Preparation for media interviews means understanding your audience, deciding your objective and planning the words you want to say. And my mantra is preparation is as important as doing.
The purpose of a zingy key message is to make people sit up and listen, to make them want to hear more. That doesn’t need expanding on here.
Defining your objective – what you want your audience to think once you’ve finished speaking – is a blog for another day.
This blog is about the difference between the words we THINK we should use and the ones we really should.
This week I media trained an impressive young man from a tough background who is an ambassador for his firm’s drive to tackle social mobility.
It was clear he was highly intelligent and very clear on the essence of what he wanted to communicate.
It’s also relevant that he was going to be ‘telling his story’, as opposed to being interviewed as a subject matter expert.
Because as we worked through a process I use to dig down to the right messages, and get words on the page, he was getting more and more excited.
Making it simple
“But this is how I would explain it to my mates,” he said. “This is making it so simple!”
What he THOUGHT he needed to prepare – and had done before our session – was formal language.
What my gran would call ‘talking posh’.
And how he’d prepped it was to sit in silence apart from finger on keyboard. Then regularly check how well his words scanned on screen.
Which they did, he’s a great communicator. What no one had told him was that written words rarely work in spoken communication.
Words we’d never say, we will happily write, and then conscientiously learn like a script, never once uttering them aloud.
It’s only when we come to say them that we trip up. (And imagine the first time you deliver a carefully crafted key message being on BBC Breakfast in front of 6.8m people…)
The media interview is a conversation
The media interview, on TV, radio, a podcast and even when being written down for online or printed news, is more than ever about a conversation.
Yes, it’s a conversation with rules and protocols, processes running in the background but still, a chat.
When we do our preparation for media interviews, we need to prepare spoken language. That means words aimed at our audience not the journalist, that WE can say comfortably and credibly.
Top Tips:
This is a conversation – the language needs to sound conversational
It is YOUR conversation – have that conversation in your language
Say your messages aloud – make sure they SOUND right
If you can, bounce them off someone else – if possible get them to ask the questions
(Post Script: The key messages, stories and proof points our social mobility ambassador came up with for Version 2 of his interview agenda were stunning. He brought his story to life in short, clear bursts and was totally convincing doing it).