Are You Media Ready?

Jacquie Jordan is the founder and CEO of TVGuestpert. It is the 15-year-old cutting-edge media and content development, promotions, and booking platform that offers full media services for clients, partners, and collaborators. TVGuestpert Publishing is a New York Times Best Selling publishing house. The Guestpert Academy is an online program offering visibility, media training, and TVGuestpert On Camera Training.

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Jacquie shares tips and strategies for how people can come prepared for a TV interview, a book promotion, or any media content promotion. Jacquie is a two-time Emmy nominated TV producer, three-time author, and the host of Front & Center with Jacquie Jordan, a broadcast podcast. She is also a guest critiquer on a news program at Newsmax where she and a panel discuss other media celebrities. Learn from a professional how to use media to boost your book, but more importantly, yourself.

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How to get ready for an interview

Prepare the Background

At Newsmax, they do Skype. Instead of TV studios you have to have your own proper lighting and backup battery. Always make sure to do a Skype run-through after hair and makeup are done and check your lighting and background. Deep backgrounds are keys to television. Too often, on television, people are right up against a wall like a mugshot. This is why you want deep backgrounds.

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Your New Best Friend: Speaking Points

Anytime Jacquie gets a topic, she always writes out her own speaking points. Every one of her clients has to do this exercise for every single appearance and she does the same. It’s the way to keep yourself from getting your points and words mixed up in such a short amount of time, whether it’s 3 or 4 minutes.

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How to Introduce Yourself

Don’t forget the most important real estate: you and what you are about to say. Jacquie’s go to introduction is this: “I’m Jacquie Jordan. I’m a media consultant. What I can tell you about this topic is.” This is the formula that will communicate everything you need to say quickly and effectively. This is the important opening sound bite that establishes you and what you intend to speak about.

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Why Sound Bites are a Lifesaver ?

Jacquie explains how a three-minute interview is different from a seven-minute interview. It’s also distinct from a deep-dive interview where you get to talk for an hour. When it gets down to the moment on air, you have to focus all your energy looking at the red dot and communicating what you are an expert on. You have time for a few soundbites, and this requires no distractions. This is why you have to know what your content is. Not through memorization, but the general headlines and areas you could delve into, depending on what time you have. Knowing your content in a way that is flexible allows you to adjust to time structures, especially for television.

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How to Approach Media Opportunities

Sell Yourself, Not the Book

Jaquie invites you to speak for yourself and beyond your book; your value comes from your philosophy and experiences that have informed writing your book, not in your ability to summarize it. Your book is a small part of you that is limited and finite, whereas your ability to learn and grow is not curtailed by the number of pages in your book. While your book got you the gig, it is a tool to enable you to reach a larger audience as an author and person with so much potential. Jaquie always tells television producers to never book a book, but instead, a person with a story to tell.

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How to Answer Questions You Don’t Know

When you center your presence in the media around yourself rather than your book, the possibilities expand. The conversation can more easily shift from the strict topics of your book and onto things more tailored to your audience. This enables you to branch out and address larger issues. As an author and storyteller, it is easy to become fixated on what you’re an expert on, but this mold can be broken.

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While it is impossible to be prepared for every question, it is key to know how to respond when you’re put on the spot. As long as you can apply your expertise to the conversation at hand, you’re doing what is necessary to participate from an informed standpoint. This is the way to bring the significance of your book into conversation when you're speaking to an audience that may have diverging interests. Understand how you can link your book and message to what is going on in the present, and you can participate in any conversation.

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Don’t be afraid to qualify your statements. Qualifiers allow you to respond to any question with both honesty and composure. Allow yourself to give a disclaimer if you are asked something you don’t know a lot about. Jaquie’s favorite qualifier is “I don’t know the answer to that question but what I can tell you is,” and you offer something relevant that you can comment on. This will make it easier to think and answer on the fly if you allow yourself to qualify what you say. Doing this will allow you to expand your own sphere of influence and reach wider audiences. To leave your comfort zone is to take advantage of the media experience.

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Nervousness is Not Your Enemy

A lot of people think the issue is to figure out how not to be nervous, but nervousness is necessary to engage people through technology. If a guest is not nervous, they’re not in their body and instead in their head. This blocks their ability to be present enough to reach the audience past the cameras. A nervous guest is a great one as they are in their body and they have the right energy to transcend the equipment. This allows for the necessary hyper-presence.

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Hyper-presence is what gets people engaged, it makes people put down their coffee and grab a pen and paper to start writing what you’re saying. People watch TV to be distracted from their lives, but your nervous energy can be channeled into bringing them back into the real world and into their body so they can hear and receive your message. Without nervous energy, you won’t have the energy to command their attention through all the technology that mitigates this interaction. Rather than conquer nervousness, embrace it to fuel your presence on screen. Waiting to go live makes anyone anxious, just focus on staying present and focused on the little dot; don’t allow your mind to wander or get distracted by all the moving pieces that makes a production.

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Jaquie says when she goes back and watches clips from when she was nervous before, she looks animated and her energy commands the attention of the viewer. Despite looking at a two-dimensional space, her message comes through because she is so hyper-focused and present. It is so important to command the attention of the viewers as consumers have the ability to choose what they watch. There aren’t only 3 stations anymore, if they don’t feel pulled into seeing more, they have plenty of other places to go for content. Consumers are able to follow people they respect and find credible with messages that they resonate with. This is why your hyper-presence and nervousness allows for the necessary authentic energy that can keep a viewer with you.

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Jacquie illustrates both how to prepare for a media appearance and what to do during it to reach as many people as possible. The preparation starts with a deep background that adds dimension. Speaking points and sound bites make it immensely easier to enter a conversation dynamically and with ease. Don’t forget to practice your short introduction, it should quickly communicate who you are and what you intend to talk about. When mentally approaching media opportunities, it is necessary to know that you come before your book. Doing this allows you to expand the topics you can comment on, and therefore your reached audience. Above all else, don’t be afraid to be nervous, use that energy to be hyper-present on screen and engage with the viewers. But if this leaves you wanting more, not to worry. Jacquie has courses on TV On Camera Training and you can find her on Instagram @ jacquie_jordan. Her company is TVGuestpert and you can also reach out to her via email [email protected].

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Click here to see Jacquie’s tips: https://youtu.be/n5HkpGUO0-0