Category: Media training

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.

Finding journalists sounds easy. Earlier in this series of blog entries, we looked at how big it was as a profession and realised that there were over 100,000 of them in the UK alone. Unfortunately, we also took some time to look at how ludicrous some of the pitches they receive can be.

The trick, as we established in that linked blog entry, is how to ensure you find the right journalist. First,we’d urge you not to go too scattergun. There are plenty of online services offering help finding journalists because they have a list of thousands or whatever. They will take your press release or another piece of collateral, stick it into a mass mailer and send it to literally thousands of people.

Here’s the big secret. Most of those people will indeed be journalists or some sort of media outlet. They will be able to publicise you if your release catches their attention. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to do so. The big problem is that professionals can spot these mass market things from quite a distance. They’re generally distinguished by having an “unsubscribe” button to be GDPR compliant and this tells journalists that everybody has the same story already. That makes it a great deal less appealing.

This is why we always recommend a targeted approach. Less is more, and other clichés and yes of course we know that should be “fewer” is more.

So how do you find these people and what do you approach them with?

Journalists are chatty

Ideally, a journalist should be a good listener. They should ask a question that leads to a discussion and glean insights from the speaker.

Phooey. Anyone who has met our lead trainer Guy will be well aware that a number of them can’t wait to tell you all about themselves. Fortunately, you can use this to your advantage. Follow them on Twitter and better still, check their profiles on Linkedin. This is where they will have set out their stalls professionally and the switched-on ones will make their interests and the publications for which they write more than clear.

 

Also join the groups they’re likely to look at. This doesn’t mean searching for journalism groups, which are frequently packed out with people looking for the numbers for various press offices (people think journalists have researchers to find these things out for them, do they heck) and links to articles they’ve just published.

Interest groups

We recommend instead that you join groups into which you can add something useful. If you’re in manufacturing, look for manufacturing groups. If you’re in IT, join an IT group Nine times out of ten the best journalists will have joined already. Start answering questions and helping people, put the odd post up yourself; eventually it’s likely that journalists will start to approach you as a contact.

Look also at other social media. At the time of writing, Twitter has recently been acquired by Elon Musk and a lot of people are predicting its imminent demise. Our rule is that if something has been imminent for more than a month there’s a good chance it’s not going away even if its character is likely to change. Facebook can also be useful and the jury is out on Mastodon.

We’ve deliberately stuck with the more text-based networks. Many people are heavily engaged on Instagram but it’s a little trickier to engage when someone’s communication is primarily through images. Essentially, assess where your ideal journalist is likely to hang out and address that network.

Caveat: finding journalists doesn’t mean threatening them

There’s a theory among some press spokespeople and business owners that the best way to attract a journalist’s attention is to inform them you’re an advertiser and will withdraw your spending if they don’t write about you. To which we’d say no, no and for the third time, no.

Of course, there are some smaller blogs and publications that only cover the people who advertise them and if that’s a financial model that works, fine. Equally, there are opportunities for companies with deeper pockets to sponsor publications and supplements, maybe even in the national press. The readers tend to spot this after a while, though. They carry less weight than pure, earned press coverage and you’re better off in the sections people will take seriously.

It’s also true that some journalists will thoroughly enjoy winding the advertising team up by ignoring any entreaties from would-be advertisers carrying money. Commentators are mostly proud of their independence; threaten it or try to suggest it’s compromised and they are likely to walk away.

Finding journalists – which ones?

Some readers might be feeling as if they’ve been given a satnav and no direction. Here is where you find journalists. What journalists? How do you know who they are?

This is where you have to do some homework. There is no point in wanting press coverage if you’re not going to check the press out. Members of the press will be alert to people who haven’t read, watched or listened to the media they are approaching. Here are a coupleof things that have happened during lead trainer Guy‘s career:

• Working on a Guardian supplement for small and micro businesses. Guy sent a note out to get help and information on technology for small traders. One PR person sent him a pitch for a financial institution’s share trading platform. Guy said he meant small traders as in small businesses that traded things. The spokesperson wrote back and said, “These are small traders, unless you’re looking for something for Fred and his market stall!” Micro businesses like market stalls were exactly the sort of target he had in mind.
• In the same supplement, people would approach Guy with suggestions for the people page. “We are a small business and have a new director, it’s newsworthy”, they said. In nine years of publishing the small business supplement, there never was a “people page”. The people pitching clearly hadn’t looked – or had persuaded themselves there was such a page.

Your first job, if you want to target a publication, is to look at the publication itself. Check the masthead, the credits section where you’ll find the editor, the features editor, the news editor, all those people. Find them on LinkedIn.

Finding journalists then sending something

Let’s say you now know who you need to approach. You want to send them something, information, for example. You’ve located them, their email is on the masthead. So what do you do next?

There are different approaches and you need to keep an eye on what works. You also need to consider what feels comfortable to you personally. The easiest thing, you’d think, is to send a quick email. My company is doing X, we think it’s important because Y, would you like a chat? That can work sometimes.

The more traditional approach is the press release, which consists of:

1. Snappy and meaningful (not “clever”) headline
2. Subtitle expanding on why the headline is important
3. Intro paragraph with who, what, when, where, why
4. More detail in following short paragraphs but make sure the journalist gets the gist if they only glance through the first paragraph
5. Contact details, who to ask for pictures and further quotes

The error some people make is to follow up with a call either too quickly or too late. Journalists are unlikely to welcome followup calls even when they’re well-timed but we have seen:

• People leaving it two weeks before calling and following up – possibly because a client is breathing down their neck.
• People hitting “send” and then calling within two minutes. Genuinely, this has happened to us.

Calling with something to say

It can be frustrating when you send your release out and nobody appears interested. Some journalists will offer feedback on what they felt went wrong. Very few of them are pleased with a call that just says “I wanted to check you got my press release” although a few people still put those calls in.

If you’re convinced your announcement was newsworthy then it can be worth a followup call but first, be prepared for a rebuff; second, try to avoid asking whether the release arrived. “Yes” and a hangup is a possibility. “Did it bounce back?” tells you that they think you know whether the release got through and they’re not going to engage. There is a way to avoid these outcomes.

Suppose you send a release out about this inexpensive new smartphone you’ve made because you are convinced people are spending too much money. Your call might go: hello, that press release I sent about the Cheapophone, we’ve now struck a deal with X mobile phone network to sell it.” Or “We now have a customer who’s adopted them for her business and she’s willing to talk.” Or “We’ve just heard a major technology analyst has rated us in the top quadrant” or something.

It could be anything but try never to be as bland as “did you get my press release?” It’s too easy to terminate the call.

Something we focus on during our workshops is media drawbacks. Of course, we are pro media and in an earlier blog entry we outlined why talking to the media can be a really good idea.

It’s just that it won’t serve you well if you grab every opportunity that crops up. It might be that having multiple opportunities sounds like a pipe dream for the moment but if you start to gain a bit of profile they can arrive quite quickly.

Here are some reasons not to engage that you might want to consider.

• The opportunity isn’t right or you can’t stand the publication that’s approached you. It happens. It’s 1985, you’re a female entrepreneur whose business is doing really well and the Sun wants to run a profile on you but you’re aware that this paper sells itself on the strength of topless women on page 3. You’d rather not take part.
• It’s 1997. Your business has grown and is doing well. The Guardian wants to speak to you but it’s so rabidly left wing and really doesn’t match your values.

In both of these cases the benefits are likely to outweigh media drawbacks. The first is no longer an issue as that particular feature is in the dustbin of publishing history but people still have issues with the Sun and other papers like it. Be careful. If you’re promoting your business your choice of outlet should ideally be about the readership rather than your own preferences. Likewise the second. If the right people are reading the Guardian it matters less what you think and more what you can get out of it. There are other things that can go wrong, however.

Media drawbacks and your time

The first is undoubtedly the problem of managing your time. When lead trainer Guy worked on IT trade publication MicroScope in the late eighties and early nineties there were a few marketing executives he knew he could go to for a comment on just about everything. They’d always take the call and always come up with something insightful.

He once met one of the readers who actually bought their supplies from one of his regular commentators. He said, “Oh yes, I know XX, he’s always great to talk to” – and XX’s customer came back with “I know, that’ll be why he’s never got enough time to return his bloody customers’ calls.”

There could be all sorts of reasons for not returning a difficult customer’s call. We sympathise. However, one possible reason is that XX had unintentionally focused too much of his time on working for the press rather than doing his actual job. If you don’t think you will have enough time to do your press engagements justice then you’re likely to do them badly or to start eating into time that should be spent otherwise. If it’s affordable this can be a sign that you need to expand your team. It can be quite a step, if you’re in the “growth” stage, to start taking people on whose value doesn’t feed directly into the bottom line.

Misquotes, misattributions, rephrases

Equally serious is when someone gets a quote wrong or attributes it to the wrong person. Sometimes companies like people to do that. When Guy (him again) was working on MicroScope all those years ago someone sent a press release with a contact person for followup questions. He called, took some notes and wrote the story. Before it reached publication the phone went again: it was the interviewee’s boss. The boss wanted the quotes attributed to him rather than the person to whom Guy had spoken.

There was no question of changing the content and they were puzzled when the editorial team wouldn’t co-operate. The thing was, Guy hadn’t spoken to the director in question and it was not the editorial team’s role to pretend he had. Some 30 years later he still wonders whether they appreciated the point.

Other times something is wrongly attributed or plain wrong.

Out of context

You’ll have seen many people saying they were quoted out of context. This can mean different things to different people but the best definition we’ve found is here, meaning someone has quoted only part of a sentence or at least not filled in the context to make it worthwhile. For example our main camera operator Paul might say “I could direct the next James Bond film if I had more experience of fiction and a Hollywood profile” (he’d still be pushing it but we’ll let that pass). If someone just quoted him saying “I could direct the next James Bond film” you can see how the meaning changes completely.

You have the right to complain if a journalist does this to you. What’s more difficult is when people say they were quoted out of context and they actually mean “I wish I hadn’t said that”. Try not to be that person! It can be worth having someone in the interview or on the call with you as a sanity checker. Never mind that the journalist resists – you don’t work for the journalist.

Rephrases

Sometimes a journalist will rewrite something into their own vernacular. This can be particularly useful when you’re speaking to a journalist from a different culture. When Guy launched his first social media book in 2009 (don’t even Google, it’s a decade and a half out of date) he received an invitation to go to Malaysia and speak at a conference. He did so and as part of the publicity a newspaper came and interviewed him. His quotes, when they came out, didn’t capture his voice at all. They were full of “wow” and “oh boy” – he was sounding a lot more like a Malaysian man than a Brit with jet lag.

However, it’s not worth getting hung up on those details. The substance was right. They even got his favourite gig right: they wanted some local colour so asked him which concert he’d enjoyed most. He said Paul McCartney and the reporter said “Wow”, no, really she did, “In the sixties with the Beatles?” Guy was a year old when they played their last gig but we’ll let that pass. The point is that these little rephrase didn’t damage the sense.

The danger is that if you’re incoherent, long and rambly or if you mumble, the journalist will have to compress what you said into a sentence. This is where you risk your quote turning into what they think you meant rather than what you actually said. Be careful to think before you speak and ensure you stop firmly rather than tail off wherever possible.

Plain wrong

The other risk is that a journalist will misunderstand and put something in that’s a load of old nonsense. Most often this will be based on a genuine misunderstanding. In her very earliest days as a journalist one of our colleagues asked a company for their turnover. They said £40,000 (that’s “sales” to international readers and for context this was 1989) so she reported it – but found they were unsurprisingly unimpressed when she didn’t make it clear that this was the monthly rather than annual figure.

Mishearings and misunderstandings are entirely possible. If possible, when you feel you’ve been misquoted or there is a misrepresentation due to a factual error, it’s worth getting someone else to put the call in or send the email. You might be feeling vulnerable or that your job is at risk. This could mean you are concerned your family home is in danger.

This in turn means you’re possibly the worst person to get involved. You’re angry and anxious. The vast majority of the time, the journalist or editor will want to remove any inaccuracies as quickly as possible, It can be much easier if someone else puts the request in.

It’s still worth it

These media drawbacks shouldn’t put you off but you need to be aware of them. There is a huge competitive edge to be gained from mindshare and branding when you talk to the media; customers thinking they want service or item A and your name popping into their head immediately will help you grow the business enormously. Just understand that things can go wrong. You can end up as a full-time media spokesperson when you have a company to run or you can use an external PR company (or both as you grow) – it’s always worth having some sort of expertise backing you up.