6 Tips from the 3 stages of hosting successful virtual press briefing

This is a podcast for you if you're finding getting noticed is proving harder than you thought. On this show, you'll discover free and effective ways to get your business recognized and understood by the people who matter to you. I interview other entrepreneurs, experts, and also share some of my experiences from over 25 years as an entrepreneur, including setting up an international public relations agency network. My name is Jim James. Welcome to The Unnoticed Show. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. My name is Jim James, and I'd like to share with you some ideas about talking to the media today, because many of us find that public relations involves media relations, and media relations involves a media briefing. So let's just look at 6 tips. About when you're preparing a media briefing. Recently, I've just prepared a media briefing in Southeast Asia for a client. We held a media briefing online with media from across Southeast Asia and clients also in Asia, but also Europe. I've also been helping a couple of clients with their press releases that are going to go out this week to announce a new company they formed. So there are a couple of instances where I've been really drilling down on my 25 years of experience of really organizing organizing and running press briefings and reaching out to the media. So I thought, what could be better than to share that on this show? Now, first of all, when we're looking at a media briefing, I would like to share the first key point to remember is that the media are really not your audience. They're not your audience because ultimately they're not the people, by and large, that you are hoping are going to take action by listening to what you're doing. When I say that, of course, you're hoping they're going to take action by writing or issuing a podcast or maybe making a film about what you're saying. But they're a conduit, they're a channel to the people that you really want to reach. First of all, let's just remember when you're reaching out to the media, the role they're playing is to help you to communicate with your audiences. And in order to do that, we need to treat them really like team members, not like an external vendor or someone that needs to be either engaged or in a funny way sold to. First of all, let's just get the mindset that the media, the journalists, we need to work with them. We also have to remember that the media have got their own objectives to fulfill. Some people go into a media briefing expecting the media to be as excited and interested about their products or services as the spokesperson is. Now, the journalist has got to manage the expectations of their editor and their publisher and their readers. Sometimes they own their own publication, but by and large, they've got to have a revenue model, which means that they're either selling advertising— so it's got to be compelling content— or they are running subscriptions, in which case they're talking to an audience that they know very well and that they have to deliver to on a consistent basis. So bear in mind that the media that we talk to, or that you're going to be talking to when you're looking to engage them, have got quite a lot going on in their agenda before they even get to hearing about your agenda. Now, first of all, then I'm going to look at the pitch. Now, the pitch is what we write, or now increasingly, I'm using videos to send a pitch. They're what we write to the media to tell them what we'd like to share, why it's important to them to attend. The key thing to remember about a pitch is that we have to look at it from the perspective of the journalist, not from our own perspective. Too many pitches that I see, the client says, I want to talk about this, I want to talk about that, this is why I'm doing this. And as we would in any situation, we'd find that a little bit dull. What we want to do first of all is look at the context into which your news is going to be dropping, because that's what the journalists are going to be using to decide whether or not it's going to feed the need of their readers. First of all, let's look at your invitation. And the invitation, I like to say, only really has 2 short paragraphs. The first paragraph is setting the scene. This is what's happening in this industry or this geography or in this particular scenario. And this in the second paragraph is what we as a company or an organization or as an individual are going to be talking about that addresses that particular issue. So the invitation needs to be really very simple, to the point, because the media have got literally hundreds of invitations per week going into their mailboxes. Now, the next thing we need to look at is the platform. Now, I just recently did a media briefing in Singapore, actually, and we used gotomeeting.com as the platform. And I had to say that it's not a good platform for a media briefing. Why not? Because it doesn't allow the individuals in the room to see the guest. It's a webinar platform. And what we really want to do in a media briefing is we want to engage the journalists to come along with us on a journey As we talk with them about the issues that we understand there are facing the audience in their daily lives or their weekly or their monthly business lives, and about our solutions to those problems. So the platform that we choose needs to enable us to engage with those media. GoToMeeting.com as a webinar didn't do that. Zoom does that. There are also some like On24. Swapcard, but those two tend to be geared towards the larger events. Zoom is good because it enables us to see one another. It also enables us to share the content in real time. But what I also like about it is that it allows breakout rooms. In a conventional media briefing, we would rent a room, a conference room at a hotel, for example, and we would have 8 to 10 media, maybe more. I've done bigger media briefings. For example, in China, we'd have maybe 40 media and a group of spokespeople at the front. But after that, we'd always have breakout sessions for 2 or 3 media that have a similar audience to talk with the spokespeople. So the platform that we choose needs to facilitate these breakout rooms where people can have smaller, more intimate conversations. So once you've decided on the pitch and you've decided on the platform, what we need to then look at is the materials. And what I would say to you is what I say to all clients. There are 3 keywords to remember when you're preparing your materials: simplify, simplify, simplify. Every client that I've ever worked with over 25 years has acres of internal PowerPoint presentations, and by and large, they've been built by sales teams, sometimes by technical teams, but on the whole, the main business of a sales team is to present. So they tend to have the most volume of content, and often it's the salespeople who are considered to be the most articulate who are put in front of the media. Although, as I've shown in another survey, the Edelman Trust Index, people actually don't trust CEOs or salesmen as much as they trust subject matter experts. So if you have a CTO or an engineer, they're more likely to be trusted by the audience and even by the media than your normal front-of-house people. Presentations for the media need to be simple, they need to be direct, and they need to help the media to write a story, because as I mentioned before, the media are not going to be the customer, they're going to be helping to facilitate the sharing of the story. If your material is complex, it reduces their chance to share it. In my Speak PR course, I talk about the 2 dimensions of shareable content. That is where content is new and when it is simple. The newer it is and the simpler it is, the easier it is to go viral. The more you walk away from that, The older the material, the more complex the material, the less willing the journalist is to take a risk to learn it and maybe get it wrong. But also bear in mind, I mentioned they may have 100 stories that are coming at them this week. They may be filing 5 or 10. If your story takes a long time for them to understand and to work on, it's probably not going to get much work done by them because in this increasingly drag-and-drop school of journalism around the world, what we need to do is to create assets. I call them assets: infographics, video, quotes, statistics, photographs. These assets need to be, if you like, a jigsaw puzzle that the media can compile very simply. So preparing the materials is always one of the roles that an external agency will fulfill. And not least because internally the marketing and the PR managers are reluctant to tell the salespeople or the CTO or the CEO that their material is too complicated. No one wants to look that silly. At my time of life, I don't mind if people think I'm silly. What I do know is that if it's too complicated, the media will think that I'm silly for bringing them to a conference that they don't understand. So simplify, simplify, simplify. More pictures and less text. We all know the old story about Apple and how their presentations led by Steve Jobs were all about photographs and more about conversations away from the slide. The reason this is important is because when we're working with the media in these media conferences, the goal is to get some of the story across, but the bigger picture is to build a relationship. To get the journalist to know and, and trust the spokesperson so that they come back for more. The journalists may get a good story at the press briefing itself, especially if there's an announcement of some kind. But what we're really trying to do is start the relationship with the journalist that's going to continue for a long time. So I ask clients not to worry about educating the media on every facet of their business and product. Focus more on looking the journalist in the eye and getting them to know and trust them so that we can come back to the media and work with more detail at a later date. Now let's just talk about preparing the speakers, and if this is you, the speaker, I want you to bear in mind that there are some ground rules for you here. One is to remember that the media will not have the same level of understanding as you do or your speaker does on the the trends and the topics and the technology that you and your company or organization are offering. They can't. They may be covering in one week 5, 6, 7, maybe 8 stories. Now, in the old days, there used to be journalists who would be dedicated to one beat, and they would be as knowledgeable as the company spokesperson. That's still the case a little bit, and maybe in some of the analysts' meetings, that's still the case if we're talking to people like Forrester or Gartner. Or some of the finance analysts. But by and large, the media are covering a lot of different topics, and they really are what I might consider to be an economist expert. If you read The Economist, you get either in the brief section 80 to 200 words, or maybe in the long-form supplements, maybe 1,000 words, and you can become an expert to a certain level or a certain depth within the short pages of that magazine. But it's not a comprehensive understanding. Now, in the case of briefing in our job last week in Asia, we had media from Indonesia, from Thailand and Malaysia, and also from Singapore. And the spokespeople were based in Sweden and in Singapore, but were Westerners. So we have to bear in mind if we are doing a press briefing, especially an international one, that English is not everybody's first language. It's very easy to assume that because people speak English, that it's the same as them learning and it being their mother tongue. I had one client the other day who said that they sat in a meeting in in a Zoom, and everyone else was from Thailand. And once she, who is a European lady, had said hello and they'd said hello to her, they they went off into Thai speaking. And she said, "I felt so." lonely and also so disrespected, but also so lost. So I always remind clients that we have to bear in mind that not everybody speaks the same language. And if you— they are a media group from multiple countries, then we really must make sure that we pace our delivery so that everyone can keep up, but also so that we use language that is accessible. So another rule about being a spokesperson is to not use jargon for your industry. There are many terms in all of our industries that are shorthand for the common parlance, and they are words and sentences and phrases that are shortcuts and make people feel in the know. But if you've got a journalist who's not in the know, you're simply leaving them out. Much like my client, she felt left out. Now, if this is a journalist feeling left out, guess what they'll do? They will just cease to pay attention. If they cease to pay attention, you cease to have the possibility of coverage. So a media briefing is not a masterclass for a peer group, but more like an undergraduate degree-level introduction to your company, your service. The media that are chosen are bright young people and sometimes more mature, but on the whole, especially these days, journalists are quite young and they move beats quite frequently, especially in Asia. So we have to bear in mind that that media briefing for them may be an introduction to your technology, your company, to an industry. It doesn't mean we have to talk down to them or treat them as stupid. It does mean though that we need to make it accessible. So our role in these media briefings is to give some guidance and to give some encouragement, and also ultimately to create a sense that this is of interest. Because if the young person or the old person, the journalist, sits there and they don't feel engaged and somehow enthused about the topic themselves, when they go back to the editor and to the publisher, they'll be unable to convince them that it's a story worth filing. So it's really, really important to remember who the audience is. And as we deliver our content, just to remember that we need to recap the content. What I do is I work with clients on a message home with one key message, 3 supporting messages, and underneath the supporting messages, some proof points. 3 key messages, 2 proof points per message is enough to get across to the media. That will be enough to give those media a story that they can take away. And if they're interested, they can always come back and ask for more. And now let's also just talk about what would happen if you have a media briefing after the presentations. We always want to prepare some questions in advance. Some media will ask their questions, but if not, then it's good for the agency or the host or the facilitator to prepare some because we can't cover everything. And there will be some areas of the business that we might want to include in afterthoughts. Another aspect is to try and bring humour into those media briefings. When I'm facilitating, I always try and remember that most people are a bit anxious because it's not a normal situation. A few people have to present, a few people have to listen, a few people ask questions in a, in a way that many people feel as though they're trying to interrogate them, trying to catch them out. This is not a normal situation really for anybody. So a little bit of humor to lighten the tension in the room or in the virtual room is also a really good plan. Now, post-event, what we do at East West PR is we send then a transcript of the event, because in social media with virtual conferences now, we can take a video, we can get a transcript. We've then sent the transcripts to our local partners, Indonesia and Thailand, Malaysia, and translated those along with the graphics that we shared so that the media will have the assets in their own language. So it's easier for them to catch up because they may or may not have followed the whole story during that 1-hour presentation when there were 3 speakers and 1 facilitator and 27 other guests and a new technology. There's a lot of things going on there. For everybody. So it's the post-event follow-up that enables a media briefing then to be really, really successful. We send a video, we send a transcript, we send infographics, we also send some key talking points. So the agency can help, but if you don't have an agency, you can still do those things. You can still send those materials to the journalists. So finally, ask them the question, Is there anything else I can provide for you? To expect the media to get the whole story first time is really a big ask. So I always ask if there's anything else, and I also ask them what's their one takeaway. I like to ask what's the one story that you think you heard from today's press briefing. If they look at me blank, then I know that I've had a bad press briefing and I failed. Hopefully, normally, in fact almost always, they come away with one great story, and then it's my job to help make sure that they can get that into the media. And I'll also ask them when they think they might file that story and when it might appear, because I want to close the deal. I've done all that work to get them there, they've done all that work to get there, and I want to make sure that ultimately it reaches the air And that their readers get to hear everything that we've wanted their readers to hear in a way that is intelligent, articulate, and most of all compelling. Thanks for listening to this episode around creating a virtual media briefing. The rules are the same if it's not virtual, but more and more of us are doing virtual or hybrid events. So this list of activities pre, during, and post will stand you in good stead. And if you need any help from me, please do just reach out jim@eastwestpr.com. Thank you so much for listening. And I wish you all the best in getting noticed. I hope you enjoyed that show. Now please write to me, jim@eastwestpr.com, and tell me the number one problem that you're facing right now so that I can serve you more. Above all, I hope that listening to the Unnoticed Show has given you more ideas and more confidence to share with the world the wonderful work that you are doing. Please do subscribe as I've got more guests tools and ideas to help you get noticed for free.