Category: Media training

Last week we took a look at producing your own media. You might not want to go through indirect channels, you might have a base of customers and prospects that will respond to the direct approach.

There is a lot to be said for the indirect route. You produce your own podcast, fine, but it’s going to contain whatever you want. You get someone else to interview because you’re interesting and the listeners will know you’ve been sanity-checked. It’s like the difference between a traditionally-published book and a self-published effort. A self-published volume might be excellent but it might also be full of typos. The traditional version will have been accepted by a publisher and had an editor looking over it to ensure it follows in a logical order and the spelling and grammar are OK.

If you’re convinced you have enough to say, however, why not try? There are many ways to run a podcast so we’re going to use Guy‘s “The Near Futurist” as an example.

What is your podcast about?

It might sound obvious but the first decision to make is going to be the topic of your company’s podcast. “It’s going to be about my company” is unlikely to succeed. There are a number of reasons for this. Primarily the things that interest you in and about your business might not be all that thrilling to someone else. A small glazing business once came to Guy for thoughts on its website. It had started the copy (with changed names): “Ben and I had been trading independently for ten years but we thought, recently, let’s be serious – so we incorporated as a limited company.”

Nobody in the history of glazing has ever had “but are they a limited company or partnership?” as the first thing they want to know. Some need to understand whether the glazier is experienced. Many want to see pictures of windows they have installed. Probably all want to see testimonials.

Your podcast is the same. Making it about your business just won’t work. Guy’s effort, for example, could have been about journalism. Only other journalists and PR people/spokespeople (OK, that would be the readers of this blog, we grant you) would listen. So he decided to make it about the near future, taking advantage of 30+ years as a technology journalist .

So you need to decide what it’s about. Maybe there’s a niche within your own business that you can exploit.

An aside: the business purpose

The business purpose was and is different from just entertaining people, although he likes doing that too. Guy wanted to ensure he wasn’t one of those media trainers who had done some journalism years ago and whose counsel was therefore likely to be out of date. He wanted people to hear he knew how to interview people, to have a platform for his voice so if people wanted to check him out for some corporate voice work there was a current source, and perhaps a secondary source of income – which, thanks to a small amount of sponsorship, it has produced. Your own podcast needs to have a reason behind it as well.

Where do you start?

A theme you’ll get used to with us is the satnav image. You don’t start with “who do I interview” or “what microphone do I use” – you start with the business purpose. That’s your destination and like a satnav, the route you take has to be the best one to get you there.

It’s particularly important to be realistic with that destination. Few people are going to listen to a podcast and think “I’ll go and buy some of that item/service immediately”. You’re much more likely to achieve branding and thought leadership as long as you have a strong enough idea; this means putting obvious self-promotion to one side and focusing on issues that will resonate with your target client. It’s important at this stage to speak to a few of them!

You’ll need to decide some of the basics. Some podcasts are an hour long. Some are ten minutes. How long will your listeners listen? Ask them!

Guy Clapperton takes up the story:

My own podcast was relatively easy to formulate because the idea was to act as proof that I could interview people rather than just tell them about being interviewed – it’s a proof point. It’s also subtle proof that whether I’m more or less in my late fifties or not, I’m not put off by newer technologies – you hear a lot from marketing people about ‘over 55s’ as if we’re an alien species and I was keen to kill that stone dead.

Having those aims in mind it made complete sense to take advantage of my contacts in the IT PR industry and get them to supply me with some guests. I did so and it became easy to start building up a set of shows. The mechanics are surprisingly simple.”

Record and publish your podcast

When Guy is out interviewing people he doesn’t bother with an intimidating mic or other IT set-up (we get that you’re going to cry “we know, we’ve heard it”. Instead he uses his phone – just voice recorder on the iPhone or the equivalent on your Android phone. In terms of recording remote interviewees he uses Zoom although here he does use an external mic; the Blue Yeti was very good until he dropped it; the Blue Snowball does just as well. It connects to your computer like any other USB device.

He arranges the time for the interview and sends some topic areas over and records. He then uses a copy of Audacity (you can download it free of charge) to take out the umms and aah’s, his own and those of the interviewee. It’s worth leaving a few in so that you don’t end up sounding fake.

He then adds music, again using Audacity and he downloaded this music from Audiojungle – always use music for which you’ve paid a small amount so you can be sure you’re allowed to upload it. Other sources of music and of course other editing software is available.

Getting it out there is the next stage and here someone advised Guy to look at Libsyn, short for Liberated Syndication. This is an inexpensive way of uploading your edited and complete podcast; you can add “cover” artwork and show details.

It’s up there but nobody knows

At this point you’re published but nobody knows about it. This is where Libsyn has some clever workarounds; once you’ve filled in some details and selected some sources it will push your podcast to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Acast, your own website, just about wherever you want.

Then it’s up to you to publicise it.

Caveat: lies, damned lies and statistics

There are two things to beware of here. The modern version of Libsyn has two sets of figures you can look at. One is “Unique” and for a long time, Guy looked at these. What he didn’t realise was that it would register every time someone scrolled past a Tweet mentioning his show prompting it to start automatically. The fact that someone clicked off immediately was not, apparently, a problem.

The figure to look for is the IAB figure which is easy to select. This will be lower but it excludes accidental starts and other “non-listens”. Guy is now quite happy having 2-3000 downloads a month of his podcast.

The other thing to watch out for is your own time spent on getting your word out there. A small section of people reading this article might have ambitions to be full time podcasters in which case, great, go for it. However, most of you won’t, and it’s all too easy to put so much time into your podcast and publicising it that you might as well have taken it up as your sole occupation.

Always remember in the case of this or any other sort of marketing, it’s great as long as it’s doing its job. If it doesn’t perform or starts to suck all of your spare time out of the equation, it’s not doing you any favours – try something else!

And good luck – if your podcast attracts attention you can become a permanent fixture in your ideal client’s ears. This will make it all the more likely that they’ll come to you when they need a service like yours.

 

 

Your own content is a vital part of the media mix, Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at why you might want to take part in the media and get coverage. There have been, we hope, some compelling thoughts. There will be people, however, who will wonder why they have to bother. Their own blogs, LinkedIn posts, Tik Toks, Instagram and reels allow them to contact clients and prospects really easily.

There is an element of truth to this. There are risks, however. Your own media is going to offer your side of the story and nothing else so everyone is going to expect it to be promotional. The trick, we believe, is to offer value without pretending it’s otherwise (we like to think these blogs are a good example: yes of course we want you to buy media training from us as a percentage of you do, so by all means these posts are promotional but we aim to add genuine insight to encourage you to keep reading!)

The aim of this entry, then, is to consider what you might want to put out into the market in terms of your own media. We will make a few assumptions:

• You know what you need to get out of your media and what you want your audience to do next
• You’ve done some basic research on your prospects so, for example, you won’t be aiming to do a Tik Tok if you’re aiming at senior people or a LinkedIn entry for the consumer market.

Those basics should be obvious but they don’t seem to be to everyone!

Own content: what are you good at?

There are many articles and resources online which suggest your social media is not about you, it’s about the client. Well, yes, up to a point and that’s why we kicked off with a couple of questions about your customer. There’s another factor, though.

Actually, the subheading up there is a big clue. You need to ask yourself what you’re actually good at.

For the moment, as we type, Google‘s algorithm (according to our excellent webmasters at Rare Form New Media) favours longer-form blogs that emerge regularly and contain original content. Longer-term followers might have noticed that prior to the website’s complete overhaul, you’d get a quick 300-400 word tip and then we’d end the article; 1250+ is apparently what’s going to be picked up and highlighted on Google now so we’re behaving accordingly.

The thing is, lead trainer and founder Guy writes all of the content at the moment (yes folks, it’s me). And as you might expect from someone who’s been a professional journalist for over 30 years, he’s pretty words-oriented. There he is, posing like a whatsit in front of some books he has no intention of buying.

So this plays very well into exactly what Google seems to want from websites at the moment, lots of fresh content with links outside and inside with an unobtrusive focus on the SEO phrase (in today’s instance you’ll notice “own content” crops up a few times).

Alternatives

Business advisors we’ve had have also suggested we look at other social media. Again, LinkedIn tends to be pretty good for us because it’s wordy. Instagram, however, is fine for “reels” – the short-form films that lend themselves to tips, we just re-use the ones we send to YouTube – but people scanning it for still photos will be out of luck as Guy has the visual sense of a particularly slow hamster. With a blindfold.

This may not be great for business and it drives the advisors up the wall but we do urge you, if you want to generate your own content, to stick to something you’re going to do well. Here is our basic impression of the social media and owned media out there at the moment and how to tell whether they’re right for you.

Your own blog

Obviously, a blog is in your playground, you’re paying for the space so you won’t face sudden controversies as a new owner takes over or the politics take over. You’re not restricted by word length so take advice from web experts – assume the lengths we’ve described above will be out of date if you’re reading this when it’s a year old or more. However, it’s worth considering people’s attention span. You might notice we’ve broken up every long entry not only with pictures but with subheadings. This helps people concentrate and it also helps structure the article; the main heading has subheadings and these in turn have H3 headings underneath them. Google will look out for well-structured content that isn’t duplicated from elsewhere and if Google’s algorithms like it, it’ll perform better when people are searching.

Facebook

A lot of services have their own company pages on Facebook. This can be a great idea for consumer-facing businesses. In our experience the business community isn’t as excited by a Facebook group so if you’re a business to business supplier then it’s worth looking at LinkedIn. Try to remember people go to Facebook to relax and unwind a little so it’s worth keeping it chatty.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is intended as a business network. Microsoft owns it; the original founders had the idea that you shouldn’t connect with people you didn’t know personally so you could recommend anyone in your network. Somewhere along the line, members jettisoned this idea en masse so connecting with anyone is pretty commonplace.

This has the advantage for business owners in that its audience arrives expecting business content. It also has a newsletter function with which you can reach people who follow you very quickly and in large numbers.

As you’d expect from such a widespread service, however, just about everybody is aware of those services so you’ll find competition for attention is fierce. You can get attention by adding constructive comments and debated to other people’s entries. Be careful though; this is a slow burn, results are not swift. This in turn means it can be quite a drain on your time.

YouTube

If your following would benefit from how-to videos or other forms of video content then YouTube is a useful resource. Remember everyone can upload videos so it will pay you to take a little more care than most; brush up your editing skills and buy a better webcam and microphone than the ones that came with your laptop. Very few people will look at a video and judge it as good or bad because of the video quality consciously. Many will walk away with a bad impression and not be sure why when the image is off centre, when the sound is muffled.

It’s arguable that YouTube is more the consumer brand and for business to business services you will look more professional with a paid account from competitor Vimeo. Depending on your market you may find a certain polite bewilderment if you even mention them; without any suggestion of this being a good or a bad thing, Google owns YouTube and therefore has a lot of marketing and branding muscle to throw at it.

Instagram

Insta (as the kids call it) has moved beyond the still-images-only network of years ago. You can now upload short videos (or “reels”) and therefore talk to as well as show things to your target market. Don’t forget to engage afterwards; you really don’t want this to end up looking as if you’re just shouting into the void.

Tik Tok

For a long time we wrote Tik Tok off not because it wasn’t going to succeed but because it was primarily a young person’s thing and in the consumer market – so if you’re in those markets it’s going to be good for you. Inevitably the young people from ten years ago are in their twenties and sometimes even thirties and are still watching Til Tok videos; from our point of view we’ve started duplicating our “tip” videos from Instagram and YouTube into Tik Tok just so we have a presence; it looks likely that people will still go to Tik Tok for something more entertaining.

Podcasts

You can of course make your own video series or create your own podcast. This isn’t difficult and in our next blog entry we’ll have a look at how lead trainer Guy puts his Near Futurist podcast together and gets it out there.

Overall it can be worth publishing your own media because it’s inexpensive and you get to tell your own story rather than allow an intermediary like a journalist to handle it. Before you decide to ignore the independent channels, however, remember they offer a sanity check and some legitimisation. You say your business is great to work for, that’s fine. Nobody is cynical enough to suggest you don’t believe it but they will recognise that you have a vested interest. If an independent journalist says you’re a great employer, however, people are more likely to listen.

Managing expectations is a bad phrase. It is often perceived as meaning “this is going to be a bit rubbish” – go on, when someone says they want to manage expectations a bit, that’s what you think they’re going to say.

In PR and media terms managing expectations is important. So often we’ve had initial meetings with clients who believe that once their interview skills are up to scratch, sales will go through the roof. Look at Steve Jobs. He was an incredible presenter and speaker and when he spoke people bought his iPhones. Well, yes they did. He also had an absolute fortune of marketing spend behind him.

There are more serious objections to working with the media, though, and this article is about one of them.

Will the journalist will just do what they want?

When we were preparing Clapperton Media for the redesign and rebrand (if you like the website then we got it right, if you don’t, not so much) we spoke to a few advisors. One of them asked us what our main mission in life was and we said – as it says on the homepage – that our clients were concerned that a journalist would take their points (or their clients’ points as many of our partners work in PR).

Our job, we said (and will continue to say), was to ensure our clients had the tools in place to manage an interview. The response was “I don’t accept the premise, I know journalists, they’ll just go away and write what they want”.

We didn’t end up working with him, as you can imagine. He had the same expectation as a lot of people, however; go into an interview with a journalist and they will take over and set the entire agenda themselves.

Some might, and it’s in avoiding those that the PR community can demonstrate a lot of value. The wiser ones, however, will allow you to set a lot of your own agenda. Here’s why.

Managing the journalist’s expectations

What so few people tell you is that journalists themselves have expectations for an interview. Here’s a blog entry from journalist website Muckrack that takes you through the sort of preparation they’ll do.

What they expect from you is very straightforward: expertise. If you’re dealing with a journalist and you want to publicise your business, they won’t want to act as your PR department but they’ll want to write about your area with some authority. And here’s where we get to the related point about journalists: they will have done the research and may even specialise in writing and commentating about your area, but they’re unlikely to have taken part. Your knowledge is going to be better than theirs.

This means that we need you to take over the agenda from time to time. Here’s a link to a YouTube video we use for media training sometimes:

It’s Dido Harding, then chief executive of TalkTalk, on a cyber-attack that happened eight years ago. The point we want to highlight is exactly three minutes in. Kirsty Wark is trying to interrupt but Harding persists in talking over her and introduces the notion that the company is offering its customers free credit monitoring so they can see whether they are at risk.

The interview improves

Wark may have been frustrated about this (we don’t know her, can’t ask) but Harding didn’t work for her, she worked for TalkTalk and wanted to be accountable to its customers. She is right to take control here. It’s also noticeable that she adds value. Wark couldn’t have known about the plan to help with credit monitoring, it is entirely up to Harding to introduce it at this stage.

She does so by taking control. She establishes her expertise. The viewer will trust her a great deal more than someone just answering yes and no and allowing the journalist to dictate the agenda completely.

So what should you expect?

The journalist expects you to share expertise and they won’t expect a sales pitch – if they get one it will stay in their notebook and not get shared or it will end up on the cutting room floor.

So if you can’t go in heavy with the sales pitch, what can you do and what should you expect to get out of it? Here are a few ideas.

Address some issues

You know your market better than the journalist. They might follow it carefully but their information is second hand. Pick some issues that are important to your business. The chances are very good that they will be important to others too, specifically the journalist’s readers. Qualify those issues by saying why they are important. Use phrases like “our customers are telling us” and “what the market is doing is…” and you will start to gain traction.

Limit what you address

One of the most frequent complaints we come across is clients thinking journalists are at fault because they fail to grasp the complexity of an organisation. They don’t get the nuances.

Let’s turn that around for a second. A journalist visits you or your organisation, or arranges a call. You spend, what, 45 minutes once the polite noises are out of the way? And you are expecting someone to master all of the nuances of a complex organisation in which you’ve been full time for several years within the space of that three quarters of an hour.

It’s not going to happen. The way to ensure you don’t get misquoted or misunderstood is to limit the topics you speak about. Expecting a journalist to grasp everything too quickly is a non-starter so the thing to do is to offer them a great deal less. Tailor what you say to that journalist’s audience.

Be careful with exclusives

One thing you’ll need to watch as interest in your business grows is the idea of an exclusive. Giving a journalist something no other outlet has is going to go down very well – with that publication. The tricky thing is navigating your way around other journalists when you’re perceived to have done someone a favour. For our money the easiest thing to do is to treat them all equally; by all means you’ll have some you’d rather deal with than others because you’re human but we’d recommend trying not to play one off against another. It rarely ends up serving any useful purpose (and if you’ve been giving exclusives to one particular trade journalist because they worked on your favourite publication, what do you do when they move job and work for the competition?)

Final expectations

You can and should expect to be treated fairly. Journalists will always get a balancing comment if someone is criticising you (if said journalist knows what they’re doing). You should expect accuracy – they might not highlight the bits of your messages you wanted them to, which is another good reason for limiting what you tell them, but they will correct it if they get something factually wrong.

As we’ve said before, in terms of what the reader or listener is going to do next, it can be a good idea to start at this point and work out your communications strategy from there by moving backwards. Getting back to the point with which we kicked off this entry, it would be very unusual, unless you have Apple’s marketing dollars, to get a load of sales out of a piece of press coverage. It tends to be a slower burn than that. But if you play the game, deliver relevance and engage with what’s important to the reader, it’s a slow burn you should be able to ignite.

Preparation is vital if you want to achieve anything and that includes interview preparation. One of our trainers who wll remain nameless because he doesn’t want everyone to know how unfit he is has decided to do the “Couch to 5K” course in 2023. He has downloaded the app but is aware that he can’t just go in and do it in his late(ish) 50s. He will need to work his way up to it and warm up his alleged muscles.

In a possibly related incident, lead trainer Guy had a client a few years back who was doing a “fireside chat” style panel discussion online. She wanted to build her confidence and felt she needed preparation. They went through the likely questions a few times but one thing Clapperton Media did was to send a video of us asking questions and leaving a space for the client to answer. The idea – and we admit it was crude – was that the client should run through the panel experience before actually taking part and come into it “warmed”.

Preparation in other fields

It’s quite baffling to us that some people feel they shouldn’t have to prepare or warm up before taking part in an interview or sometimes a presentation. Consider what people do in other fields. We’ll start with areas that are a long way away from the field in which we work and move closer, which we admit is probably a cheap psychological trick.

Warming up for tennis

Here is a picture of some people playing tennis except as you can see they are nowhere near ready to pick up the ball. They are stretching, they are limbering up and warming their muscles. This might sound a little obvious and even patronising which is not our intention. They will have started preparing a long time before if they expect to be any good (not that we have anything against beginners). As we write, Roger Federer is a few months away from having announced his retirement but we’re guessing he’d still be pretty handy on the court; even if you’re twentysomething and athletic but haven’t picked up a tennis racket in your life he’s still going to slaughter you in a game.

Warming up for an audition

Slightly closer to home for people wanting to work using words is the preparation you might use if you’re going to perform in front of an audience. Here’s a link to the Royal College of Music’s guidance on what to expect in an audition to get onto one of its prestigious courses. The bit you’re looking for (or the bit we’re interested in if you’re not motivated to read through it) is the part that specifies you should allow 15-20 minutes for warming yourself up before you start the audition.

In other words they expect you to come in match-fit. Now ask yourself, if you do any public speaking as part of your job, any keynotes or Town Hall meetings for your employees or clients, do you warm up your voice first – or just expect it to work? Some of the skills you need to “project” as people call it are related to the music the Royal Academy advises, although if you check the excellent Lee Warren’s book on presenting he makes the valid point that sound resonates rather than projects – consciously try to project and you’ll push too hard and end up shouting.

It’s worth considering what you do about warming up your voice and speaking clearly before a major presentation. Most people overlook this but at least have a think about the subject beforehand.

Preparation before a speech

We had a client just before Christmas who we’d describe as a “minority”. Not because of any gender or race distinction but because when we asked what preparation he’d normally do before a speech (we weren’t training him in making speeches but we’ll come to why we asked in a second) he said “nothing, I just turn up”.

His view was that he had decades of experience in his field so just arriving and talking would be fine. He had testimonials to suggest that in his case it was indeed effective; for the vast majority we’d suggest it’s a somewhat haphazard approach – our trainers have been working in their fields for decades but wouldn’t dream of arriving without a briefing and some notes on what they’re going to do, probably including a formal presentation.

The vast majority of our clients agree. If you’re going to go and speak to 200-300 people you’d better do some sort of research, prepare and rehearse several times so that you’re familiar with the material and what comes next. You want that audience to identify with what you’re saying and to act on it.

Many of our clients say this is common sense. Preparation is vital for a speech, of course it is. We then turn this around when we’re training people to talk to the press and ask them what they do in terms of interview preparation. Many clients say, as the client who appeared at the beginning of this section did, that they just turn up. The journalist or other media professional just wants them to answer questions, which they can do without preparation.

Preparation before an interview

The flaw with that logic is that the people going in front of an audience of 200-300 wanted to prepare. The people going in front of an audience of thousands through the medium of a press interview thought they needed to do less. Do the maths – it doesn’t add up! Also if you’re just going to give the journalist they want then fine, they’ll love it. But in what other setting would you enter a business conversation and just hand everything over with no regard to your own needs?

If you’re going into an interview then the need for preparation is massive. You might want to engage the help of a PR company (you might already have done so which could be how you’ve secured the opportunity). Some of the things you will need to know will include:

• Your topic and what’s going to be of most interest. Yes of course you’re the expert in your area and your company but you’re not going to be able to communicate all the information and every detail in the space of a 45 minute interview. So you have to cherrypick.
• This means you’ll need an understanding of the journalist and the publication. If you work in, say, the fashion industry, you’ll have targeted a publication that’s interested in clothes but you’ll have a different set of messages for the trade as compared to the consumer, also you might be talking to someone who specialises in writing about fashion on a budget, fashion for people who don’t use animal products…there are many variants and only by knowing who you’re talking to and thinking through the right messages in advance can you do your business justice.

Ready for what?

Your interview preparation will need to leave you ready not only for presenting the facts but also for facing the followup questions. We could consider Guy’s client with the panel discussion again.  We sent a recording of some questions which she was able to use as a warm-up and she had of course prepared before going in front of the audience. She had an audience of about 100 online; if you’re interviewed, even by a trade audience, you could probably add a couple of noughts to that figure.

Now, how were you going to prepare, again?

If you or your clients need help with interview preparation we’re here to put you through your paces – just fill in the contact form and we’ll set up an initial chat.