The Media Interview

I saw an accomplished scuba diver being interviewed the other day and one of the opening questions was: how many dives have you done over the years? She hesitated for some time and then began saying how she hadn’t kept accurate logs, etc.

If you find yourself being asked for numbers or statistics - consider the context. If a business reporter is asking for productivity statistics and you don’t have them at your fingertips, you don’t want to give approximations or anything that might be misleading. Simply say that you don’t know and offer to get those figures as soon as possible.

In the case of the diver, the details aren’t important. We just want to know a rough number of dives - has it been hundreds, thousands? Having complete logs may be important for you as a scuba diver, but your audience doesn’t demand that kind of accuracy.

And since someone asked about it once, have an answer about total dives ready for your next interview.

Many professionals are torn between wanting to promote themselves during a media interview and sounding boastful. Here’s one good solution from C.J. Hayden, who helps professionals market themselves:

One of the secrets to effective articles, talks, and interviews is to tell stories about your clients. When you describe their challenges and accomplishments, you reveal the value of your role in helping them without having to boast about it.

And people love to hear real-life examples and stories.

In answer to Margie Zable Fisher’s Top Ten Reason’s Why PR Doesn’t Work, Brian Solis came up with Why PR Doesn’t Work and How to Fix It (thanks to Point Being for pointing it out).

Solis makes a lot of very useful points, but for my purposes, this piece of advice for clients was particularly relevant:

5 - Just because you created the product doesn’t mean you’re the best person to sell it. I’ve worked with some of the most passionate executives that just don’t click with the people they’re trying to engage - no matter how hard they try. Suck it up and get a spokesperson who can help tell the story to the people that will help grow your business.

Rob Amberg of of Cushman/Amberg Communications in St. Louis posted an interesting piece about Emotional Branding on his Transom blog (love the name - visit the blog to get the background on it). He talks about how Matt Miller, the CEO of Playworld Systems uses ads and media exposure to promote his company by attaching it to the emotions surrounding kids and play:

If you listen to media interviews with Matt, he doesn’t talk about playgrounds. He talks about the world needing play. And he doesn’t care if you play on his playground or a competitors. He just knows what play can do and is an advocate for it.

Law Gazette article out of the UK.

Dangerously, many lawyers also believe that if they are able advocates and successful practitioners their skills will transfer seamlessly to media interviews and areas of law in which they have no real expertise.

Most are wrong – we all know the axiom about the lawyer representing himself having a fool for a client. And even in the largest firms where marketing and communications professionals abound, their expertise may be limited to business development and marketing communications and not to handling crises.
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Allocate spokespeople. Train them in media interview skills;

Thanks to Justin Patten’s Human Law blog for pointing me to this article.