Media training Archives - Page 10 of 12

Many years ago, our lead trainer Guy had a media training client who taught him something about targeting. The client owned a chain of mobile phone stores, let’s say they were in the Reading area. He had been offered the chance of a profile piece in the Financial Times.

He had declined.

Guy was a picture of consternation. What, he wondered, was the point of training someone to speak to the media if they were going to turn down such a great opportunity?

The client’s answer was simple and instructive. His objective, he said, was to sell phones. The FT would publish a trustworthy and accurate piece – and one that would get him precisely nowhere. The publication would deliberately resist anything so promotional whereas the local paper might – we don’t know if he was correct on this point – be open to a promotional idea of sorts. If local people read about his shops they might actually visit, he reasoned. His mum would like a nice FT piece but he couldn’t see it working for his business.

Of course he was right.

Targeting is vital

Bad phone call for targeting blog entry — Journalists might not be terribly pleased with an irrelevant pitch

This is why, in our PR pitching masterclass, we talk a lot about targeting your press releases to the right journalist and publication. There are two elements to this (actually three but we’ll come to that at the end of the section).

First you need to decide which journalists or other media professionals are going to respond to you. This, if you don’t use a professional public relations agency, is a case of asking your contacts and seeing what they think.

That might sound a bit haphazard and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not an exact science. In the same way that a mate can recommend a restaurant and you can turn up and find it’s just not right for you, you can find you just don’t hit it off with a journalist, or the idea is fine but they’ve just written something like that and it will be published next Tuesday. Never forget that “no thanks” is by far the easiest answer to a pitch. It allows the listener to do precisely nothing if they choose. Also remember, however, that journalists and other publishing professionals depend on good ideas for their livelihood. No matter how cynical and jaded they sound, if your idea is good and relevant they need you.

Know the journalist

You need some knowledge of the journalist and what they write, podcast or broadcast about to remain relevant. Many are specialists. Lead trainer Guy has been writing about technology as applied to business (with some minor forays into consumer technology) for over three decades. Here are some of the things that have come into his inbox over the years:

Typing at 11.47 on 7 December 2022: a glance at the in-box tells us the BBC has sent a release telling Guy that Robson Green is fronting a new TV series. Guy did write about a new programme for the Radio Times once. In 2005.
On the same day there was a press release to Guy’s inbox telling him that the Supreme Court had said that bans on prayer and help for women in crisis could be implemented in Northern Ireland. This is something Guy personally regards as important. However he needs to read a complete story when a relevant expert has evaluated it, spoken to people and found out what’s really going on rather than a release from one interested party.
Guy’s favourite example was the company that kept sending him information on female sex toys for over a year. Mysteriously he forgot to ask them to stop sending these releases; we have never had the guts to ask him why not.

There was also a lot of relevant stuff of course, a lot of public relations professionals get it exactly right. The good news is that it’s not difficult to rise above the rest. One of our favourite games is to get the phone out during a PR Pitching Masterclass session and see what’s come in during the previous hour. In the ten years since launching this course there has always been something irrelevant to highlight.

Know the publication

It should almost go without saying but it seems not to. Knowing the publication is crucial. If you have a local story because you work in Edinburgh and have created 50 new jobs at the height of an economic downturn, great! There’s a good chance The Scotsman will be interested but don’t expect much reaction from the Argus in Brighton. Likewise you might have a hot news story to pitch to the Nationals but you’ve got your heart set on somewhere less immediately relevant. It happens.

It’s important to know the publications and also to understand what the readers are likely to do next. Remember the wise delegate at the beginning of this entry; he rejected the Financial Times not because it wasn’t a great publication but because he knew it wouldn’t be great use of his time.

But does it work for you? Targeting your objectives

Targeting image - overworked woman — You can end up working very hard but who is it for?

Knowing the journalist and who they’re writing for are undoubtedly excellent things. However, there is a killer question you need to ask: do you want to end up working for the journalist or do you want to build your own business up?

This isn’t as glib as it sounds even though you know the answer without thinking about it. You want to build your business, of course you do. Everything we’ve said so far, though, has been about finding the right journalist and outlet. We’ve discussed what the journalist does as they’re specialists and we’ve also gone through some real life irrelevant pitches.

So let’s say you’re a small consultant in tech security. You assess your market, you pitch to the journalist and he or she comes back with “that’s great but I need a user or case study to talk to”. That’s sounding good – then the article comes out and your client is cited as someone who had a tech problem and overcame it. No matter how many times you scour the article, you can’t find yourself or your business named as the person who sorted it out.

Will they credit you properly?

This happened to one of our delegates once. He told us he was up at 5am to appear on BBC Breakfast and represent his company (which was a larger concern as it happened). He’d done what he thought they wanted by avoiding mentioning his company name. He assumed they would credit his company in the caption. In the event he just came out as “Technology expert”.

There is a real risk for spokespeople: they can end up working for the journalist and the publication rather than the business for which they are responsible. Journalists mostly don’t have huge resources so if you mention that you’ve seen an important report they’re likely to ask you to send it over, free of charge. If you’ve written a book they’ll expect you or your publisher to provide the review copy. They will want a particular angle and they need to arrange their story around it. They are working for their editor and their readers and they will see everything in this light. It’s important to look at every opportunity that might come up and ask yourself: does this actually help our objective? If not, it might not be the right opportunity for you and you’ll spend a lot of time and effort working on the journalist’s behalf.

Targeting pitfalls

The mysterious “third element” we mentioned at the beginning of the last section is of course the sheer size and impossibility of the task. Keeping track of so many people is difficult. It’s one thing us Guy pulling out his phone and seeing who’s pitched something fairly ludicrous, ignoring decades of what he’s actually been doing. It’s another completely when someone has to sift through all of the potential contacts. According to Statista (see this link) there were around 110,000 people who could be described as journalists in the UK in 2022. That’s up from 71,000 people ten years previously. Many are likely to change jobs, go freelance, others will suddenly start a blog or podcast, still others will start or close a publication.

Nobody is underestimating the difficulty of keeping track of all those people. Unfortunately that’s what the job involves.

Targeting is fundamental

You can have an excellent story. You can understand why it affects many people who are outside your organisation. If you don’t take the trouble to find out about the media professionals and outlets that might be interested, however, you’re unlikely to get much coverage. Make sure you know why a story is important and to whom, ensure you approach the right outlet and the most suitable writer and you should stand above some of the actual professionals working in communications right now.

One more acid test, if we may. When you’re writing your pitch or formulating what you’re going to say to the journalist, ask yourself: why am I telling them this? If you don’t have an answer, start again – if you don’t know, they won’t either!

Further information on “Pitch Perfect”, our media training masterclass, is available by clicking here.

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.

The Mediamentor Tips YouTube channel

Sometimes you don’t want to read yet more in terms of blogs. You want some quick media tips on how to cope with those difficult and searching questions but you’re concerned about eye strain and the writing on your phone or tablet is all blurring into one in spite of the care we’ve taken choosing fonts.

That’s fine – it’s exactly why we started offering video tips as well. The link above takes you to a playlist on Clapperton Media Training’s YouTube channel which is packed with over 50 one or two minute videos on something that’s struck us during media training sessions. We just like to share stuff as soon as it occurs to us.

Hosted primarily by lead trainer Guy Clapperton, we hope you’ll find the media tips on offer useful. Just help yourself – it’s what the videos are there for!