Why Your Execs Need to be Media Trained

I’m off to do a media training today, and I thought it was a good opportunity to explain the strategy behind having executives and spokespeople go through formal media training.

As the famous line from Alice in Wonderland goes (more or less), “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

The same applies for media interviews: if you don’t know what you want to say and how to say it, you’re bound to say anything.

That’s the essence of why we do media training, or as I prefer to call it, media interview skills training.

The three components of media training are:

1. Helping spokespeople understand the media environment: who they are talking to, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to use that information


2. What to say: one of the biggest problems spokespeople have is that they tend to use corporate-speak in interviews, larding them with jargon and corporate catch phrases that don’t mean anything outside their corporate culture. So spokespeople need to learn how to translate their messages into “media-friendly” sound bites filled with facts and figures, anecdotes, examples, analogies, metaphors and the like


3. How to handle the interview: you can go into an interview and wing it, or you can use some simple techniques that actually make the interview work better for both the reporter and the interview subject. For example,  it’s a good idea for the spokesperson to give the reporter a “roadmap” of what he or she wants to cover in the interview, and to “flag” the most important points they want to make.

After we cover the above, the next step is practice. We step up a video camera and tape the spokesperson giving a practice interview, then we review the tape and discuss what they did right and wrong. I find that this is the most powerful element of training program, as spokespeople try to incorporate the skills they’ve learned.

If you’re interested in learning more, or learning how to apply these techniques yourself within your organization, I’m giving a seminar called “Teaching Your Executives to Love and Master the Media Interview” at the 2008 Media Relations Conference (sponsored by Bulldog Reporter) in April in San Francisco.