interview Archives - Clapperton Media

The picture for this post is not an iceberg. Well, it’s not a complete iceberg. The fact is that icebergs are largely underwater so you can’t see them without the proper equipment. What we’ve got here is the tip of the iceberg. About one tenth of one.

You probably knew that but you will be thinking, never mind the pedantry and detail, that’s an iceberg. You’d be right. And yet loads of people still think that when they’re explaining things to the press, the thing to do is to explain all the detail they can. And the result is a confused journalist.

This is very frustrating if you work in PR. You spend ages pitching a story to journalists (maybe even after doing one of our courses, he hinted), you pare it down so it attracts attention and then your client does the human thing of trying to help with all the information they possibly can.

This is where that information can become garbled. The journalist may be a specialist in the client’s field but they may not (and even if they are, their skill will be in writing about it rather than being a practitioner). Their real specialism is in getting stories out of people and constructing a narrative.

So if your client has been working in their field for 20 years and the journalist asks them something, their instinct can be to try to impart everything they’ve learned in those two decades. This is actually going to be a lot for the recipient, who will be doing other interviews too, to take in and assimilate.

Pare it down

In our media training sessions we try help your client to cut down on what they deliver to journalists, podcasters and other stakeholders. If they can start with what sort of headline they’d like to see and work their way backwards from there, they are more likely to offer the important bits rather than every last detail.

Going into too much depth can come from a good place, it’s the client trying to be helpful. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone whose job is to report what’s happening in a condensed amount of words, keeping it simple and cutting out the unnecessary stuff is actually more use than the detailed version.

Basically we all know we can only see about ten per cent of an iceberg above the surface but if someone asks you to show them a picture of an iceberg you’ll show them something like the image we’ve used here. We can help get your clients to do the same – just show the journalist the iceberg.

You’re in an interview and you’re the sales director. The journalist starts asking about marketing. Or sales. Or HR.

There are ways of coping. Blurting out answers because you think you ought to say SOMETHING isn’t the best.

Check this video for Guy’s thoughts.

It always amazes us at Clapperton Media that so many people think they can ad lib a media interaction and go without interview prep. The same people who will rehearse and prep a presentation that’s going to go to 200 people in a hall will cheerfully claim they know what they want to say to the press (when they will effectively be talking to thousands) and they don’t prepare.

It will stagger you, no really, stagger you, that this approach can often go wrong. A question comes in that doesn’t suit your agenda exactly. Your tone doesn’t suit the occasion completely. The instant rapport you imagined you’d have with the journalist just isn’t happening. It is all told a bit of a nightmare.

We knew one PR professional whose client had exactly that attitude going in – didn’t need support. They spent an hour with the journalist and it didn’t go well. They came out of the meeting, called the PR person and said they didn’t want the interview to go out. They were then stunned to find out that the PR person had no power or authority (and let’s be honest, no inclination) to prevent the publication of an interview that had been given willingly. It wasn’t paid-for content so there was nothing to be done about stopping the write-up, which then wasn’t pretty when it appeared.

Interview prep needs taking seriously

A variant on this is the person who just doesn’t take it seriously. The PR people have prepared a document and the executive who’s going in front of the press intends to read it, honestly, and might even have glanced at it before the event. But they don’t give it enough time so they’re not on top of the figures, the latest research, the journalist’s readers and therefore how they can connect with them.

Clapperton Media Training works with many PR companies, some regularly and some on one-off bases. We often hear from them that their biggest frustration is the client that takes the prep documents and almost immediately discards them. Clients are busy people, they get that – but seriously, those prep documents are gold dust and invaluable – take them to heart, you’ll do a better interview.

No good media trainer is going to help you to lie which is odd because that’s what so many people think it’s about. But we won’t. It will catch you out eventually because you’ll forget who you told what and establish yourself as unreliable.

Here’s a short video on the subject.