Trump tax PR hit is as much about timing as his finances.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Speak pr. This is for you. If you are leading an organization and you know you've got value locked away in this organization, if you can just find ways to communicate that. And that's what we do on this podcast. My name is Jim James, and this is a show with tools and tips on how to get noticed for free. Today I'd like to talk about timing and how timing is the key to an audience being receptive to the message that you're trying to share. And I'm going to talk about timing because in light of the announcement of Donald Trump's tax affairs just a few weeks ahead of the 3 November US election, it just brings home to us all that the message sometimes is going to fall on deaf ears and sometimes on receptive ears. So we're going to look at the issue of timing and how to optimize timing for when you want to get noticed. Now, I'm sure I'm not alone in having heard the news of the Trump Organization taxes. Now, of course, they don't affect me personally, of course, and the issue is that they don't really affect most people at all. And yet it is headline news. And it's headline news because of the man that Donald Trump is, but also because of the timing coming as they do on the eve, really of the first debate with Senator Biden. Now, ever since Donald Trump was a nominee, he'd been asked to declare his taxes and he'd avoided doing so. And so there's been a suspense about his taxes, really, for the duration of his term. It's bubbled in the background, not least of which because of the questions about if he owes money, who does he owe money to, and could he possibly be somehow indebted to the people that he needs to negotiate with on behalf of America. All of this may have washed away and been buried underneath one or two of the other issues that are facing the world. The global warming, the North Korean missile issue, the issues around Covid, for example, and the China trade war, enough big issues for people to have not worried about one man's taxes. And yet the timing coming on the eve of this election is what's important. And I was reminded of this phenomenon of timing because we have to think about when we're delivering a message, because the receptivity of the audience is going to be determined about where they are in their sort of state of mind. Now, One of the WIO's laws that I've mentioned before, the Scandinavian parliamentarian and academic was that all communication is destined to fail. And one of WIO's reasons is because people are just not listening. They've got other things going on and that filters their attention. But in the case of the eve of an election in America, really everybody is focusing on the credibility of the two candidates. Now what we've got then is an issue from our own public relations perspectives that we are often sending information without necessarily thinking about the moment, the time and the state of mind of the person receiving it. I was having a conversation today with a friend who's running a a new mobile phone app. He's in Singapore, but the app is in Shanghai. And we were talking about his challenges of reaching out to really an audience that he says is anyone that might want a desk space in Shanghai. And I asked him about when people would want to have this information, when they would want to be booking the one desk or two desks. Would they be booking it in the morning on their way to work? Would they be booking it for work? Would they be booking it after having dropped the kids at school or having gone to the gym? Would they be meeting other people when they are finishing their work at lunchtime? So the time that people are going to receive the message impacts a couple of things. One, it impacts what they're already doing and how occupied they are with their current issues. Whether your offering your service, your message is helping them or hindering them. In the case of talking about this Shanghai app, I talked with this entrepreneur about building an avatar, about looking at what kind of person, male, female, young, old, active, not active, parent, not parent, working in tech or not in tech, all these different characteristics which would define their purchasing decisions. Because this way he can start to niche down and make the marketing campaigns relate to the individuals. But the second part of that is to look at the day or the week or the month of the individual as well. And now we're all familiar with, you know, Christmas and Easter and Halloween and all of these big occasions. Well, of course, if we're selling Christmas trees in the summer, there's not much pickup. But by November, December time, there's a lot of pressure to have a Christmas tree. And all of a sudden we're looking for the adverts about Christmas trees. The same is true about fitness apps or office sharing apps or food or insurance. During this time of COVID I've seen more adverts, for example, for people offering to help me with my will and my health insurance. It was never an issue before, but now it is because people are receptive. So when we're thinking about the messaging that we'd like to share. There will be high points and low points in people's day and their weeks and their months when they're more receptive than at other times. It's obvious, really, when you think about it, talking about camping equipment in December is probably not going to get a lot of attention. Talking about it in March, April, May is going to get attention. The same is true of promoting coffees and lunchtime specials just before people are going out, and not promoting, for example, a lunchtime special at the dinner time. But in public relations, we often don't think about the timing. We think we've just got one message and we should send it out. Now, the statistics are showing me on the podcasts and also the social media that I have, that I have certain days and certain times that are better when people are more open to listening. So my Wednesday Thursday listening numbers are much higher, for example, than my Saturday Sunday listening numbers. The social media peaks around 8, 9 o' clock in the morning for LinkedIn, for example, when people are first logging on and checking, and in the evening when they're logging off and going home. Now, if we're working on sending out messaging globally, then we need to be geo targeting the message so that we're sending it out in the morning in Asia, for example, which would be midnight here in the uk, but would just be late afternoon, say in New York, would be the morning in San Francisco. So when we're thinking about the timing of what we're sending out, we have quite a few considerations. I was thinking about this as well, prompted because today I was driving with my daughters and the drive time radio was sponsored by the Green Flag breakdown service here. And so it was a great example of targeted advertising. They call it the school run Drive time with Green Flag. Green Flag is a breakdown service. I haven't heard that at any other time of the day, but I hear it now first thing in the morning between, I guess, seven and nine in the morning. So if we're thinking about the timing of people's schedule, we also need to think about the timing of the individual in terms of the conversation. Now, we've all gone to our children and asked them to do their homework when they're busy watching Netflix or we've asked someone to hurry up and get dressed when they are having their breakfast. In other words, quite often socially, especially as parents, where we're allowed to interrupt, although it's not welcome. I think we all know that we are often quite clumsy, but sometimes quite skilled at asking for things. If you think about if you've had to ask for a raise or you've had to ask to borrow a car, then you think about the person being receptive, being ready. And that should be just the same in terms of the messaging, the old note that you should never fire somebody on a Friday because it's not fair to give them all weekend to ruminate, but to give them, give them their notice on a Monday, let them clear out their desk and they'll be busy during the week and they'll appreciate that. The same applies in terms of getting our messages out. If we think about the journalists, as we've spoken about before, they're getting in excess of 100 pitches a week in their inbox and they may need to run 20, 30 stories. So there'll be times when they're just focused on the work that they've already decided to do. And so we have to think about and be considerate, I suppose, is the word I'm looking for. Be considerate about what we're asking someone else to listen to, where we're ready to tell them, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're ready to listen. So how can we tee that up? Obviously, if we're with people, we get body language. If we're not with them, then we need to look at some of the metrics, look at, see what is currently being read or seen or shared by people at these certain times of day or night. So the other part of this then is we've teed up the message, we've teed up the timing. What we also then need to think about is the delivery of the message. And I was working with a client who's been preparing a video presentation to go to a virtual trade show in America. And it was a nearly 20 minute long presentation. The really interesting bits were at about minute 15 or 16. So when I'm doing media training with clients and presentation training, I always ask them to take the best parts and put them first. It could feel counterintuitive because we're used to sort of building up to the punchline. We're used to trying to get a preamble, trying to give a story, give the history, give someone a sense of what we're going to tell them, partly because we're watching their body language to see if they're going to be receptive to what we're saying, have we got their attention or not. But with journalists and the media and people on social media, we don't always have that luxury. In fact, now we don't have that luxury. People want you to get to the point, and the point needs to come first. And it's at that point, that first 30 seconds or 60 seconds, no more, that we have to have captured the attention of the people that we're interested in. Which is really why listening and watching and being perceptive about their being receptive to listen to what we're sharing, when we want to share it is key. Because if we're sharing messages which are not about to be well received, then we're going to get shunned and possibly even flamed on social media. So if we think about timing all the way back to the President Trump tax affairs, the issue about Trump's taxes are just the same as they were four years ago when he was running for president. Actually, nothing has changed about his tax situation either, it seems. But what has changed is the receptivity of the audience to his tax affairs. The secret is then to harness that, to look for times when the audience that you've got, be they your internal audience, your partners or your external audience, when they're particularly sensitive to the message that you want to give. That could be a particular time of the year, a time of the month, a time of the day when there's a trigger event, a particular need that they have, a bit of psychology and a bit of analysis and a bit of identification of the avatar. Because if we don't identify the avatar closely enough, we will be communicating in general with people who are living with specific interest moments. So the golden rule of communication is always to seek to understand, then to be understood, then to find a middle way when it comes to timing. If we want to ask people to take on board a message that we believe is important to us, we have to make sure that it's refined and ready for them to understand it. But we also have to make sure that they're in the frame of mind to want to listen. And that is going to be the way that we move people from levels of ignorance through to awareness, through to engagement, and ultimately to evangelism. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speak pr. My name is Jim James. If you've enjoyed this, please do subscribe, do share this with anyone that you know that may also find it useful. We're now at over 165 episodes and over 5,000 downloads. So very proud and very delighted that people are finding my sharing of value and service. So until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business and that you keep on thinking about the timing before you start communicating.