right when he was caught smoking pot in early 2009. "He admitted it immediately, and though he lost his Kellogg endorsement, other sponsors stood by him after he came clean," Jordan says.

Helping wealthy and powerful people navigate public opinion, and the media spotlight, is more than a passing interest to Jordan.

Jordan herself is a recognizable figure who has critiqued celebrities and their crisis management on MSNBC, Fox News and other media outlets, but her own clients are private citizens, albeit prominent pillars of their communities. As she points out, any individual or family with extreme wealth has a reputation to protect and, if a scandal should erupt, often has more to lose than an entertainer or sports star, from whom the public doesn't necessarily expect sterling behavior. Even if a scandal is just local news, the private individual who is involved can still walk into any local restaurant or country club and become instant fodder for whispers and stares. A divorce within a prominent family, a new marriage, a new business, a business failure or disappointment, illness or a succession issue within a family business, a lawsuit, a problem on a nonprofit board, not to mention a son or daughter with a drinking problem-all of these are situations that might lead someone to call Jordan.

"Private individuals very rarely if ever have a team of handlers around them the way celebrities do," she says. "So they tend not to have any guidance as to how to manage the situation when something goes wrong. As a result, a couple of things happen. First, there's this automatic fear of the press. The second thing is, people often try to cover up the truth. I always say a lie can only get bigger and silence can only get louder." 

Part of what her firm does is old-fashioned public relations, helping clients determine how to handle media inquiries when things go wrong as well as how to develop a positive public image in the first place.  But Jordan is more interested in steering her clients to a plan that makes reputation not just a media strategy but part of a family mission statement. When she started Jordan LLC in 1998 most of her clients were CEOs and other senior executives looking for consultation about communication and leadership development, but a focus on wealthy families began about five years ago as the result of a series of meetings with Patricia Soldano, the founder and then CEO of Cymric Family Office Services in Costa Mesa, Calif., which GenSpring Family Offices acquired in December 2008. With Soldano, who is now president of the Southern California office of GenSpring, she talked about the importance of reputation to high-net-worth families, and how it is a greater concern than ever due to the amount of information-and misinformation-that appears on the Internet. 

Jordan and Soldano agreed that wealthy families should consider reputation as important as wealth preservation and legacy building. "It's like the third leg of a three-legged stool. Your reputation can directly affect the other two legs, but in most families it is not managed with the same degree of attention," says Jordan. As with wealth preservation and legacy building, a solid reputation can be shattered overnight if the stakeholders aren't prepared to address adverse circumstances.

"I've found that if people come to me before anything happens, and are willing to sit down and acknowledge that there is something that could become a crisis, we work out a communications strategy and more often than not we are able to deflect it," says Jordan. "Most crises are the result of an issue that has emerged but keeps getting swept under the carpet until it finally erupts."

Jordan has made a number of presentations at conferences of GenSpring advisors and clients. "Usually people will say they'd never thought of this before," says Soldano. "Or they'll say 'I need to go home and check my children's Facebook pages.' Michelle is a visionary in this area, and we are now telling people to hire someone like her. Then when a crisis erupts you have a plan in place. It's like having a plan in case there is an earthquake."  
In her presentations Jordan generally outlines a series of preventive tactics that she believes every wealthy family should deploy. The most important, she says, are these six:

1. Agree that the family's reputation should be treated as a valuable asset.

2. Become familiar with social networks. Jordan says family members-young ones and even many of the adults-need to understand that anything they post on such networks as Facebook and Twitter will become a matter of public record. She once had a client who was running for political office and was photographed at a party standing behind a table filled with wine glasses. A reporter contacted the client, pointing out that the photo was posted on YouTube-something that could have caused severe embarrassment seeing as how the client was known as a non-drinker.  The photo did not get any further attention, but once the client became aware of it he was able to prepare an explanation just in case.

3. Conduct a thorough Internet search. "That includes the more obscure references that are deeply embedded, often starting sometime around page 15 of a search," says Jordan. There are search companies that can help find these hidden references. Jordan works with one such company, RepuMinders, which is part of Transom Family Services. While search outfits cannot remove the negative references, Jordan believes it is important to be aware of what is out there and try to build positive references by seeking media coverage of a client's more redeeming activities.

4. Audit the family's reputation on a regular basis. Jordan recommends conducting a thorough Internet search every three to six months. "It's a review of your reputation, like reviewing your investment portfolio," she says. "At this time family members should also talk about whether there is anything going on that has the potential to emerge as an issue."

5. Assemble a crisis team and have a plan in place to get the necessary information out. The team should include certain family members but also a lawyer, the head of the family office, a media relations representative and a trusted family friend. Jordan believes a family, like a corporation, should appoint an official spokesperson, whether it is someone in the family or an outside professional, who will handle all inquiries if a problem occurs. The spokesperson should be prepared to figure out who has a right to know what is going on-that could be investors in the family business, a spouse, the media,  employees, bankers, vendors, clientele, insurance agents, government officials, and others-and how much information is appropriate. However, the spokesperson should always be truthful so that the information he or she communicates leaves no room for innuendo or rumor. "I would never work with someone who came to me and said, 'Can we spin this so it looks as if I didn't do it?'" says Jordan. "If you're guilty you're guilty." Instead, she advises anyone who has committed a legal or ethical violation to go public with an acknowledgement, then seek redemption through what she calls the three "R's": responsibility, recourse and remedy.

6. Enhance the family's good name whenever possible. "This isn't about self-aggrandizement or publicity," says Jordan. Rather, letting the world know about philanthropic work and accomplishments of family members can be a preventive strategy, a way of building a good reputation that can carry a great deal of weight when something goes wrong. She also recommends rewarding family members who help strengthen the family's reputation.

Jordan recommends the same tactics for anyone who runs a business.  "The CEO is the voice of the company, and responsible for the ethical tone," she says. Consider the many Wall Street CEO's currently under fire largely for a lack of contrition over their roles in profiting from the credit bubble that led to the financial crisis. As another reputation specialist, Franz Paasche at Communications Consulting Worldwide in New York, told the International Herald Tribune in November, one of the repercussions of this perceived personal failing might be that banks will be ill-equipped to fight for the policies they want in Washington. By contrast, CEO Gil Scharf of the brokerage firm Euro Brokers established a reputation as a compassionate and ethical corporate leader after his firm lost 61 people, a third of its staff, in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Jordan, who is a personal friend of Scharf, called him right after the tragedy and they talked about how to handle that unforeseen crisis. "I said you're going to be judged by how you treat the families of the victims," says Jordan. "He had no other thought than that." Scharf made himself accessible to the press, relating personal recollections of employees who had died, and quickly set up a relief fund for the families.

Kathy Bronstein, former CEO of the Southern California-based fashion retailer Wet Seal, turned to Jordan over another matter that could have damaged her reputation: In February 2003, after 18 years with the company, she was fired from Wet Seal with no warning. The company had suffered two quarters of poor performance, but less than a year before "many in the industry were hailing her as a merchandising genius," the Los Angeles Times reported.

"Michelle told me when I should accept a media interview and when I shouldn't," says Bronstein. When Bronstein did talk to the media, she was up front about the firing, as well as her subsequent lawsuit against the company (for wrongful termination, gender discrimination, defamation, emotional distress and invasion of privacy) and settlement. A year after Bronstein lost her job, the local newspaper, the Orange County Register, ran an interview in which she owned up to having occasionally lost her temper as a boss, but also made it clear that she had moved on, reassessed her life, and become happy with her new part-time consulting business, which continues to thrive. Bronstein says Jordan was particularly helpful in showing her how to steer interviews so that she was able to tell her side of the story. "I'd recommend Michelle in any situation where someone needs advice on how to minimize the downside," she says.