162: The 3 Mistakes Most Spokespeople Make in their Media Interviews (and how to avoid them).

One of the first questions I asked media trainer Warren Weeks in our webinar last week on the mistakes that spokespeople can make in the media is what is the biggest challenge that spokespeople have when they get in front of a camera or speak to a reporter?

People's biggest fear, first of all, is looking stupid or getting that deer in the headlights question.

Is that you? Does it sound familiar? Does it feel familiar? Let me answer this for you. Yes, welcome to a podcast that uses current events and tested media and PR strategies for how to manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. In this episode, I'll share with you the slips that people like me and Warren Weeks see in our media workshops and also in news interviews all the time. Now, I mentioned that last week media trainer Warren Weeks from Toronto met for lunch over a webinar. We were discussing the common mistakes that spokespeople can make in their media interviews, and I had asked them to join me because I was kicking off my latest version of my membership, which is indestructible online and also the indestructible PR hub. You've heard me talk about it before. It is now officially launched. It is my free membership. Look for both of them in the Show Notes. If you want more information, just go to our Show Notes either on your phone or on the website and everything you need will be in a click. But back to this webinar. The webinar. The reason why I brought Warren in is because many people have challenges in communications, and so many of those challenges are based in fear. And we wanted to talk about media interviews because people are always looking for the solution for the perfect media interview. Now, I know, and I think Warren would say the same thing, that many people could go an entire career without doing a media interview. It may never come up in your job. I mean, you may do an interview with your company newsletter or, you know, maybe in town in a local newspaper, you might be interviewed because you're the baseball coach or maybe you were running, you know, an event in the town. But to speak to the media about your position and then to be quoted and then to be in a newspaper article or to be in a television interview, there's many of you who may never come across that opportunity. However, it only takes one interview to bring it all down. So that's why you want to make sure if you are going to do an interview that you do it right. It takes prep, it takes practice, and it takes patience to craft the right messaging to protect Yourself from one of the biggest concerns that Warren had mentioned right away in the open that people have when it comes to media interviews. And I share the same thing. I see it all the time in my workshops. I can smell it when I walk in the room. I can even smell it over a virtual training. People get afraid. And what they're afraid of, it's not necessarily that they're afraid of stitching two words together. They're always afraid that they're going to be taken out of context or that a reporter will mix their words or use them in a way to make them look bad. It's a healthy fear. It's understandable. But there are three mistakes that Warren identified. I asked him to identify the three mistakes that he saw, and I could not agree with him more. And he shared them. And I'm going to share them with you in the podcast this week. So I started the webinar with this one question, like, overall, what is the biggest mistake overall that encompasses any interview that you see people make time and time again? Take a listen.

I really believe the biggest mistake that spokespeople make in their media interviews is that they treat it like a conversation.

It's an excellent tip because you should never, ever, ever treat a media interview like a conversation. Now, it is a natural reflex. When a person comes up to you and they ask you a question, everyone is going to immediately default into a conversation mode. It's normal. Think about what you do when someone comes up to you and asks a question. Hey, how you doing today? Hey, so what are you doing for lunch? Oh my gosh, did you hear about so and so? Everyone goes into the same place. So when a reporter asks you a question, it's very natural. It's the same cadence, it's the same tone, it's the same feeling. They're there to put you at ease. And that is by design. I mean, unless they're chasing you down in a parking lot a la Mike Wallace. The late Mike Wallace. Like the 60 minute style of ambush reporting, most interviews start just like that, a conversation. So how does one get around that? You know, what can they do?

Understand that what you're getting into is not a conversation. Yes, it should sound conversational, but it's a completely different animal. When you understand that, that's when you start having better media interviews.

So Warren's advice is good advice. It's discipline. It's mindset. Because a media interview that might go on for 20 minutes, but a reporter will likely only take two to three quotes. So make sure they're good ones. All right. The question that I had for him, mistake number one, what is it that spokespeople might do that you might consider to be a slip? Take a listen.

Mistake number one to me. And again, it's a conversational cue. I was actually taught this in journalism school back in the early 90s, and it is the awkward pause. Now, we've all seen this at, you know, you're at a conference, you meet someone, name tag, how are you? Where are you from? Do you have any kids? And then there's that weird pause. And then what happens? You get a little bit nervous and you jump and you blurt something out. This happens in media interviews too. I was actually taught this as a journalist. They say, look, you're going to be interviewing a bunch of people who are media trained up to the eyeballs. They're going to be giving you these corporate bs, kind of high level messages about leveraging the synergies of their industry with a tradition of whatever that's useless to me as a journalist. And so they said, one of the most powerful things you can do is just leave a pause in your interview.

When does a prolonged silence actually become awkward for us? So let's take this out of the media space for a moment. According to scientists, the moment the silence becomes awkward is at second number four. There are participants in one Dutch study that happened within the last several years that said they felt more anxious and rejected and less self assured after some amount of prolonged silence in a difficult discussion. That amount of time was 4 seconds. So even though 4 seconds may not feel like much time, it can be painfully long, painfully long in a media interview. Because the problem is for most people, they want to fill the awkward silence with words. But when you do that, you are creating an opening for a reporter to identify another story. Because before then, before the interview, it was unspoken.

What is really consistently interesting to me is that it's not the second or third or fourth message on your page. It's something from in here or it's something from your subconscious. And so you end up blurting out this little thing. And that is probably more interesting than the garbage message that you gave them earlier, that really corporate message. And so the reporter picks that thing and then the spokesperson's upset.

But now you've opened the door. So the solution, discipline. Don't add any new content. Warren in this webinar was very, very deliberate when he said that it's not as much about sitting there zipping your lip and not saying a word. It's more about the mindset of not feeling that you need to feel the silence. One of the quotes I used in my podcast last week when I talked about media mistakes was, silence is the best quote. They can't quote you if you don't say anything. Warren also mentioned, if you are on the phone, for instance, with a newspaper reporter, and they're writing, and there might be some dead pauses in there because they're probably catching up on what you have to say, they're either typing or writing it down. When that happens, you can have a sip of coffee. You can look out the window. And Warren had mentioned, if you need a new line to come up with, if you want to fill that space, fill it with a statement you've already said. Fill it with content that isn't new. It's the same thing that you said, but perhaps you said it in a different way. Now, in a crisis situation, the pause can be problematic. And Warren had mentioned that in the webinar as well. And I say this all the time. A crisis is not a time for silence. A crisis is a time to speak. And you're going to be speaking the facts, you're going to be speaking the response. But in a typical media interview, like we're talking about today, it's okay to sit in the silence. It's okay to feel the awkwardness. Remember, it's not a conversation. All right, next, take a listen to Warren as he sets up the second mistake a spokesperson can make in a media interview.

Every one of us has this little breaker switch inside our brains, and we're not even conscious of it. To me, it's kind of like blinking or breathing. You don't think about it. It just happens. And what it is is that little thing that prevents us from telling the same story twice in a conversation.

It's forgetting the rinse and repeat. It's viewing each media interaction as a continuous conversation. Now, I know some of you have probably been in a number of media interviews. Some of you may have even handled an incident or a crisis where there's one story and it's one big story, and the reporters want to know the facts, the who, what, why, where, and when. But saying the five W's and the H, the how can get tiresome if you're saying them over and over and over. Now, we showed a great clip from Warren last week in the webinar. It was about a train derailment. And in the initial interview that Warren showed to the participants, there was a person who was a spokesperson for the city he was a chairman, he was a chair of a board who was speaking on behalf of this town that face this massive, this massage disaster from this train derailment. When he spoke in this first interview, he was calm. He was intense. There's certainly intensity behind his delivery, but it was very focused. He said what needed to be said, and he was saying it to a rather small group of reporters. He was contained and he was in control, and he articulated what he knew well. And in that case of this train derailment, it was a lot of facts. But then Warren showed the next clip. So it's the same person, same train derailment, but the media scrum, the press scrum, grew a lot bigger. The questions at this guy, they were louder, they were more pointed. But the same spokesperson who was on message in the first clip was now wildly off message in the second. Part of the reason why is because he was continuing the conversation that he had previously in his mind. He was checking off that he had already said these statements. He had already said these things over and over and over. And you could see in his agitation, you could feel it and you could hear it. He had the countenance of an old, angry man who was sitting on his porch yelling at kids for throwing a ball into his yard. You felt like he was thinking, I've already told you this over and over. Why do you keep asking me this? The agitation from this media interaction, any media interaction, if you find yourself in the middle of one where you're going over and over with the same information, you it's not a one and done. It's a one and let's begin again. You know what? I was trying to be clever there. It's not a one and done. It's a one and we've only just begun. How about that? A little Karen Carpenter in there. But it is an ongoing conversation. But it's a conversation that's starting from the beginning time and time again, so don't worry. And I have seen this many people think right in the beginning, we talked about the fear of looking stupid. You know, the fear of not knowing the answer, being a deer in the headlights. What that translates is people get frustrated and they get angry, and then they start to think that the press is out to get them. So the solution is to go back to the. Well, you know, Warren had mentioned, use the same four to five talking points over and over to get your message across. When I work with clients, I ask them, what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What are the threats that are out There. If that sounds like a SWOT analysis, it is. And that's what I do in my crisis plans. Because what we do in those plans is we create our messaging. We create them from a place of strength and knowing what these weaknesses are, and then you mix in the facts. So if you're dealing with a critical issue or a crisis, you're gonna speak from your strengths, but you're also going to know what. What your weaknesses are. All right, next mistake number three. I'd asked Warren what is the third mistake that he sees spokespeople make time and time again?

Take a listen, and it is repeating the reporter's words in your answer. It happens, I would say, in almost every single interview. If you watch the news, if you listen to the radio, if you even read a newspaper copy online, you will see this happen every single day. It's so blatant, you don't even need to see the question to realize someone's doing it in an answer. And again, it's a reflex.

Warren was emphatic about this. He felt that this type of mistake was a mortal sin of media interviews. And I absolutely agree with him. On average, a reporter is only going to take two to three quotes at the most from you. They might take some more information, but actual quotes, you're going to get around 2 if you have something to say. But if someone is asking you a question and they're setting you up for the negative, you never want to repeat the negative. It's very common to do. He had mentioned in the clip that he had used, it was with the MLB commissioner talking about the coronavirus and the impact of the coronavirus. And he was on sports programming, he was on espn. And the question that was prepped for him was, how much of a nightmare has this entire pandemic been? Or the impact of the coronavirus on baseball? And Manfred replied, well, it hasn't been a nightmare. We're doing so on and so forth. Well, not a surprise. The press picked up on the word nightmare. And not only the video we saw over and over again, but the print press did the same thing. And it wasn't just included in the print story, it was included in the headlines. And so now you have the headlines. Now, where does that show up? Well, it shows up on digital. So if you go up online and you look at the websites and where else does it show up? It shows up on social media, and if you're on Twitter and you have 280 characters, you're going to see that word nightmare over and over. And over again, which I did. And I remembered it was a great example because I absolutely remember when it happened in real time, likely what happens. And oftentimes I see this happen. I can't speak from the MLB commissioner's perspective, but I'm sure he thought this. But I see this a lot of times in my trainings when people tell me about being taken out of context, they feel as if then that the press is out to get them. It becomes adversarial. Or they'll say, they misquoted me. But really, when this happens, it is on the spokesperson. It is the spokesperson that is falling into that device that that reporter uses. They want you to repeat the negative all the time. It's a trick. You know, they want you to do that. Now, it sounds like, see, they're out to get us. They're just using tricks. But they're trying to get you to speak. They're trying to get you to tell the juicy parts of the story, because they do. They want a quote. But if you just happen to hand them a juicy quote by repeating the negative, well, yeah, they're gonna use it. So what is the solution? How do you not repeat the negative? Well, one, it's knowing that it's a reflex. As Warren had mentioned earlier in the webinar and I had mentioned in this episode. So much of it is just your state of mind, you know, your mental state of mind. Are you in it? Are you 100% in it, or are you reflexive? If you, as Warren mentioned right in the beginning, if you treat an interview like a conversation, you are going to be more likely to make that type of mistake where you're going to repeat the negative because you're convert, you're conversationally going back and forth, you're going tit for Tad and this for that. You're saying this. I'm just going to repeat it. I'm going to parrot it back to you. Remember that every second in an interview is an interview. You want to have discipline. You want to have control. And you can pause, you can wait before you speak. It might be a little bit awkward if you're on live television, but how many of you are really on live television? If it's a microphone in your face and a reporter's asking you a question, they can edit out a lot of that silence. But take the time. If you're mindful and you have discipline, you're not going to repeat the negative. So there you have it, the three mistakes most spokespeople make in their media interviews. And I gave you three solutions from Warren and myself for how to avoid them. In each podcast I share an indestructible PR tip to protect your reputation. It is a tip that is more current and innovative. It uses a strategy knowing that your audience resides in both the traditional and digital worlds. So in this episode, my indestructible PR tip is this. Go into every interview with a quotable quote. Choose your words carefully when writing a talking point that you want to land. That talking point is a full sentence. It's social. It's written for social media, meaning it fits in a tweet and it tells your entire response in seven seconds. Now they say it takes seven seconds to make a first impression. It also takes seven seconds to leave one. That sentence was delivered in seven seconds. If you can do all of those things in one quote and say it in around seven seconds, then you've delivered a quotable quote. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening.