We’ve talked before about what to do when a reporter calls to interview you about something positive. Today we cover some basic information on giving an interview in a contentious, potentially confrontational setting–broken down into 8 key points.
The Scenario:You’ve been asked by a television news reporter to give an interview about allegations against your company.
The first question you ask yourself is: Is it best to give an interview, or lie low?
Answer: When you have nothing to hide (and no legal reasons not to) it’s good to be proactive and get your side of the story out there. Just remember to take care of how you present yourself and your side of the story:
1. TV reporters will generally want to interview you on their schedule, not yours. However, if you’re not prepared to speak, try and schedule an interview after you’ve had time to prepare. If that luxury is not available, take a few moments to huddle with your public relations or management team and decide what theme and key points you want your messages to convey in the interview. Prepare for the worst questions with your best answers. Developing three simple sound bites that sound natural and unrehearsed can get you through almost any interview.
2. Repeat your key message and points several times during the interview, if the interview is long enough for that opportunity. Even if you are asked a question unrelated to your key message, bring your key messages into your answer:
Key Message: Your company is the top-ranked firm in the Midwest for employee satisfaction.
Question: How do you respond to the allegations from two former employees that they were working in a hostile work environment?
Answer: We have consistently demonstrated the utmost in professionalism in our human resources practices. In fact, we’ve been named the top-ranked firm in the Midwest for employee satisfaction.
Retort: But these former employees say they were unfairly treated.
Answer: In any organization our size there are bound to be conflicts, but you don’t get named the top-ranked firm in the Midwest for employee satisfaction without treating people right.
Keep in mind, this isn’t about pleasing the reporter but about getting your message across.
4. Never repeat or initiate a negative. Notice in the answer above the interviewee reinforces the good without giving any reiteration of the negative.
An extreme example of this is President Nixon:
“I am not a crook.” If he wasn’t a crook, it was probably not a good idea to introduce that word into the public conversation.
5. “No Comment” is never the answer when asked a tough or hostile question. Use the opportunity to refer back to your key message: “I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you that…”
6. Always be honest and if you don’t know the answer to a question, then admit it.
7. Watch for efforts to put words in your mouth or the application of a negative “frame” around the situation. Some reporters may try to get you to tacitly agree to “allegations” by framing the question in a way that makes you seem complicit:
Question: As you have not denied allegations of hostile work environment, what will you do to meet the demands of the employees?
Answer: Our company’s reputation, as illustrated by our being honored as the top-ranked firm in the Midwest for employee satisfaction, is solid.
Retort: But you have not denied the allegations.
Answer: We’re not in the business of responding publicly to human resource issues. That would be irresponsible and not in keeping with our ethics and acclaimed employee satisfaction rankings.
8. Don’t take it personally. Even if the reporter is hurling the most heinous, unkind allegations at you (“Some people say that your company kills kittens…”), a thin-skinned show of temper, self-pity or weakness will be magnified and may go viral for all the world to see.
Be graceful, take your time and politely respond with your key messages. Attacking the reporter almost never helps. Most reporters are ethical, hardworking folks performing a vital public service–but your job is to take care of your company’s interests and yourself–they know that.
Just remember, the media can do a lot of harm (or a lot of good) to your reputation–but not without your help!
Good stuff about social media measurement from Katie Paine.
Paine is CEO and founder of Katie Paine and Partners, a marketing and PR measurement consultancy, and the author of the book Measuring Public Relationships. In an interview with CW Magazine Executive Editor Natasha Nicholson for the CW Radio podcast, she talked about how social media have changed marketing and PR, and offered tips on how communicators can measure their social media efforts.
We have to redefine our measure of success. Because it used to be that big numbers were better. So a million “eyeballs” in The New York Times or a million “eyeballs” per month on nytimes.com doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is how many people actually do something. So it’s not how many eyeballs but what the people who own those eyeballs are actually doing with the stuff you are sending. Are they clicking? Are they engaging, responding or retweeting? Are they signing up? Are they giving you an e-mail address? Are they actually interacting with your brand? That’s what matters. And it’s going to be very small numbers.
I use the example that in the olden days, Walmart would have counted success by reaching 11 million people or 11 million moms. Now they credit 11 moms who got a whole bunch of people to get engaged with their product. They literally said, “one of the reasons we made our profit numbers in quarter one of this year [2009] was because of those 11 moms.” Eleven. Not 11 million, but just 11. That’s all it took, because those moms became engaged with the brand, passed on the information and literally contributed to sales.
Today we hear from Sean Williams, talking about “Measuring Communication Without Crying”:
To make measurement work, you have to know what you want to accomplish. Maybe you want to get media attention. Fine, but why? And don’t just say that you want it because media attention is good.
Ask yourself whether your PR and social media plan is really aligned with your organization’s business plan. You need a real objective, with a specific goal over a specific time frame. Perhaps your objective is to reach a certain audience segment in the next six months, such as Facebook users over the age of 55 or people who work in manufacturing in South Africa. Maybe you want to focus on a specific business area like tire dealers or individual consultants. Or perhaps you merely want to increase traffic to your web site or increase the number of people who follow you on Twitter.
Whatever your objective, you must also consider your audiences and stakeholders. Do you know where they spend time online, what they like to read or view and who they tend to trust? What research is available about them?
Great advice from the gurus at Brainzooming. Read the entire post, but this part in particular really caught my eye:
Don’t make them suffer through your brand identity crisis. This can be especially challenging for solopreneurs and small businesses with less considered brand identities. A huge part of a brand promise is predictability. Even if your brand is edgy, it should be predictably edgy. So when communicating with your audience, make sure you behave in a way that’s consistent with what your audience expects.
When measuring PR success, it’s most important to have clear goals and expectations set in advance of the campaign:
A client’s expectations of what business objectives media exposure should fulfill can vary dramatically as well. As Sara Pereira, founder and president of Pereira PR in Vancouver, British Columbia, explains, “It’s not only about the amount of coverage we are able to get, but how clients expect that garnered coverage to translate into business results. Do they want media exposure to drive web site traffic? Do they want media coverage to create sales leads?”
Pereira goes on to explain, “When we are able to understand client expectations based on business goals, and make them measurable, we create PR strategies that are much more focused, rather than just driving hard to get as many press hits as possible.”
If you’re a PR pro, make sure you don’t over-promise.
If you hire a PR firm to serve your company, make sure they don’t promise you the moon either. Any public relations firm that tells you they can guarantee non-paid media placements is being overly optimistic at best. At worst, they’re probably lying.
At the risk of sounding worse than the Joker: I (mostly) agree–don’t give it away if it’s what you do to earn a living.
Okay, straight up–I’m not saying I never do pro bono publico. I’ve done a lot of volunteering and I’m happy to do it. I also have a couple of clients who don’t have a lot of money, but I believe in their potential and want to help.
However, I’d be disingenuous if I told you that (besides the volunteer work) I don’t tire of the persistent entreaties for free or outrageously discounted services from organizations and companies. Especially those that have the means to pay me for my work.
It’s always something. Rewrite some copy, design an invitation, critique a for-profit website or do free publicity for that annual fundraiser for prickly heat. I could go on, but suffice it to say that some people think that since I own my own company (and their cause is just and “you’re just so good at this!”) surely I would be happy to donate my time for free or for a pittance (that’s called a loss in business-speak).
Now if I do those things in hopes of creating a relationship that will lead to new business, that’s one thing–you pays your money and you takes your chances. But anybody who has walked in my bootstraps knows the difference between a legit opportunity to create a new business relationship and just plain being taken for a sucker.
Hey, to be fair–every one of those examples I gave are my fault because I said “Sure, I’d be happy to help. Who cares if that puts me behind with a paying client?”
But now, I have to say this: I’m flattered to be asked, but no. Can’t do it. I can’t help you move, either.
Doctors who volunteer in inner city clinics or third-world countries two weeks a year deserve our admiration; ditto for lawyers at legal aid or accountants who help out folks for free a little at tax time. Same goes for PR/marketing/advertising people who serve charitable organizations as a board member in charge of publicity. They’re doing their own version of ministering to the needy: putting their modest talents and connections to work pro bonopublico–for the public good.
But you can do the public so much good that you go out of business. Then the joke’s on you. (At least at that point you’ll have plenty of time to volunteer.)
My advice is simple: pick one or two causes/organizations per year that you will help pro bono–then set boundaries. Say yes only when it’s feasible. Never, ever get overextended due to your generous heart or the quality of their cause or organization. Trust me, if you do you’ll begin to resent the very people you volunteered to help.
And if somebody who owns a business tries to hire you on the cheaps, playing on some misplaced sense of loyalty or the passing acquaintanceship so easily called “friend” these days, don’t even think about it. Do what Nancy told us to do in the eighties. Just say no. Work for peanuts and you lose money, time and respect–and when you’re bootstrapping a business you can’t afford to lose anything.
If I sound like a Grinch so be it.
Honestly, I believe we should give with a generous, happy heart. That’s easiest and most genuine when you have a roof over your head and you don’t feel like a sucker. No joke.
“I moved to a trailer park,” says Mr. Belic, “which is the first real community that I’ve lived in in my life.” Now he surfs three or four times a week. “It definitely has made me happier,” he says.
“The things we are trained to think make us happy, like having a new car every couple of years and buying the latest fashions, don’t make us happy.”Mr. Belic says his documentary shows that “the one single trait that’s common among every single person who is happy is strong relationships.”
Buying luxury goods, conversely, tends to be an endless cycle of one-upmanship, in which the neighbors have a fancy new car and — bingo! — now you want one, too, scholars say. A study published in June in Psychological Science by Ms. Dunn and others found that wealth interfered with people’s ability to savor positive emotions and experiences, because having an embarrassment of riches reduced the ability to reap enjoyment from life’s smaller everyday pleasures, like eating a chocolate bar.
It’s the political season, and tempers run hotter than an August in (insert name of your hot town here). Besides politics, there is also the specter of the ongoing culture war over morality and religion.
That in mind, we recommend you heed advice you may have heard since you were a kid: never discuss religion or politics if you want to keep a conversation pleasant. The same should go for business advertising.
Certainly, we all have strong opinions, and the right to express them is what America is all about. But when one of our clients wants to advocate for a political, religious or cultural issue in their advertisements, I ask them to take a step back. Take a deep breath.
Unless you focus on one group with your ads, you’re advertising not just to people who think the way you do (who will likely believe you are a principled person for expressing your beliefs) but you are also reaching–and potentially alienating–an entire market segment. (TV ads, for example–are generally targeted to the audience at large, even if you focus on one particular channel.)
Here’s an example–an aluminum siding company in Oklahoma:
Yes, you heard him right. In the middle of his pitch to Oklahomans to buy aluminum siding and new windows, he says “Yes, I’m an Oklahoma conservative Christian businessman who stands for liberty and freedom. So, let’s end this secular socialism right now.”
Okay, we’re not here to say he’s right or wrong in his beliefs. We’re here to say that while this may appeal to a base of customers and bring lots of publicity, it may forever damage the company with potential customers who either disagree with him or are simply turned off by his mixing of politics and religion in his sales pitch.
Another way to express yourself publicly is to submit a letter to the editor of your local paper or start a blog. That route makes your political or social stance less tied to your business and its reputation. People will probably be far less likely to find that distasteful, as you aren’t expressing yourself in a way that appears like a craven attempt to makes sales by pushing political or social issue buttons.
Ultimately, we recommend you give potential clients a “business” reason to hire you, whether it be your service record, unique product offerings or longevity in your field. Good marketing and public relations strategy is about knocking down objections–not building walls (or adding siding to existing “walls”).
Good stuff about social media measurement from Katie Paine.
Great advice from the gurus at Brainzooming. Read the entire post, but this part in particular really caught my eye:
When measuring PR success, it’s most important to have clear goals and expectations set in advance of the campaign:
