How many times have times have you watched an interview on television and cringed as a company spokesperson or interviewee did the old ‘Prince Philip’ and dropped a clanger in front of the nation?
Admittedly things sometimes just don’t go to plan or you could be facing the odd missilefrom Jeremy Paxman, but preparing yourself for every eventuality and the messages you wish to convey should be among the first things on your list as a brand custodian. They certainly should be second nature by the time you come to be facing cameras.
You may be being interviewed about something your company has recently achieved or perhaps by a journalist seeking to exploit the moment to hammer home your company’s shortfalls in a particular area. Whatever the situation, you need to be sure that you are on message, in control and more importantly an interesting interviewee.
This is where media training comes in – the idea of schooling the interviewee in the art of leading the media agenda and controlling where they want the interview to go, rather than being led by it.
Of course, there are those of us who are natural raconteurs and enjoy the spotlight and it makes sense to use these when they are at your disposal – providing they are the best person to comment on the chosen subject. Yet, sound media training in a safe environment will allow you to train and test novices in the art of controlled communications and equip them with the skills to face the media with confidence.
Whilst working for Samsung there was a need for continuous dialogue with the press and the media at large, and as you’d expect this meant that as well as product launches, we’d have to deal with some extremely awkward situations from time to time.
In this respect I found external media training to be extremely useful and an an invaluable tool to help set the media agenda. While there are all manner of companies claiming to offer this kind of help – some surprisingly never having been journalists in their own right – we felt it was best to seek this from those asking the questions and people with real experience in handling these situations: those who had been journalists themselves.
Narrowing this list down can be difficult and it’s best to seek the advice of your peers. However, what you should be looking for are those with real experience in your markets or those who come highly recommended. At Samsung we had a need to train teams across the board from junior product managers to heads of divisions and regularly used a company called White Label Media who were able to develop bespoke training programmes to suit our needs rather just plain old talks about how difficult journalists can be.
Being able to do things like film and critique members of the team and guide them through the various techniques required to control a situation was not only great for enabling us to build better media relationships, but also helped bring the team closer together as a whole. As director of PR this helped me enormously, making staff more receptive to ideas and initiatives, and much more keen when it came to speaking to journalists. Where once there was fear, there was a commitment to now engage with confidence.
There’s one other thing to remember in all this. Seeking an external viewpoint and counsel on recent media activity also enables you to bring fresh ideas to the table free from the corporate blinkers and that can only be a good thing, right.
