Guy Clapperton, Author at Clapperton Media

Body language counts. A few months ago, Paul, Sophie and Guy were helping someone with their media skills. A few months later and Paul and Guy were filming a corporate video for the same company and the delegate said “I remember that session. Sophie taught me to sit on a chair.”

He actually wasn’t joking, he felt anchored and more comfortable in his body language as a result. This came up again last Wednesday when Paul and Guy trained someone in a TV studio and – because they’re sneaky – they sat him at the news desk on a swivel chair. He was a really good spokesperson but immediately Guy started talking to him he started swivelling a little, from side to side, as he spoke and it looked terrible. He took the point!

Furniture influences body language

Chairs are great for sitting on, don’t get us wrong. But if you’re going to be seated in an interview and you’re on camera, remember to ask if they have a non-swivel chair if you’re worried you’ll look fidgety. Watch out also for high-armed chairs if they have arms; you might feel relaxed but you can end up looking hunched and the audience will tense up as a result.

In terms of your body language, lean back and you’ll look relaxed; spread your arms across the back of a chair or sofa (sofas are common on daytime TV) and you might even look a little arrogant. If you want to make a particular point sound important, lean towards the camera a bit and it will look as if you’re that extra bit engaged.

And if you want to learn to sit on a chair or to breathe to get your voice under control as the team will be telling a delegate this week, don’t hesitate to get in touch – contact details are below as always.

(The chair in the pic is in the Churchill War Rooms, where I took the picture after chairing a corporate round table for TP – no relevance other than “it’s a chair” and “I like the picture”.)

Lead trainer and founder Guy Clapperton writes:

“Thought leadership” is one of my pet hates and I’m pleased to say a number of people in PR and communications are starting to come around to my point of view. Like all bad ideas it starts in a good place but has ended up as a meaningless bit of jargon.

Starting with the positives, if a startup client looks set to be a genuine leader in their industry and can express genuinely innovative views in a comprehensible way, this is a godsend to the public relations industry. An article people will want to read, which will make them go away and think about your client, has obvious benefits. Your client will want to be positioned as an authority as early as possible in front of clients, prospects, investors and their peers.

The problem arises when, from the very best of intentions, public relations professionals put “thought leadership” on some sort of shopping list they need from the client. They may strike it lucky; sometimes someone will have thoughts and instincts they don’t realise are usable in this way and will be only too pleased to offer them.

Thought Leadership as packaging

Too often, unfortunately, the PR professional feels pressured into packaging any old opinion as “thought leadership” when it really isn’t. Nonetheless a commonplace view will get pitched as unique. This doesn’t position them as a leader, it positions them as someone who hasn’t done the research around their market.

(Also a quick search on LinkedIn even throws up people who think “thought leadership” is a job title. It’s not.)

The next stage, which I’ve certainly seen, is when people start pitching “thought leadership” to journalists and editors. This is only a step away from the time someone offered to tell me about “their client’s messaging” – these are pieces of jargon best left to internal communications among the PR team, use them to a journalist and it’s like a conjurer telling someone they’re going to do an illusion. We know it’s an illusion but it’s more effective if it’s left unsaid.

If “thought leadership” becomes commoditised (and if someone is offering people like me some “thought leadership” that’s what’s happened) or if it can be produced on demand, it’s no longer leading anything, it’s following a marketing agenda. Clients will suddenly find themselves branded not as leaders but as followers. Indeed, when I put a version of this blog entry onto LinkedIn, one editor said she’d had a PR professional get in touch offering thought leadership from their client; she asked “Great, what’s the subject?” and the client basically said “we don’t know, what would you like?” This is the extreme opposite of “leadership”.

That said, by all means keep pitching those opinion pieces. Many are readable. If you’re pitching someone for an interview, brief the journalist on the sorts of views they’re likely to come out with, it will help in the planning.

But try to resist the idea that everything has to be a piece of leadership. Overstatement really undermines whatever and whoever you’re pitching.

If your client wants to distance themselves from something it might seem worth using the passive rather than the active voice. For example, instead of telling you we let a typo through in a blog entry we might say “A typo was not corrected”. It makes it sound as if it wasn’t actually us failing to spot it (we could blame the cat but basically everything you read from me is actually our own work). Technically there’s nothing wrong with it.

Gramatically it’s when someone diverges from the standard subject, verb, object sentence construction and move to object, verb, subject. The primary school example is “The cat [subject] sat on [verb and OK, preposition but basically the verb] the mat [object].” Switch that around and you get “The mat was sat on by the cat” which is awkward, take the subject away and you get “The mat was sat on” and nobody knows who by. It’s been tried at high levels.

It’s a trick President Reagan used to use when saying “mistakes were made” instead of “I/we made mistakes” and the reason we’ve recently been reminded of that is the kerfuffle (technical term) over Raynor Winn’s book, “The Salt Path”. The Observer newspaper has made several allegations, We’re not visiting those specifically because Winn is taking legal advice so they may well be disproved but in terms of how she and her husband lost their home and the financial process behind that, she has said “mistakes were made”. But by whom?

We’re calling it: if you’re in PR you need to tell your clients that this approach doesn’t get you off the hook. It sounds as if you’re deliberately trying to make it sound as if you weren’t part of this process. It’s frankly as ineffectual as “No comment” which is almost always an evasion.

Monzo had a really good guide to this in its writing guidelines a while back (they’re still worth reading but they’ve taken our favourite part off); to detect a passive or just inclarity, just ask yourself whether you could add “by a monkey” and end up with something that makes sense even if it’s rubbish. So “I made a mistake” is clear. “Mistakes were made” is something to which you could add “by a monkey” so you’re leaving the reader to work out who made the mistake.

It doesn’t do much except make your client sound as if they’re wriggling out of responsibility. Journalists have been wise to it for decades – the best advice is either to make a full declaration or none at all.

Now if you’ll excuse us, more coffee must be made and drunk.

Lead trainer Guy Clapperton writes:

One of the things I look for in a media training session is whether the spokespeople are good at storytelling. If you’re running a startup then trust me, your storytelling skills can be as important as your financial acumen, your marketing prowess or anything else. Well, almost.

It’s why the Chartered Institute of PR, of which I’m a member, has been agitating for communications specialists to be on boards or at least advisory boards for some time.

Storytelling is one of the major ways in which you can amplify your credentials and make them more memorable. Here are three ways in which I could tell you about my business:

* I’m a media trainer
* I work with PR companies to help spokespeople clarify and deliver coherent messages
* I’ve been that journalist who is after quotes but who isn’t the expert in a field other than writing and reporting for years. I’ve realised increasingly that I’ve been dependent on people making themselves and what’s going on very clear during all of that time – but I only interview them when they’re feeling tense about speaking to a journalist. That’s when they screw up. So I like to help build confidence and ensure that when someone speaks to a journalist, their expertise gets into the resulting coverage and it’s accurate.

The third needs cutting but it offers a much more relatable and interesting version of who I am and why I do what I do than the blander first two, accurate though they are.

So if someone asks what you do for a living and why, do you have a story behind you? Every board has someone dedicated to employing people, someone else whose job is to build sales, someone assigned to financials – but often the board misses out the bit about how they explain themselves to the outside world and even internal stakeholders.

If you’d like to talk to me about developing your storytelling, don’t hesitate to ask.