Tiger Woods is trying to fight his way back to life in the wake of a sex scandal linking him, by some accounts, to more than a dozen other women. Akio Toyoda is scrambling to salvage the auto-manufacturing firm his family founded, apologizing yet again to customers and the public in a humiliating appearance before the House Oversight Committee this week.

Neither man, however, is likely to voluntarily switch places with Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs CEO who rapidly became and remains the symbol of Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis, and thus one of the most hated men in the country. And nothing he and Goldman's formidable PR team try to do seems able to change that.

"It's like he has financial Tourette's; he can't control what it is that he says, and that's hurting his company, over and over again," says Richard Laermer, CEO of New York-based RLM Public Relations. The icing on the cake was probably Blankfein's ill-considered comment that he sees himself as doing "God's work" as an investment banker (made during a newspaper interview that was intended to be part of a PR strategy to boost Goldman's battered public image). But even if Blankfein had been pitch perfect, that wouldn't matter right now.

Even reports of a record donation by the firm to its charitable foundation were dwarfed by news of the multimillion-dollar bonuses paid out to Blankfein and others, rapidly followed by news that Goldman Sachs served as an "enabler" to European countries by pitching strategies that would help countries like Greece continue to overspend without making it look as if they were racking up extra debt.

That's just the latest blow to Wall Street, which seems to be stuck firmly in the position of being the most unpopular business in the country. One investment banker known to StreetWise reports being refused service at a popular hangout on the Lowest East Side when the bartender realized he worked for a Wall Street firm.

Tiger Woods and Toyota are undoubtedly benefiting from the advice of top public relations and crisis management advisers right now. Wall Street firms may be doing the same privately, but since their efforts don't seem to be bearing much fruit, StreetWise decided to talk to some folks who know what they are doing, from former senior PR figures within the investment-banking industry to crisis managers who have worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to the oil and gas industry.

What, StreetWise wanted to know, can Wall Street do to shake the image of being Public Enemy No. 1? Is their only option, as Eric Dezenhall, author of Damage Control and founder of Dezenhall Resources Ltd., somewhat flippantly suggested "to give away 100 percent of their salary and bonus and assets and then to jump off the Empire State Building and impale themselves on the horns of the charging bull statue that symbolizes Wall Street" in lower Manhattan?

Be patient. Trying to get anyone to feel warm and fuzzy about Wall Street again right now, with the economy struggling back to life and unemployment rates in the double digits, is an exercise in futility. It may even provoke a kind of backlash. Washington power players have told Wall Street that they are the culprit du jour, and they're going to have to live with that status until the current economic anxiety abates and the public feels better about their lives. For now, it won't matter how much the highest-paid Goldman banker or trader gives away to charity: The focus won't be on that generosity but on how much they earned and still have in assets that enabled them to be so generous in the first place.

"This is the time to start thinking about how you want stories that will be written about you and your firm in five years to read," suggests Andrew Gilman, CEO of CommCore Inc., a communications consultancy that advised Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol poisoning/product tampering case back in 1982. (Gilman isn't currently representing any Wall Street entity.) "But until public faith is restored in the system and American capitalism is seen to be working again," it will be hard for Wall Street to escape its role as a villain. While Toyota can take a more active role in reshaping its image and restore confidence by being not only remorseful but also working flat out to solve any and all problems, Wall Street will have to let time pass and the economy rebound.

Don't overexplain. Part of the problem that Wall Street faces is that so few ordinary citizens—and not even every policymaker—really understands what it is that it does and how it generates value for the rest of the economy. So trying to justify bankers' bonuses because they make lots of money for their firms isn't going to make anyone else any happier. In the long run, helping Americans understand that Wall Street helps Main Street achieve prosperity is a reasonable goal, says Chris Gidez, U.S. director of risk management and crisis for PR giant Hill & Knowlton, who spent 15 years helping energy companies manage their public image. "But that doesn't happen by taking out a big newspaper ad or giving a speech," he says.

Jesse Derris oversees crisis communications for Sunshine Sachs & Associates and counts Wall Street figures on his current client list. But he says that one thing that never works is too much explanation. For instance, why try to explain that it's a good thing that someone walked away with $10 million rather than $20 million or more? To most Americans, Derris notes, either figure is so large as to be beyond comprehension. "There are some things that just can't be explained in ways that are acceptable, especially after the industry has done such a poor job communicating about compensation levels as they grew far faster than those in any other profession.

Reshape the debate. Wall Street does have a value to Main Street—that's why the government bailed it out in the first place. As the economic crisis abates, however, the PR challenge for Wall Street will become getting the average American to accept and understand that. "Opinions are formed on emotion rather than reason; right now Wall Street is shorthand for everything that is wrong with America," says Gidez. Down the road, however, that attitude can be reshaped and Wall Street presented as a valuable national asset.

Remember those ads that boasted "Intel inside," that helped build a brand image for Intel semiconductors, the part of all our digital toys that made them run but that we could never see? When Wall Street works efficiently, that's the role it plays. It helps funnel capital to businesses in ways that most of the country doesn't see and can't track. "The way businesses get out of the crisis isn't by talking about how good they are, but showing what good they do," says Laermer.

Perhaps down the road it will be time for Goldman's corporate clients—companies that have created jobs thanks to Goldman's ability to help them find capital—to step forward on Goldman's behalf. Perhaps the public would trust what they say more than what can be dismissed as the self-serving rhetoric of Wall Street firms themselves.

Over times, says Dezenhall, the challenge becomes tweaking the nature of the questions being asked. "The critic needs to be put in the position of asking himself, do I want to be the person who doesn't want to back winners? If, a year from now, small-business people can stand up and say, look, if it wasn't for this money I got from Goldman Sachs, I wouldn't be in business today, people will react by saying, 'Wow, I never thought of it that way before.'"