Media train, but don’t overdo it!
By Danny Sullivan
Last week was a particularly uncomfortable one for four ex-banking bigwigs here in the UK. They faced a public grilling from British MPs about their roles in the events that led to two of the country’s biggest banks needing to be rescued with taxpayers’ money.
The extensive media training that each received was widely reported on, and was even raised during the session itself. “Are you expressing sympathy because your PR advisers have told you to do so?” queried one MP.
Thank goodness not many PR folk will ever have to prepare their organisations to face such a high-profile public dressing-down, but media training is still an important element that serves its purpose well, no matter the profile of your company.
Unless you are partly responsible for the near-collapse of a major bank, you probably don’t need to go through the kind of rigourous training that the four chaps in London doubtless endured in the lead up to the grilling. In general, media training should not lead to the detriment of personality.
The golden rule of speaking to the media centres on the fact that they can only print or broadcast what you tell them, so stay on message. Yes, certain subjects and situations require more focus on key messages than others, and the bigger you are, the more careful you need to be. For the majority of tech companies, however, building a successful ongoing rapport with their target media is just as important as ensuring your top three messages make it into print.
Stifling an engaging and entertaining orator to try and exert control over the resulting coverage will serve only to irritate the media or, at the very least, make for an unmemorable interview. Far better for the interviewer to encounter an executive who is happy to explore additional areas of discussion in a more casual manner. This may mean that you lose some of the focus of the message, but you’ll have left behind a much happier reporter, and hopefully one who’ll want to come back and talk again some time.
