Lead trainer Guy Clapperton writes:
Category: Media training
You’re a public relations professional and you’ve secured some coverage for your client. They are going to meet a journalist but they don’t appear willing to practice for the interview. Here’s a strategy that might help.
Clapperton Media Training is proud to announce that founder, chief executive and tea maker Guy Clapperton has been named among the inaugural Independent Impact 50, which aims to showcase the influence, commitment and contribution of the UK’s independent PR sector.
“It’s great to be able to share in this long-overdue celebration of an independent practitioner community that been ignored for too long,” says Guy. “It is so refreshing to see independent practitioners being truly celebrated and showcased for the value what they do, not who they work for”
As Guy says in the video, this was a particular pleasure because he and his colleagues are trainers rather than pure-play PR practitioners which makes this sort of recognition very special.
The winners aren’t ranked, just listed. PRovokeMedia has the full story here.
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.