It is, of course, conventional wisdom that in the digital age, it's even more important to move quickly when crisis strikes. But I'd suggest that the opposite is true: because things move so fast, it's important for organizations to make sure they are not being stampeded into hasty but ill-conceived decisions based on transient events.

A perfect example occurred last week, when a video surfaced at a conservative website purporting to show Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod confessing that she gave preferential treatment to black farmers. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, apparently under pressure from a hypersensitive White House, responded quickly and forced Sherrod to resign.

The next day, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina reportedly praised the decision, telling colleagues: "We could have waited all day, we could have had a media circus--but we took decisive action, and it's a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere."

Or it would have been, had the video not been exposed as a total distortion of what Sherrod actually said. By the end of the week, the White House and the Department of Agriculture were furiously back-pedaling, but the damage had been done: by panicking as it did, the administration was made to look craven and weak.

Sometimes it's worth weathering an initial storm of criticism--however uncomfortable it may be for a few hours or even a few days--rather than to blunder badly because you couldn't wait for all the facts.

Clive Crook, who blogs for The Atlantic and writes a column for The Financial Times is one of the most intelligent--and least partisan--observers of the American political scene. Which makes his latest FT column an even bigger disappointment.

Under the headline "Obama Has Angered the Centre and the Left," Crooks demonstrates just what is wrong with so much of political journalism, viewing every policy decision through the prism of what it means in electoral terms. Politicians themselves can be forgiven for seeing politics primarily as a horse race; surely it is the job of responsible journalists to remind them that what really matters is whether the policies they enact are effective and how they impact the lives of real people.

Crook argues that "If Mr Obama had followed the advice of the party's progressive wing, he would have killed his administration's electoral prospects--and his own hopes of a second term--stone dead."

He doesn't actually spell out why he believes that statement to be true, but reading the rest of the column the logical conclusion is that Crook believes embracing the policies of the left would have further alienated "centrist" Americans. After all, the president has compromised with moderates in his own and the opposition party and still been branded a "socialist" by the far right.

But as Crook himself acknowledges, the dismal prospects of the Democrats in this year's mid-term elections are largely the result of a lousy economy. And his column doesn't begin to address the economic implications of Obama's decision to reject the policies of the left.

That's unfortunate, because it leads Crook to ignore the fact that the kind of stimulus package urged by left-leaning Democrats--economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is the most visible proponent of such policies--would almost certainly have resulted in a much more robust economic recovery than the one we are seeing right now. It was an approach focused on creating jobs rather than appeasing big business or addressing exaggerated concern over future deficits.

The weak stimulus package that the Obama administation enacted worked, but only weakly. The jobs it created barely made up for the jobs being shed by state governments and the private sector.

A strong stimulus package would almost certainly have worked better, on policy terms at least, since it would have put more Americans back to work more quickly. Regardless of what it did to Mr. Obama's election chances, it would have been a better policy.

But what about those election chances: does Clive Crook really believe that the Democrats' prospects would be worse if unemployment today stood at 7 or 8 percent today rather than 10 percent?

In a column more interesting for its hyperbole and political bias than any rational argument, Dan Calabrese (who says he worked in public relations for 12 years) calls the Obama administration's decision not to back down from a fight with Fox News the "dumbest PR move ever" and

Let's deal with the cliché, never-pick-a-fight-with-a-man-who-buys-ink-by-the-barrel argument first. Calabrese trots out the familiar conventional wisdom: "You have to deal with the media, even if they're not entirely fair, and the worst thing you can do when they've got their eye on you is to try to shut them out, hoping that somehow they will just move on to something else," he writes. And later: "This, however, is the first White House where the media relations geniuses surrounding the president thought they could make a media outlet go away by essentially pretending it doesn't exist."

But I don't get any sense that the White House PR team--the sharpest ever to occupy that building, in my opinion--is hoping that somehow Fox will just move on to something else, or that they think they can make a media outlet go away by essentially pretending it doesn't exist.

Rather, I think that they have come to the (in my opinion belated) realization that engaging with Fox News is simply pointless. There is no evidence to suggest that he network would produce more balanced news if it received full cooperation: the administration's frequent, almost obsequious attempts at outreach to the "network" have demonstrated that making nice is not going to cause Fox to abandon its war on the Obama presidency. And there is no evidence that Fox's coverage will become less balanced simply because the administration disengages. How could it?

But the broader question raised by Calabrese's rant is whether it makes sense to treat Fox News as a part of the media, or whether it is in fact an activist organization. Is Fox News driven by a public interest mission of informing and enlightening, or by a partisan political agenda? The network's role in organizing and recruiting for the tea party protests earlier this year seems to me to position it squarely as a political advocacy organization rather an a news-gathering enterprise.

So Fox News--in terms of its mission and motives--bears more resemblance to, say, Daily Kos, than it does to The New York Times or CNN. (I don't mean to suggest that Daily Kos would ever sink to the ethical depths of Fox News in terms of its accuracy and intellectual honestly; I was merely looking to identify a similarly ideological "news" organization on the other end of the political spectrum.)

The question of whether organizations have an obligation to engage with their ideological adversaries--and what form that engagement should take--is quite different how an organization should respond to the media.

Every organization finds itself with faced with activist groups who can never be placated, because they have no interest in the organization's perspective, the facts or the truth. At some point, an organization has to decide whether engagement with those groups has any chance of success. If it doesn't, the organization is smart to dedicate its resources to those critics with whom it has a chance of establishing a genuine dialogue.

There is zero chance of any kind of honest dialogue, engagement, or consensus between this administration and Fox News. Once the latter elected to wage a war against the administration, there was simply no reason for the White House communications team to waste any more of its own time and energy and public's hard-earned money.

If the BBC was Fox News--or even NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN--I would be worried about it offering the leader of the far-right British Nationalist Party a "platform" to communicate his views.

But British journalists are not inclined to be spoon-fed answers and are still inclined to ask difficult questions, and to demand answers. Check out this wonderful BBC clip if you don't believe me. And so Nick Griffin is unlikely to find himself in a position to spew propaganda--especially since the BBC has come in for so much criticism over this decision, which means a U.S.-media style free ride is pretty much out of the question.

In this instance, sunlight really is likely to be the best disinfectant.

Having said all that, take a look at the BNP's positions, described on its website here. This is a party still considered beyond the pale by most of my countrymen. Tell me whether there's anything there you can imagine GOP leaders like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin disagreeing with.

I can't help thinking that in Twitter, the Republicans have found their ideal communications medium.

A few weeks ago, there were numerous stories about the GOP's use of Twitter after Tweet Congress focused attention on the issue. Reports suggested that 24 percent of Republican lawmakers were using Twitter, while only 8.5 percent of their Democratic counterparts were.

This was a big deal, because it is widely assumed that superior mastery of new media was one of the things that helped Barack Obama trounce John McCain in the recent presidential election, and so any indication that Republicans were engaging with new communications channels and reaching out to younger voters was big news.

Why Twitter? Partly, I assume, because it is the hot new medium. But partly because it's 140-character limit is ideal for context-free communication.

So when Senator McCain wanted to mock earmarks in the latest budget, he turned (or, more likely, one of his younger, hipper staffers did) to Twitter, sending out tweets mocking money directed to "Mormon cricket control" and "Beaver management."

Twitter's perfect for this kind of schoolyard sarcasm, because there's no space to provide context, such as the crop damage caused by crickets or the potential for flooding if beaver activities aren't managed. It's a great medium for scoring cheap laughs at the expense of reasoned debate.

You might have gathered by now that Twitter is not my favorite new medium. Not surprising, given that brevity has never been one of my virtues.

Still, it's nice to see Republicans are trying to engage via social media. Maybe next they can come up with one or two actual policies that appeal to the under-60s.

I went to bed last night, and woke up a little after midnight, just as the first polls were closing back in the United States. I watched the election coverage until about 8 this morning, then I headed out to Paddington station, for a train to Heathrow. In an hour or two I will be on a Virgin Atlantic flight to Shanghai.

On my way to the airport, and then in the Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow, I have had half a dozen conversations with Brits (and one, I think, German). I get mistaken for an American a lot back in my home country; apparently, I picked up a trans-Atlantic accent during my 20 years in New York. Their excitement over the new leader of the free world, Barack Obama, was palpable (though not, it should be said, as palpable as their contempt for the outgoing office holder.)

Obviously, after the experience of the past two presidential elections, the first few hours of CNN's coverage (in the U.K., it's either CNN or Fox; we chose the lesser of two evils) were somewhat nerve-wracking. Even after CNN called it for Obama at around four in the morning, I kept expecting someone to announce that they'd found 10,000 missing McCain ballots in Ohio, or that 20,000 Democratic votes had gone missing in Florida. It was only after McCain's concession that it really sank in.

Only a month or so ago, my British and continental European friends were expressing their doubt that Americans would ever vote for a black president. Or that the same people who voted for George W. Bush four years ago--long after it became apparent who he really was--could vote for someone like Barack Obama. At times I worried that I must sound hopelessly naïve, assuring them that I was confident of an Obama victory, that for the vast majority of Americans the content of Barack Obama's character was more important than the color of his skin.

But my faith in America turned out to be entirely justified. I am relieved, excited, and for the first time in eight years optimistic that America can once again be a force for good in the world. America chose hope over fear; unity over division; and decency over negativism.

[I was going to include a whole section here about the unspeakably vile campaign run by John McCain here, but if Obama can be gracious in victory, I see no point in dwelling on the negative.]

Once the immediate euphoria of this moment has passed, I dare say I will have some more semi-coherent thoughts on the public relations lessons to be drawn from this victory. For the moment, though, I am going to enjoy an early morning beer and toast the 44th president of the United States, who I believe has a chance to be one of the greatest in the country's history.

Today we introduce a new award, for Worst Spin Ever. Our first nominee....

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, in a memo explaining why his candidate remains confident despite trailing by an average of 6.5 in national polls: "Today, [Obama] expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn't have the votes to win."

Needless to say, North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona are all traditionally solid red. If Obama wins any of them, he will almost certainly already have more than 360 electoral votes in the bag. He's investing in these states in part because he wants the McCain campaign to have to stretch its resources even thinner than they already are, in part to boost the prospects of Democrats running for Congress in those states, and in part because he senses the chance of a landslide.

In other words, Davis would have you believe that Obama is playing offense deep in the Republican half because he's given up on swing states like Pennsylvania and Colorado, where he only has a double digit lead.

The Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy, the always informative Carl Bialik , points to brandadvocacy08.com , a site operated by brand consulting firm Motive Quest that tracks online buzz about the two presidential candidates, not only at political sites such as DailyKos and The Corner, but at a whole host of mainstream sites, from ESPN.com to Men's Health.

The idea, as Motive Quest chief executive David Rabjohns explains to Bialik, is that when they talk to pollsters, "people try to come up with answers that sound intelligent, but the truth is we don't always buy things for intelligent reasons." In a more anonymous forum, they may be more candid. Rabjohns says his measurement of online brand advocacy for consumer products is a pretty accurate predictor of sales, and has pledged to shave his head on YouTube if the company's numbers don't accurately predict the winner. (Based on yesterday's buzz, Obama has an online promoter score of 63 and McCain is at 37.)

One interesting note is that Bialik asks whether politicians should be marketed more like brands, and Rabjohns offers the following insight: "What's happening at the moment is that brands increasingly need to be marketed like politicians. Politicians attach themselves to memes that matter. Successful brands and politicians that do that are able to generate more advocates."

I think he's half right. Consumer companies can learn this lesson from politics, and many have: it's one reason cause-related marketing and corporate responsibility can build loyalty and advocacy so effectively. But we shouldn't forget that at the end of the day, politics is transactional, whereas building a corporate or consumer brand is about a long-term relationship--which is why so much of what goes on in a political campaign, particularly polarizing attacks on the other party, would be ineffective in a consumer context.