We’ve all been there – you pick up the phone, fire up Teams, arrive at the venue for the interview, whatever – and the journalist just takes over. You get no chance to put your agenda forward.
So here’s a recent video tip in which Guy explains why you need to push your agenda a bit more heavily than you might have thought.
Powerpoint can be a terrible thing. We refer to it as “the enemy” in our presentation masterclasses and lunch and learn sessions. We don’t mean PowerPoint itself, of course, just the way some people use it. Have you ever been in one of those conferences in which someone starts by saying “I hope you can see this text at the back”? Or worse, they start by announcing they’re going to “talk to a presentation” and they turn their back on you and literally talk to it?
People who have attended our courses more than once over the last few years will have noticed our own approach to PowerPoint evolving. This is at least partly because of reading a book and doing an online course, both of which come from expert (and friend) David Henson. We’re therefore delighted to be able to offer this course alongside our face to face sessions. More on that in a second.
David has a few mantras for his use of PowerPoint. We urge everyone to adopt them whether you’re buying the course or not. First he urges everyone to keep things to a minimum; if something would work on a handout, it’s not suitable for a slide. Second, you might not need slides at all. If they don’t support your message (or if you’re using them as notes) it might be worth dropping them all together. There are refinements as well.
David’s course offers input on the use of images and fonts. He looks into the different sorts of image files in use and why some of them won’t work. He offers some shortcuts in animations and the judicious use of 3D images in those. Colour palettes, image composition and a great deal else come in for scrutiny.
We’d be delighted to help you with your stage or screen presence. We can coach, train and critique with our roster of actors and TV presenters. If you just want to transform your approach to PowerPoint, however, we can recommend Dave’s course and you’ll have change from £300 even after paying VAT.
You know when they told you at school that in an exam you should include the question within the body of your answer? Here’s why it works in media interviews too.
A couple of weeks ago Guy was delighted to be invited to take part in the “Socially Unacceptable” podcast from Prohibition PR, offering insights from his long career as a journalist and a trainer. It’s just gone live so you can watch or listen any time you want to.
It’s 45 minutes and the participants covered the ins and outs of media training pretty thoroughly; how to avoid being boring, why Guy became a trainer in the first place, which the worst media stuff-ups have been (the hosts do not use the phrase “stuff-ups”) and who the best interviewers actually are.
It’s always lovely to have your ego scratched a little when someone asks to interview you but in this instance Guy hopes, as he does in all of his training activity, that there will be something of value to be gleaned from the stories he relates and the insights he offers. We have a clippings page for anyone who wants to check that we stick to our own advice and talk to the media as well as tell other people how to do so and are fairly obviously delighted to include this one on it.
Special mention has to go to the hosts: if you watch it, bear in mind that Guy’s Internet connection was playing up (he has subsequently spent £450 on new extenders and it’s fine) so the hosts couldn’t actually hear much of what he was saying. Media training is an excellent thing but a technology failure can happen to anyone at any time. Thanks to the way Prohibition’s recording set-up, Riverside.FM, works, he was recorded locally on his computer, it looks and sounds perfect to the viewer and they just had to take it on trust that his witticisms were actually funny!
So no change there, then, you ask his daughter. Here’s the show.