Make the most of media
Get opportunities and get them working
INTRODUCTION
Guy Clappeerton (for security reasons this looks nothing like my actual signature)
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So you want your business to get some press coverage – great. It can be really beneficial in terms of…well, in terms of what? A lot of people go into an interview thinking this will almost certainly bring them sales. It may well not. Others go in thinking it will bring them to the attention of their target customers. Well, it might, as long as you’re speaking to the right publication.
So here are a few real basics to start us off.
Think through why you want to get into the press at all
Getting into media might not be the best way for you to build your presence.Where do your customers and prospects actually get their information? 20 years ago some of the local restaurants in SE19 might have treasured a review from the Evening Standard; I remember Carol and I used to visit a restaurant in South Norwood which had a framed review from Fay Maschler in the window.
Some nice words from Grace Dent might still go down nicely – I have to say that, ask the Alma – but sheer volume of good write-ups on TripAdvisor might be even better. There was a car mechanic near where I lived years ago and I took my little motor in there to support a local business. If he’d had social media at the time, the fact that he lost the car key and took a full 45 minutes to find it so I could take my car back wouldn’t have done him many favours – although when he claimed he was being edged out of business by his landlord he did try to use the local press as a means of pressure. It didn’t work.
So how do you know where you want to be?
What do your customers read, listen to and watch?
Most of you will be in the consumer market rather than business to business so you’ll be talking to your customers a lot of the time. This is where you can ask some purposeful questions. What sort of media do they read? There are people paying to advertise in some local outlets – one of which confirms it’s delivered to 6,700 supermarkets and shops…in Southwark and Lambeth. Do your prospects even see it?
Ask them what they read and listen to. Dress it up as a bit of research if you like. They won’t mind.
Then start attracting attention but first set a course
We now move to what I call the satnav manoeuvre. If you want to go somewhere – anywhere – and use a satnav, the first thing you do is not to decide on the shape of the roads or the route but on where you want to get to.
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Likewise, where do you want people to end up after reading your interview or observing your coverage in some other way? It might not be where you think. Let’s take a local restaurant – you can see a pattern emerging here – Yak and Yeti, which I chose at random. If they were doing something in the local paper, do they want to attract all of the potential clients – that’s anyone who wants to eat and who’s based in South London? OK, that may be a bit big, so maybe people in the Crystal Palace area? Maybe they just want to be the Indian restaurant of choice so aren’t too worried about competing with, say, Numidie, Maybe they want to be the restaurant of choice for people already wandering around the Triangle looking for somewhere to eat, or maybe they want to become a place that people will actively plan to visit.
Once you know what you want the reader to do next, you do what a satnav would do – look at where you are and work backwards from your destination. How do you get to where you want to be – what breadcrumbs, what messages, can you put out there to deliver them to the right place?
Remember we’re not taking it for granted that a press release or interview is the right method but that’s what this book is about.
Choose your outlet
Your outlet should be the one or ones your target customers (remember we spoke to them) will be reading. By all means target more than one outlet but please don’t be that person who sends the same thing everywhere. Editors can spot it a mile off.
Ideally, look at your publications and who writes for them and target individual journalists. Follow them on social media – we’re not usually shy people, we earn a living by getting into the papers all the time. You can try starting a conversation there if you want. Remember you’re not there to self-promote (much), you’re there to establish yourself as an expert – in decor, in art, in shoe repairs, in teenage accessories, whatever it is.
The press release
One way of getting a journalist’s attention sounds pretty dated – and that’s the press release.
`There are no rules as to what should go into a press release but ideally it should be newsworthy. This means unexpected (unless your name is Apple or Samsung in which case you will surprise nobody by releasing a new phone but you will still get into the papers every time you do so).
It’s useful to consider the image of a pyramid.
If you take a pyramid and slice the bottom layer off, you still have a complete pyramid. If you didn’t know it had been there it wouldn’t worry you. It’s the same with a press release; paragraphs should offer detail later in the release but get all the salient facts in quickly.
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Let’s put it another way. If I get about fifty press releases in a day and I’m out, am I going to read much more detail than whatever fits into my phone’s screen without scrolling unless it hasn’t caught my attention?
In terms of interviews, I hope the following articles – culled from my blog – will be a help. There are plenty more on my blog but also follow my YouTube channel for weekly two minute tips on video.
Best of luck and I hope this gets you a lot of business!
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What? No, I’m not talking about whether interviewers plan their interviews. Of course we do. I’m a journalist so I go into every press engagement with a clear idea of what I need to get out of it. This is based around my readers’ needs.
What surprises me is that so few interviewees do the same.
The fact is that journalists and other influencers are very good at making it feel as if an interview is their province exclusively. To my mind this isn’t reasonable. The idea is simple enough; someone with a commercial interest (or a political one) is going to push their view onto everyone so the journalist’s role is to cut through this. The same is true of interviews with any other influencer – podcaster, blogger, whatever.
I have some sympathy with this view. Nobody wants to read, watch or listen to a bunch of vested interests. It’s definitely the job of the journalist to make sure their copy doesn’t reflect any of this.
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There are powerful counter-arguments, though. Consider a media training client I had a few weeks ago. Nice people, helpful, non-pushy and specialists in their field. Now, I’m a specialist in several things. Publishing. Podcasting. Interviewing. Training. I am not, however, an expert in the client’s field (which was insurance as it happened but you could also slot in manufacturing, technology, any of those things). This could give me a problem.
That problem is that as a non-specialist I don’t necessarily have the right insight to ask something that will get to the piece of insight the reader really wants. I might but I might not. So it’s valid for the interviewee to squeeze their message in, whether I’ve asked about it or not.
It’s also valid (and journalists don’t always have the time to consider this) for the interviewee to look for some sort of value from the transaction. They’re offering their expertise and their time. As long as they’re not nakedly promotional it’s not unreasonable for them to expect their name and company to be correctly credited and for their view and comment to be made clear.
So do you take control of your interviews and ensure both parties come out with value? And if not, why not?
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Media training is happening twice this week, for the same client. I’m transferring a tip that came up on Facebook in a Podcasters’ group. I’m telling people to prepare and not to say things they don’t want repeated.
It actually got quite heated on Facebook. One person started the debate by saying an interviewee had got in touch. They had told a personal story and a couple of months later they regretted it. They asked for it to be taken down. The podcaster faced a dilemma: the show was getting good figures. They had recorded on the strict understanding that they would publish. Should they take it down?
A number of podcasters said yes. It was part of the deal, it showed integrity. Those of us on the journalism side were less certain. Interviewees know they will be published. This case might be clear cut but where do you draw the proverbial line? Should Richard Nixon have been able to ask if interviewers wouldn’t mind awfully not publishing the Watergate story? And if not, where does the line actually come? It’s not a great way of finding out what’s actually going on. Reactions were varied.
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I was told “that’s why nobody trusts journalists”. The original poster was told her regard to her figures was selfish. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the duty to inform the listener about what actually happened when an interview took place was lost.
There are other factors to take into account as well. If the podcaster had taken the interview down that doesn’t remove it from the Internet. If someone had downloaded rather than streamed it, they have a copy. And if someone has overtly tried to get something taken down in this way it can look more rather than less appealing to people who might make an extra effort to find it. There is an answer, if you’re going into an interview and are wondering what happens if you say something unwise.
It’s in the preparation. The only way to stop a podcaster, journalist or other influencer repeating something you don’t want made public is to prepare your messages in advance, repeat them until they sound natural to you (so pick something you mean) and above all, not to say anything you don’t want attributed to you. It’s easy to get carried away in the heat of the moment unless you’ve thought through the likely questions and the issues you’re likely to face.
Once something is out there it’s going to be a permanent record. Even if the original poster takes it down, someone somewhere will have a record of it, maybe even a recording. So the thing to do is to make sure anything that’s going to carry your name is something with which you’re going to be comfortable.
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This week’s tip is about not saying “no comment”. It’s an important point to make because it gets cited so often by people outside the press as good advice.
A clergyman I knew when I was a child was advising associates of someone who sadly took their own life. “If the press asks, just say ‘no comment’,” he advised. A colleague had said a single word to a journalist once, “no”, and the hack had made a paragraph out of it. “No comment” was the one quote with which they can’t do anything, he said.
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Except of course that’s not the case. How many times in the press have you seen an article that includes the phrase “such and such declined to comment”? I’d be surprised if you hadn’t seen quite a few. In the early 1990s I put something to a chief executive of an organisation and his response was “I’m not commenting on that, and I don’t want to read in next week’s paper that I declined to comment”.
I ignored the latter piece of instruction of course – he’d declined to comment, it was a fair and accurate reflection of what he’d said.
So what’s the problem with it? The answer is simple. It always sounds as if you’re hiding something.
I specialise in businesses rather than private individuals for media training so I’m never likely to come across the circumstances in the first example I cited above. But in business, consider how it looks: Are you making job cuts? No comment. Are you failing to honour warranties? No comment. It always looks as though you’re covering rather than answering the question. There are, fortunately, alternatives.
First, you’re under no obligation to speak to the press in the first place. We’re not shareholders in your business, we’re not staff and we’re probably not customers. I’m not suggesting you dodge the issue, just that you may find your time is better spent addressing an underlying problem rather than attracting coverage of it.
If you decide to speak to the press or the phone goes and you answer it, there are many better things to say. “This is a developing situation and I don’t want to mislead your readers” can be useful. “I’d like to talk to you but need to devote my time to dealing with the people who are directly affected”.
Better still, if there’s a problem, put a statement together and refer the press to that. We won’t like it but at least we’ll have something, and you don’t work for us so you’re doing us a favour by putting it out there.
Just never say “no comment”. If we were looking for a story before, we’ll look even harder when we hear that.
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Many of my media training clients don’t really want to take control of an interview. Journalists certainly don’t want them to; they want their questions answered, thank you very much. They will then write the article they planned. The result can be that a journalist leads the interviewee around the interview process like a puppet who might as well not be there except to pop in the odd quote.
There is a flaw in this approach for both sides. You as the PR person or the spokesperson in question stand to make very little out of the engagement if the journalist is going to write whatever they had already decided. The journalist or other influencer, meanwhile, has learned little and might as well not have spoken to you.
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The reason so many journalists resist input in this way is that they have been trained to assume the PR world will have filled the spokesperson’s head with overly commercial sales and marketing content. This is true in some cases but my media training sessions involving PR people suggest it’s a dying trend. The journalist, nonetheless, will be primed to resist any perception that someone is taking over the agenda.
The way to counter this is to offer excellent content. Never assume a sales message will be adequate but do rely on your own expertise. My clients are mostly in the technology business. Taking that as an example, it is they who have the expertise in that technology, they who know their own customers and they who have some sort of market overview. This means they can add genuine insights into something I might write as a journalist.
And if I end up allowing you to influence my article, not with sales messages but with insights that will establish you as an authority in your field and me as a journalist that listens and writes an insightful article as a result. I’ll be honest, I find it hard to find a loser in that scenario – and it certainly serves the reader better.
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Here is a picture of the view from my living room. And my boiler has broken down.
This is not a bid for sympathy. The replacement is due in less than two weeks, we’re fine. It does, however, illustrate a bit of a point. You don’t need to know anything about my heating but I’ve told you anyway. In my professional life people keep giving me facts I don’t need. This is fine in a conversation. If our communication were purely transactional then we’d live in a very dull world.
It happens in interviews too, though, And here’s where we have a problem.
My journalism is mostly in the IT field, as is the podcast. So I speak to a lot of experts who know a lot of stuff about a lot of complicated topics.
As human beings they want to help me so when I ask something they give me as comprehensive an answer as is possible. This is where it all starts to fall down a bit, unfortunately.
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My job is to communicate this stuff to the outside world and when you communicate complexity and cover all the points, it’s just possible that a non-specialist won’t understand all of it. Or I might try to communicate what I see as the most important points, which could well turn out to be no such thing. In the real world as distinct from “in the estimation of a media professional” several of the other details you’ve mentioned might well be more pertinent.
The best way around this is to digest some of the facts for me in advance. Consider what the reader needs to read, what the listener needs to hear, what the viewer needs to understand, and tell me that only. If you tell me only the things on which you need me to be focused, I won’t be distracted and write about a secondary matter.
Are all of your media interviews – particularly those covering complex issues – as focused as they ought to be?
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Like a lot of journalists I get a lot of pitches. This means an over-full inbox and not much time to read them. So like a lot of journalists I look for a headline.
As a writer of these things, if you’re in PR or at least fulfilling the role, you probably think of these as subject headings. You’ll be attaching them to emails in the hope that they will attract my attention.
It can be more productive to think of them as headlines. Here are some thoughts on why.
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Actually it might be better to quote a subject header from an email I received over the last few days. It went:
“Press release”
…and that was it. I get this often. I know the idea is to help me file the communication in the right place but it doesn’t tell me anything about what’s in it. Ditto the person who sent me something today saying their client had put a blog entry online. We all know how simple that is so why not hook me in with why the entry is important?
I often suggest my media training clients think in headlines rather than subjects. When preparing for an interview consider the headline you’d like to see as a result of any coverage. It will help you focus. And when pitching a story to me and my colleagues around the world, assume we won’t click and open the thing if we’re not gripped by the subject – so write it as a headline, also bear in mind it should be short so we can see it on our phones. I actually saw one subject line today that went over the line in the standard Gmail layout, which left me deciding whether to open it before something else caught my attention – and this was on a 27in desktop monitor. If you can’t write a shorter headline than that, get a colleague to help.
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It’s been a big week for news about communications and the right to reply but I want to reflect on one thing today: The Simpsons. OK, two things, I want to consider the singer Morrissey as well, and his management. Three things.
The story is simple. The Simpsons has made an episode taking the whatsit out of a celebrity. This is not out of character, it’s something the show does all the time. As you’ll gather from the intro, the celebrity in question was Morrissey and the character they portrayed him as was a former vegetarian, principled star of the 1980s who was now an overweight meat eater and a bit of a reactionary. The BBC had the story on the Today programme on Radio 4 and on its website, you can read it by clicking this link.
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As I said in yesterday’s video above, I’m not interested in the rights and wrongs of what Morrissey does or doesn’t believe, either now or in the present. I have no idea whether or not he is still vegetarian but either way I am in no position to criticise someone for being an overweight person who eats meat. I believe he and his management have made one major error though, and that is in exercising the right to reply.
Many years ago, the then prime minister of the UK and Northern Ireland John Major was accused of having an affair. Ironically it emerged subsequently that he had done just that, with minister Edwina Currie, but not with the person in the accusation (one of the Downing Street catering staff). The allegation appeared in a magazine called Spike and Major’s decision initially was to ignore it. His logic was impeccable; Spike was a tiny magazine with a low circulation so hardly anyone would have seen the story. Taking them to court or making statements about it in public would simply have drawn attention to the issue.
Later, when the Daily Telegraph carried the story, he sued successfully. His judgement was that it now had traction and needed to be intercepted.
Nobody is saying Morrissey has done anything similar. However, by deciding not to let the issue fade by itself and instead putting vicious statements about The Simpsons out on social media he and his management have drawn attention to the issue. I like the cartoon but it’s a while since I’ve seen an episode; I would not have been aware that there was an episode saying so many unpleasant things about the singer had he and his team not made so sure I knew all about it. I also know how rattled they are by the incident, something I’m guessing they’d rather I hadn’t seen.
In your business or that of your clients you might have a related issue – not that they’ve grown into an ageing rock star or that they’ve had an affair with a member of their catering staff but you or they may be receiving negative coverage. The question I’d challenge you to ask yourself is that although a journalist is likely to offer the right to reply, is that going to help or just repeat the negative in a fresh story about your response?
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One of the pieces of advice I’ve had frequently as a member and more recently fellow/board member of the Professional Speaking Association, UK and Ireland, is to repurpose existing materials. It makes a lot of sense. As a journalist and writer I am and ought to be fairly creative but it’s a fact that I have around six years of blog entries on this site. Many of the tips are still relevant today.
So I thought I’d follow many of my colleagues’ examples and repurpose. The first attempt was pretty good. I put them together in a book, “50 tips on dealing with the media“. You can buy it on that link and sometimes I give away copies to delegates at media training sessions, although the advent of coronavirus and exclusively remote sessions has led me to revert to giving ebooks away as aftercare. The clients still seem happy and of course – you’ve guessed it – the ebooks are lifted from blog entries too.
I had to tweak them a little in both cases. First, maddeningly, I spotted the odd typo here and there. Second, though, I try to make all of my entries useful and then finish with a quick call to action to people wanting my help. A similar call is at the end of this short piece, much as you’d expect. I took them off and put a single note at the end of each ebook and the hard copy 50 tips book.
The other instance was my idea of getting tips out to people rather than waiting for them to come to the blog. Many people will have seen my Tweets and LinkedIn entries on my new fortnightly tip sheet starting at the end of the week. My initial idea was to repurpose existing content and add something current – that should work a treat, no?
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Well, no. I found out immediately I tried cutting and pasting a blog entry from two weeks ago that 350-400 words is fine for the blog format but it’s really too long as a single item in a fortnightly email. So although there will be items from the blog in the tip sheet, they will be completely rewritten and cut back to a much shorter form.
This experience can apply to a lot of small business marketing communications. Repurpose your intellectual property, it’s a great idea – but it’s never quite as easy as just cutting, pasting and re-using exactly the same thing.
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Top marks to anyone who spotted the Sherlock Holmes reference in that title – but today’s blog entry is on another intellectual, this time a real one. Albert Mehrabian supposedly came out with the oft-quoted statistic, that only seven per cent of communication is verbal.
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I hear this quoted at conferences and I’ve heard coaches cite it to speakers. The problem is that it’s mostly baloney.
I have a good witness for this. Here’s a BBC programme from 2009:
BBC Radio 4 – More or Less, 14/08/2009
If you have the time, skip to about 23 minutes in. The presenter, Tim Radford, interviews someone who disputes that the Mehrabian research concludes anything like the ‘fact’ about communication people keep quoting. That interviewee is Albert Mehrabian.
I’ve put this to speakers who’ve quoted the research sometimes and they tell me it’s a well known fact. They just don’t take account of the issue of the original researcher behind it saying that the most commonly-quoted conclusion from his research is wrong.
His research consisted of getting people to say a word with different expressions on their face and seeing how people interpreted it. It’s perfectly valid to say expression and context make a difference. If you book me for media or presenter training and I mumble “good morning everyone I’m really excited to be here” with my eyes half shut then it probably tells you more about my activity the night before than what the words actually mean. But this isn’t right every time.
As Mehrabian says in the interview, if he wants to know which drawer of his desk an item is in and he calls his wife who is in another room, she has only words to go by. The conversation becomes purely informational. It’s really not something from which you can gather nuance.
So a resolution for 2021 might be for presenters to take account of their expressions, body language and voice by all means. But never, ever, come out with the Mehrabian myth again. It’s been out there too long and if too many people think it’s a well known fact it will take even more root than it already has.
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I’ve often mentioned poorly-targeted press releases in this blog – it’s one of the easiest ways of sorting out the better PR companies from the worst. Now there’s a new wrinkle: people are fiollowing up with “I wondered whether you’d had time to consider my press release”.
One person even sent a sad face. He – and many other people – had sent me a pitch for an article to include on my website.
Now, I’ve been freelance a long time (since 1993) so depending on where and when you came across me, you might think of me as a journalist, trainer, author, conference speaker, you get the idea. Although it’s all related, my experience covers a lot of ground.
So I now ask people: where exactly were you pitching this? This isn’t to catch people out. It’s to find out whether they are, for example, hoping for coverage in Intelligent Sourcing magazine (now online only and handled by the publisher, with whom I’d have been happy to put people in touch); had it been for the Guardian I’d have let them know I was technically never the small business contact but wrote loads – generally I’d like to connect people with whomever they need to speak. Nobody who is offering an article is likely to be pitching to my Near Futurist podcast although I do get a lot of very good offers for that; if they’re offering written material then frankly they haven’t realised it’s an audio production.
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So I ask where they were actually intending to pitch. Only: people tend not to reply. This tells me that there are a number of possibilities but the strongest is that they have automated not only a scattergun, indiscriminate approach to just anyone who might be a journalist, but they’ve automated the responses as well. So someone sends me an offer of an article, I ask where they were pitching it, they send a ‘reply’ with a sad face on it because I haven’t used it, I ask where they were hoping to see it again, and they ignore me.
The thing is they’re probably unaware that this is happening, so here’s a suggestion. Automation is supposed to be helpful. If you’re using it, it’s worth putting the odd call in (or just a quick email) to check it’s doing the job for you. It could actively be damaging your reputation otherwise – and nobody wants that.