A small favour
Guy Clapperton MCIPR
The media trainer that helps you avoid being misquoted, misunderstood or misrepresented. My team will ensure you get value out of speaking to the press.
Yes, it's a picture of me on Zoom (you lucky, lucky people) because I'm looking at setting up a webinar in May. I'm interested to find out which parts of my experience would help my contacts the most, so if you had a second could you vote in my poll on Linkedin please? Thanks - obviously voting doesn't oblige you to attend the webinar at all! I'm aiming this one at people who manage PR agencies.
Pitching it right
I’ve had an email from a company that says it specialises in identity protection and preventing fraud.They would like to discuss a partnership in which they provide press releases to my website, completely targeted.
In completely separate news, nothing to do with no media trainer putting someone else’s press releases on their site for all the coffee in Brazil, I thought I’d mention that when I train junior PR professionals to pitch to journalists I make sure they’re always aware of the importance of pitching to the right place….
Video tip: stop when you've finished!
领英推荐
Meet the team: today...me!
I've spent the year reintroducing the media training team on Linkedin and through this tip sheet - so I thought, it's about time I reminded everyone who was sending this out!
After all, you might be a new contact or someone who doesn't know me well. I have a background of 30+ years as a journalist and during this time I've seen too many interviews go wrong. People have been ill-prepared, they have tried to bat away innocent questions, they've assumed that because I write about technology I must be an expert in retail systems or whatever their niche is (I'm not, I'm an expert in interviewing people about them and presenting the story...).
Other times they've stuck to an overly commercial line, tried to "finesse" a quote rendering it incomprehensible or just ignored what I'm asking. They lose out, the journalist loses out and above all the reader loses out.
So when in 2002 the call came from Microsoft's PR team at Text 100 to ask whether I offered media training I absolutely fell on it and I've been growing that side of my business ever since. The chance to help people with preparation, with confidence and with their expectations of how to behave in front of the media is something I relish. I work primarily in partnership with PR companies as an outsourced training service. I've built a small team of trainers and we want to ensure our clients get the most out of their speaking engagements. Please don't come to us if your clients want to lie to the press and public, we won't want to help. If, however, they want some techniques on delivery, some thoughts on how to address difficult questions (spoilers: "straightforward" is better than "evasive") and input on body language and tone, if they need practice in front of some serious AV kit under a grilling from an experienced journalist in a safe space, we can help.
If this sounds like your client or indeed you/your company, by all means get in touch with Clapperton Media Training via me on here or through my assistant Lindsay, [email protected].
See you in a fortnight.
I ran media and PR training courses half a working lifetime ago, and it often surprised me that the training people wanted was in B2B comms and trade and technical media; they weren't so interested in national coverage. You lot at trade paper Microscope were hard nuts to crack for rookie PR types! Shared in the expectation that something similar is still the case, and in the hope that this might be useful.