Guy Clapperton, Author at Clapperton Media

First impressions matter, in particular in press interviews. This means the first sentence you say when a journalist asks a question is going to set the tone for the rest of the conversation.

Journalists will latch onto what’s clear, concise, and quotable. So your opening line sets the tone not only for the interview, but also for how your organisation is represented in print, online, or on broadcast. If you start with a strong, simple message, you’ve already guided the conversation in your favour.

Think of it this way: if the journalist only had space for one line, what would you want it to be? That should be the sentence you put up front. It might be a clear statement of your position, a striking fact, or a simple, human expression of why what you’re saying matters.

Here’s a quick exercise for PR people to share with their clients: take the key point you want to get across and practise saying it in no more than 12 words. That’s your first sentence. If you can deliver that confidently and without jargon, you’ll sound authoritative and above all memorable.

Waste that first line and your client will lose their best opportunity to make an impact.

Guy and Paul had fun as always media training last week; a new CEO at an established client, the job was to put him through his paces, highlight areas that needed work and – in this case – stress test the messaging.

The new CEO was great and asked them tfor a fun bit of follow-up. “Could you,” he said, “make a list of ten bastard questions journalists might ask?”

Fun being a b*st*rd

Hah, of course we could! And we did. And we’d urge all our colleagues in the public relations industry to do the same for their clients. It’s a given that clients and journalists should produce and receive the FAQ list, it should be available on the website so editorial staff can get to the more commonplace queries quickly and easily.

But we’d suggest PR colleagues to do the other thing too – think of “ten bastard questions” and work out how the client is supposed to deal with them when inevitably they crop up. No lying, no “no comment”, journalists will need proper answers, just make sure the client is prepared.

We had fun writing a load of questions we’d actually be embarrassed to ask in person. So, what are the questions you’re really hoping the media won’t ask – and do you have a strategy for when they do?

Meanwhile we might just develop an entire half-day course and call it “Ten Bastard Questions”, it’s too good a title to use only once..!

Public relations – a “nice to have” according to the board? And therefore a layer of media training is an “if you’re lucky/want to treat yourself” but the board isn’t fully sold on it?

This is the attitude my trainers and I find from time to time working with partners in the public relations industry. When PR companies are pitching for work they sometimes get told they’re not a priority “in these tough times”. And from my own point of view, one of them with a number of clients told me a while ago “I don’t think anyone’s got the budget for media training any more” (actually her ex-colleague who’d gone in house has become one of my best clients this year but no matter – the picture is uneven).

If you’re in either of those camps it can be worth having another think. Take the first: you’re a board member and you don’t want to invest in comms because it’s not essential. Have another look at that. The way you present your business to existing and potential external stakeholders – that would be your entire reputation – isn’t worth monitoring and management? If you don’t have any sort of comms management then your reputation is still out there, you’re just not participating. That’s every misconception and indeed every positive comment going unrecognised.

Board level

To me this isn’t a nice-to-have. I align with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and regard it as something that should be taken into account at board level.

Likewise media training. Obviously I have a vested interest but if you’re in PR and putting the right messages are out there then your client delivers them in a confused manner, puts too much detail in, assumes the journalist, podcaster or whoever will report them uncritically and not ask questions or gets irritated by theirn independence, that client needs help. Preferably they need putting in front of an experienced journalist for a briefing and to be offered a dummy run on video so they can see how they perform.

Again, this is about how the world will perceive their company. Many take it seriously; twice this year public relations people have commissioned me to visit C-suite people at their client with a camera operator and someone skilled in stage work to polish up their performance (never to deceive, that’s not what media training is about). For others it seems to be a “nice to have”.

I’d advise board members at least to monitor how their business is perceived in public. That’s not a “nice to have”, it’s a sign of how many potential clients will consider working with you and it’s influential on the share price.

It’s something the PR industry and its partners like me can help with – get in touch for more information.

The picture for this post is not an iceberg. Well, it’s not a complete iceberg. The fact is that icebergs are largely underwater so you can’t see them without the proper equipment. What we’ve got here is the tip of the iceberg. About one tenth of one.

You probably knew that but you will be thinking, never mind the pedantry and detail, that’s an iceberg. You’d be right. And yet loads of people still think that when they’re explaining things to the press, the thing to do is to explain all the detail they can. And the result is a confused journalist.

This is very frustrating if you work in PR. You spend ages pitching a story to journalists (maybe even after doing one of our courses, he hinted), you pare it down so it attracts attention and then your client does the human thing of trying to help with all the information they possibly can.

This is where that information can become garbled. The journalist may be a specialist in the client’s field but they may not (and even if they are, their skill will be in writing about it rather than being a practitioner). Their real specialism is in getting stories out of people and constructing a narrative.

So if your client has been working in their field for 20 years and the journalist asks them something, their instinct can be to try to impart everything they’ve learned in those two decades. This is actually going to be a lot for the recipient, who will be doing other interviews too, to take in and assimilate.

Pare it down

In our media training sessions we try help your client to cut down on what they deliver to journalists, podcasters and other stakeholders. If they can start with what sort of headline they’d like to see and work their way backwards from there, they are more likely to offer the important bits rather than every last detail.

Going into too much depth can come from a good place, it’s the client trying to be helpful. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone whose job is to report what’s happening in a condensed amount of words, keeping it simple and cutting out the unnecessary stuff is actually more use than the detailed version.

Basically we all know we can only see about ten per cent of an iceberg above the surface but if someone asks you to show them a picture of an iceberg you’ll show them something like the image we’ve used here. We can help get your clients to do the same – just show the journalist the iceberg.