When you are the face of a company, you can say good-bye to having a personal life. Well, you will still live it, but anything you do will impact the company you’re representing. If you’re caught driving while drunk, if you get into a fight or get arrested for any reason whatsoever, it will impact the company. If you make racist or other hateful comments, if your clothes are inappropriate, if your kids do something wrong, it will impact the company. That’s a fact. What’s unclear is how a company representative’s mishaps or mistakes or eccentricities will actually affect the business.

In some cases, customer lose their trust in the company. If the person speaking in their behalf was a thief, what guarantee is there the company isn’t also stealing. In other cases, such as Facebook, a movie showing the CEO acting like a careless smart ass that is more interested in his company than in his friends or any human relationship for that matter might actually have no negative impact. Facebook users are either inspired to go for it all, too addicted to Facebook to give it up, or find that not using the service will affect them more than using it, in a word, they’re being practical.

Another fact we cannot deny is that there is no perfect life and no perfect human being. So anyone representing a company will do something that’s debatable, if not completely wrong. The big gamble of how it will influence customers is determined by two factors: who will find out and how the imminent crisis will be managed. So if you do represent a brand or a product or a corporation, try to keep to yourself when going nuts. A wild party should be for close friends only, for example.

The other big issue when it comes to individual images and their impacting a company’s brand is the consequences, in other words how the spokespersons themselves are affected. How much will your mistake cost? If you own the company, there’s no immediate danger, but you will feel the losses first hand if your customers decide to spend their money elsewhere. If you’re an employee, you could get fired. Then again, if your contract is solid enough and you’re awesome at your job, you might just be replaced by a new face of the company. If you’re a contracted spokesperson, you might lose the client, and again, you will feel the monetary loss immediately.

The bottom line is simple. The moment you start representing a company, your life gets complicated. You’re under constant scrutiny. So my advice, if you accept such a challenging and rewarding position is to pay extra attention to what’s going on around you, double check all your decisions just in case, try to avoid any criminal activity, and make sure you have a nice crisis management plan in place! But most importantly, if you have a great team advising you on what to say, listen to them, they know what they are talking about. Don’t think I am right? Just think BP for a few seconds… Or think Tiger Woods!

A couple of weeks ago, I went to an interview with one of my clients. We were meeting an IT journalist who was working for a local business magazine. We met, the interview went great, the story was supposed to be included in a future edition of the magazine.

We even sent some photos after the interview, as there was no photographer available for that interview. And then we waited. It was a 2-week wait. But after just one week, we heard that he magazine had been shut down. Most employees had been fired, a few of them had been transferred to a different business magazine of the same group.

This is the third magazine that’s closed down since last autumn. Will more follow? Should we get used to not have our clients’ stories published not because they’re not good enough, but because there’s no newspaper/magazine to publish it in?

Crisis, depression, downturn – no matter how you put it, the feelings the current situation generates are the same: fear, panic, pessimism. Stories of layoffs and closed doors hit us on every channel: TV, newspapers, blogs, email lists at work, water cooler stories of what’s happening in other companies. I won’t link to any of these stories, I don’t want to help the general depression feeling grow.

The best advice anyone can give you is not to panic and not to give in to feeling depressed. You might have heard this particular piece of advice before, but you should repeat it to yourself daily, use it as some sort of personal mantra. Why? Because panic makes you stop thinking and because depression keeps you from seeing the opportunities lying right in front of you. As we all know, fortunes do not evaporate, they merely get redistributed. No matter how dire it all looks, we are far from having no options at all.

I am not trying to say you’ll wake up tomorrow and it will all be gone, but there’s nothing the right attitude and positive thinking can’t solve. It will definitely be harder, everything is shaky and most of what you have planned will be postponed, but as long as we’re still breathing, there is a way out.

So tell yourself you’re going to have a good year in 2009, that whatever comes your way, you’re more than able to handle it and you’re off to a great start. For everything else, business strategy, marketing, PR, effective sales schemes, all adapted to an economic downturn, there’s always a search engine to help! Focus on the right blogs, and you’ll find the food for thought you need.