Guy Clapperton, Author at Clapperton Media

As well as the media training to which most of this website is dedicated, lead trainer Guy keeps his hand in as an interviewer with a regular podcast called the Near Futurist. He has been producing it for four years and is based on going to interminable conferences with futurists forecasting what’s likely in the next forty years.

Guy isn’t even confident that he’ll be around in his late nineties so he put this series together in 2019 to discuss just what’s likely in the very near future. He also facilitates conferences and speaks at events based on this podcast, for which he draws on 30+ years as a technology journalist.

In this edition, he and his excellent guests – Dr Nicola Millard of BT and Prof. Christoph Siemroth of the University of Essex – discuss the impact of flexible working and where the trend is going. Is it the panacea that some people are claiming, will it enhance productivity and build up the quality of life? (Spoiler alert: nothing is a universal panacea). The research isn’t as clear as many would have you believe and the idea that everyone will want to come back to the office in order not to pay for their own heating has its own flaws as we discuss.

The podcast is part of a series-within-a-series called Dividing Lines, which is a set of debates rather than straightforward interviews and is sponsored by Diffusion PR, which is a refreshingly non-interventionist sponsor – they suggest the odd topic (and there have been some excellent ideas leading to podcasts we’re proud of), nod the guests through and then back off completely. We’re grateful for their support.

Trivial note: Prof. Siemroth is a polite German gent who refused to correct Guy’s pronunciation of his surname. We apologise to any German people who might be listening – we did ask!

Click the link below or the cover image to spend half an hour listening to this episode.

https://pod.fo/e/1558cc

Yesterday our lead trainer Guy was media training in Hemel Hempstead (and although our media training clients are confidential unless they say otherwise, if they’re reading we want to thank them for their hospitality). The chief executive at the client had one core question initially. Why was it worth talking to the media at all? He wasn’t being aggressive, he genuinely wanted to understand the benefit.

Without divulging identities we can confirm this was a decades-old business with a solid, reliable customer base and hundreds of employees. The CEO was a man of roughly Guy’s age (he’s in denial about having slipped into his late fifties) so an experienced person.

It set us thinking on two topics. First, why had he paid to engage an excellent PR company and invested cash in our turning up to his premises if he didn’t understand the benefit? (The answer became clear: he trusted his marketing team and if they wanted to invest in enhanced services that was fine – he just wanted to understand in a little more depth). Second, since someone had asked the question, what were the benefits of speaking to the media?

Media coverage might not lead to sales

We do ask our clients why they want to speak to the media and some of the time the answer is that they want more sales.

Whoops.

Let’s ask the question. When did you last allow yourself to be persuaded to buy something thanks to a bit of media coverage? Actually let’s rephrase. When did you last allow yourself to be persuaded to buy something that you hadn’t already planned to buy thanks to a bit of media coverage? We’d be willing to bet that the answer is “not recently”. Loads of people check the reviews and social media feedback when they want to buy a new phone, a new dishwasher, choose a restaurant to visit. Note, though, that they had already decided they were in the market for these things.

Let’s clear something up before we go any further. We are talking here about “earned media” – in other words not an ad that you’ or a client has paid for, not a sponsored supplement in which you have final say. We are talking about independent reportage, something the journalist has found interesting in and of itself, or a thought leadership piece an editor thought was worth commissioning.

Inevitably there are different thoughts on just how useful this traditional media actually is but, for example, Sapience Communication in 2022 published a blog post citing figures that said a third of British adults came to the traditional media for their news rather than social media.

Nonetheless we’d query whether someone is going to the Financial Times when they want advice on a new phone. So an automatic addition to your sales funnel isn’t necessarily going to happen because you’ve been published somewhere.

The media can help indirectly through thought leadership

It’s not all about sales, of course. Actually let’s refine that a little bit. It is absolutely all about sales, completely and in every conceivable form. You’re reading this because you want to improve your company’s profile and go to the top of people’s shortlist when they are going to spend something. It doesn’t, however, have to be a direct link. This is where we encounter the idea of “thought leadership”.

Now, let’s be honest; Clapperton Media Training comes across all sorts of guff under the guise of “thought leadership”. As an experiment we entered the term into an online image library and had quite a choice, including the stock image above. And if it can be mass produced that often then there’s going to be the odd charlatan at it – in our time we’ve had pitches from people insisting that adding value to something before selling it rather than shifting commodities is “thought leadership” when we thought it was obvious.

There are counter-examples, however. When Guy was editor of Intelligent Sourcing magazine a contributor annoyed the publisher by coining a new word; he was advocating a local approach to global business and called it “glocalisation” and the publisher insisted it was a mistake. It didn’t catch on as it happened but it was an original thought or an original way of expressing an existing thought.

So yes, there is scope for publishing and establishing yourself or your company as leaders in your field. It’s also worth considering whether that’s going to achieve your objective, though.

Leadership isn’t everything

If we’re frank, we hear from a lot of people wanting to be thought leaders. We’re not convinced that’s going to lead to a business result every time, To some people this is a terrible point of view but to us it’s just logical and we can offer examples.

Let’s take one of the largest companies in the world, Amazon. The company certainly innovated when it first set up and it’s done a fine job in many ways since but we’re not quite convinced it’s a thought leader any more. Its logistics and of course its web platform is incredible but if you want to know loads about books you’re probably better off visiting a small local bookshop or something.

Ditto Apple. Yes we know they’re seen as market leaders and many of our trainers are iPhone users. If you can read this text then it means that typing on an Apple Macintosh computer works. However, Apple didn’t make the first smartphone. There were phones with satnav built in well before the first iPhone even came to the market.

The point we want to make is not that these are bad companies, far from it. However, becoming thought leaders does not appear to have been part of their mission when they set up and that’s actually perfectly reasonable. It just makes it a little baffling that so many organisations want to get quoted and published as innovators in their industry when this might not lead them to the position they want to achieve.

We just mentioned satnav

The satnav image is one of those that we come to often in our media training sessions, simply because of the way they work. You probably use one quite often because they’re automatically in vehicles and on phones nowadays. If you want to get somewhere you put the location in and then let the system work out the best route. If you have stipulations and stopping points in mind that’s fine but you accept that you may arrive a little later than if you were travelling more directly.

People abandon this approach when it comes to working with the media. Colleagues in the public relations industry tell us that their clients will insist they “want to be in the Financial Times” or that they “want to publish some thought leadership”. When asked why, the answer might be to do with sales, it might be to do with branding and mind share but one thing is pretty certain; it’s rarely clear how the steps they have envisaged are expected to get them to the point at which they want to arrive.

Whether you use a public relations company or not (and if you want a profile of any scale then it can be well worth doing) it’s worth taking that satnav approach and looking at where you want to get to first. You can then work backwards and see how best to get there, perhaps needing advice from an external agency on the way.

This entry started with the title “Why talk to the media?” because a client asked the question. The honest answer from us as a media training company is that we have no idea – why do you want to talk to the media? Only when we have the answer can we and your PR company help you with anything but the most generalised course. When you’ve got that target, we’ll help you hit it!

Our lead trainer Guy was at a session yesterday in which there was a lot of focus on messaging. Yes, he was there to deliver input on delivery but understandably the client wanted to talk about what they were saying as well as the way they were saying it.

One notable area under discussion was the extent to which you believe you should tailor your message according to the medium. To paraphrase the client, he basically said:

If I’m talking to someone for broadcast then I keep it brief and factual. If it’s for a written piece then I take it as read that I can go on for longer.

Those weren’t his exact words. You get the idea though; he wanted to change his tone according to who he was speaking to.

This can be a good idea or it can be a disaster. It’s worth taking a look at some of the reasoning.

They have more space in written media

It’s often true that someone researching something to go and write about it will have more space. If they don’t have more space then they are likely to have more bandwidth in their heads to edit down your long(ish) statements into digestible chunks. So it’s OK to go on at some length, some might think.

Well, yes and no (we know that’s unhelpful). Depending on the broadcast you may well be right. If it’s news then they will indeed want to get the facts pretty quickly but that’s what they want.

What you want or need may be quite different.

Make sure you don’t sound shifty

You’re likely to have some messaging you want to get into an interview and the first thing you need to ask if you’re going to keep it factual is: how much of a message can you get into a one-word answer? Have a quick look at this interview if you have the time. If you don’t, it’s the then-chief executive of the British Dental Association answering the BBC’s queries about mercury in fillings. His first and third answers are the ones you’re looking for: he says “yes” and “mmhmm”.

Consider how much more value he could have added to that. He could have added “yes but” or my favourite, “yes and the reason for that is…” and continued into something that would have shared a lot more of his expertise. Later on in the interview, when they let him do his retake, he gets it right but the damage is done.

In his first take, he ignores the opportunity to put some messaging in place. His organisation gets no benefit and equally seriously in my independent view, the audience misses out as well. Those earlier monosyllabic answers sound more like evasions than anything else.

Transferring the messaging power

The flip side of the client’s view is his belief that you can speak at some length to the written media because they have more space or at least mental bandwidth. They can translate what you’re saying into journalese so why not let them?

In principle that’s fine as long as you have a completely trustworthy journalist who is not only on your side but also understands the exact point you want to make. Except it’s unlikely to be like that.

The first point to make is that a journalist should never be on your side, they should be independent. We always assure clients that if they make thirty-three trillion dollars in a week they will be reported accurately. They will be reported just the same if they lose the same amount. The journalist’s job is to report the facts.

Another issue is that if you offer the journalist a 100-word quote and they only need ten for their article, you’re handing them the power to choose whichever parts of your quote they want. It won’t be inaccurate but let’s say you wanted them to write about your new international expansion and you mention the investment you secured to make it happen. The journalist then goes away and writes about the investment while your priority was to make new markets aware of your presence.

Essentially if you want the press to focus on something then focus on it yourself while you’re speaking. They can only write what you’ve given them and if you give them a lot they’ll do their best to prioritise.

Messaging prep takes time

There are two more basic reasons to be consistent in messaging across the media, however:

Timing. Let’s be perfectly honest, if you’re managing a business that’s attracting media attention there’s a very good chance you’re quite busy. You have to ask yourself just how granular you want to go: short sentences for TV? Long ones for print? And if you’re doing an interview for a profile piece on TV or radio, then you’ll have to vary those rules anyway. Just how much time can you allocate to tailoring the length of your messages to every individual outlet, even if you had the aptitude to do it?
Consistency. Journalists and other media professionals do check each other’s work, it’s how they stay up to date. It’s therefore worth prioritising a consistent message and making sure you don’t trip over yourself trying to cater for different media the whole time.

This doesn’t mean you should never prepare for different media and different audiences. We always advise, however, that people should think about the audience rather than the medium. If you’re in business and you’re speaking to one of the financial press (the sort of thing we might have Pádraig help you with) then you might well be able to talk about EBITDA, P&L, all sorts of stuff like that. If you were speaking to the technical press, Guy or Chris might comment that the technologists who write it will know their bytes from their blockchain so you should be fine with a bit of jargon. If you were speaking to the Nationals or even mainstream international press you’d need to assume a bit less knowledge

Our client from yesterday is happy tailoring his message to the medium he’s addressing and we’re really fine with that. If you’re new to communicating with the media, though, we’d suggest your time is better spent thinking of who you need to talk to and what messaging they will take away from your words.

Crisis training, crisis management, call it what you want, a lot of people come to us and say they need it. If that’s you, you’ve probably had an issue that goes something like this. Your business has been around for a while. Your communications have been fine. Something goes wrong or is about to go wrong.

You call in the crisis training specialists, quickly. You need some help and you need it fast. You’re not trying to dodge the issue, far from it, but you need the right people to be commenting in the right places with the right messages.

So far so good. Only it may already be too late.

Crisis training and stable doors

Our lead trainer Guy was at a client site on Friday helping them with some crisis training. We’re absolutely not going to divulge the nature of the crisis because we assure everyone of confidentiality when we train them. They were in the middle of an issue that was going to end up in court. They had their own legal advice (take legal advice only from lawyers!) but they were wondering how to communicate in public.

They were pretty good as it happens, taking the issue seriously, bringing their empathy to the situation, keeping all stakeholders informed and ensuring they didn’t speculate about what the legal outcome might be. It was lucky they were a capable group of people. They employed hundreds if not thousands of people so there was always going to be an issue sometime.

Unfortunately they only asked for the training once the crisis was underway. This can be an error.

When do you take out life insurance?

The client is going to be fine, they were more than capable. The thing is, you’re better off making plans for a crisis when there is nothing going wrong. The best time to start planning for a decent pension is in your twenties, thirties at the latest; we know too many people who have reached their fifties and are suddenly thinking “I should do something about this” (which is easy to say when heating bills are going through the roof, we do get that). If you’re in danger of losing a loved one imminently nobody is going to insure you – you need that life assurance when you’re in good health, it’ll be cheaper and it’s easier to think about when it’s a far away prospect.

Ditto crisis training and, come to think of it, media training in general. We’ve had a lot of clients coming to us because they have a media engagement or presentation coming up the following week and they want to look professional. We can always help and ensure people improve but planning further in advance is going to leave you more confident when something crops up.

This is particularly important when a crisis comes up. You need to be ready before anything flares up and if it never does, fine. Just in case, it’s worth having a checklist.

Crisis training: some basics

We have a crisis management specialist on the books, Carl Courtney, who can offer chapter and verse on what needs to happen to be prepared for a crisis. Some basics might include:

A policy on exactly what happens when something bad takes place. This needs to be locked down and to take account of the unofficial as well as official approaches. You’ll want to start with a list of who us authorised and who is not authorised to speak to the press.
You’ll also need some guidance as to what happens, if your workplace is well known, when a journalist turns up and asks people questions as they arrive or leave their workplace, assuming you don’t have working from home as a universal policy.
Ideally everyone who isn’t authorised to speak to the press will point people towards the statement. Statement?
Preparing a statement: You need to decide who will prepare a statement and where you’ll put it so it’s accessible to everyone. Your website and social media channels are ideal. This gets your unauthorised people away from having to say “no comment”, when they’ll feel completely unsupported.
Train everyone not to say “no comment”. It sounds so much like a confirmation or evasion. “I’m not authorised to comment but we have a statement on the website which I hope will help” sounds much, much better even if it basically means the same thing.
If a situation is developing, frequent updates are better than a single bland statement and then leaving it at that. If journalists, bloggers and other influencers don’t hear an update from you, they may hear it from someone else.
Prepare all of this, other than the statement (of course), before there is a crisis. You’ll be able to address it more calmly and take more time, and yes we know you’re already busy!

The other thing we’d recommend, and this is of course where we have to declare a vested interest, is having someone else come in and have a look at your plan and maybe put you through your paces in an interview situation. Even in the presence of a very friendly camera operator (and ours are friendly and offer loads of pointers and advice!) the physical presence of proper camera equipment and lighting kit is a very different experience from any in-house run-throughs you might arrange.

The aim is never to gloss over a crisis. If you’re not taking the likelihood of a major issue sometime seriously that’s a serious error in its own right. The aim is to help you communicate your side of it, get away from defensiveness and ensure that your voice is heard and understood when any coverage looks as if it’s going to go against you.

Do you or your clients need help with your media engagements and interview and presentation skills, whether on-camera or not? We have experienced people who can help – contact our calendar supremo Lindsay in the first instance by clicking here and she will set up an initial conversation with Guy to find out how we can help.