My new column is up at The Times. Click on the here to read the whole thing.

Climbing the communications summit

By Pete Seat | Thursday, April 02, 2009

On Tuesday night, just a few hours before I departed London, President Barack Obama arrived, becoming only the 14th president to travel across the Atlantic while in office. Until President Woodrow Wilson’s three-month sojourn to Europe in 1918-19, international travel outside North America by a president was, well, a foreign concept (pun intended).

Over the past 91 years, these trips have left indelible memories in the collective consciousness of our nation. Images of Franklin Roosevelt secretly meeting with Churchill, Kennedy and Reagan in Berlin, Nixon in China and Clinton and Bush in Africa are continually referenced and shown on TV.

Important policy pronouncements aside, international trips provide public relations benefits that cannot be beat. Communicating a solid message at a summit, such as the two Obama will attend this week, requires precision management of hundreds of moving parts and conflicting messages. Each of the summits I traveled to in 2008 — NATO, US-EU, G8, APEC and the G20 in Washington, D.C. — proved that summits consistently provide unique communications challenges that a president’s team must tackle.

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