Three surprising facts about media training
“What is media training?” It’s a question that we’re often asked. Communicate Media has been providing high quality, bespoke media training courses for over 30 years – but we’re always learning.
And so are the PR companies and in house media relations teams that we work with. Over the last few months, we’ve had conversations with PR and Comms professionals about what media training actually offers – and what it doesn’t.
Based on these conversations here are three surprising facts about media training:
1. It’s not an alternative to PR
In fact, it complements public relations and helps media relations teams to work more effectively with their clients and colleagues. Communications professionals bring us in to prepare people for media interviews.
We work closely with PR consultancies and the inhouse Comms teams of law firms, financial services firms, retailers, consumer goods manufacturers architects’ practices and a wide range of other organisations to help them to prepare their spokespeople for media interviews.
You know as a PR professional how difficult it can be to successfully pitch a story to a media outlet or to get your client in front of a journalist. But then the danger is that it all goes wrong when your client or colleague fails to get their message across. Neither did they use the kind of examples stories and every day, conversational language that journalists are always looking for interviewees.
Worst still, they might find themselves getting drawn into an area which is unhelpful and potentially dangerous. No media relations professional wants to hear a client or colleague say, “It all went a bit wrong. I’m not sure what I said but can you tell them not to use it?”
Public relations companies will bring us into onboard a new client. Frequently during our realistic, role play media interviews the PR person ends up finding something new and significant about their client. We worked with one manufacturer recently after which the PR said to us, “I have to admit that I wasn’t completely sure about what they did until you started asking them questions.”
Effective media relations teams
Communicate Media help PR professionals to test and refine their clients’ messages. We can also look at how these messages sound when delivered by spokespeople – do the words work? Do the spokespeople sound authentic? All of this is vital intelligence for an effective media relations team or PR consultancy.
2. Media training helps people to communicate more generally in the workplace
The skills we teach people dash thinking about the audience, getting your message across clearly and concisely and using examples and stories to prove and explain it – are transferable.
After our media training courses participants often tell us, “This will be really useful for a meeting I’ve got tomorrow,” or “I’m going to use these skills when I’m talking to my teams and reporting to my line manager.”
Whether it’s presentations (we also provide presentation training courses) or meetings with colleagues and others, the participants on our media training courses pick up a range of general business communication skills. As one happy participant put it recently, “I’ve been to a number of training courses, but this one was the most practical. Watching yourself on the screen isn’t a comfortable experience but it’s incredibly informative. Even if I never do a TV interview, I now have a better idea of how I come across to people during meetings.”
Our crisis management workshops for retailers look at how they can get ahead of the game. This means identifying risks and crises, evaluating them and determining not only how they could explode into a media story but how the senior management themselves would know about this incident. It may be that X/Twitter is covering it before you as the retailer have any knowledge of it, let alone deciding how you’ll respond.
3. It’s not about not answering the question
“Isn’t media training just about teaching people how not to answer the question that the journalist asks them?” is something that we frequently hear. Our answer to this is an emphatic “No.”
People often tell us during our media training workshops that they don’t want to sound like politicians. Very often when we dig down to ask what they mean by this, they talk about blatantly avoiding the question. We always point out to the participants in our media training courses that if you try to dodge a legitimate question, you’re not just insulting the interviewer but you’re insulting the audience. After all, the person asking you questions is only doing so on behalf of their readers, listeners or viewers.
Do you have to answer the question in a media interview? This is an interesting debate and we spend time exploring it and answering it in our media interview coaching. The point is that whether you answer the question or not you have the opportunity to move the interview in a direction that is more helpful to you. We have tools and techniques to enable people to do this and to gain more control of the interview quickly, effectively and, without sounding like a politician.
We should mention at this point that we provide media training for politicians and elected officials. The point is with our courses that we help politicians of all stripes too come across as more honest and authentic and to engage more effectively with their audiences and, ultimately, their voters.
If you’ve got any questions about media training or you’d like a free, confidential taster session then please do get in touch. You can follow us on LinkedIn here.
