TJ Walker says avoiding media interviews lets critics define you, but one bad interview can damage you for years. His fix: do more interviews so new content buries the old negative results.
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Let's face it, doing media interviews is risky. You could ruin your brand, your reputation with a bad interview, bad sound bites, bad quotes. But, and so you've heard me talk about this before, you can also do damage to your reputation by not doing interviews. You now have more opportunity for your enemies to define you. You're creating a vacuum so that other people who want to criticize you or there. Now here's the worst of all possible situations. And I do see this with clients, prospects, people around the world, they have one really bad interview, bad quotes, and it leaves such a scarring impact that they say that's it and they never do any interviews again. Now that's so wrong for so many reasons. But the biggest reason of all is now when someone googles your name, the only thing, the first thing they find, and the only thing they find is that horrible, horrendous quote. So this story, which was bad in its own right for the day, now lives on and grows and grows and grows, has a greater impact sometimes for weeks, months, years, sometimes for decades if you don't do any more interviews. And that's the real risk. The easiest way, the best way to get people to forget about a bad interview, do more interviews, if not every day interview, at least every opportunity you can. Because that content will push down the old bad content. That content will affect people's memories of you. All the more reason to look at every single opportunity through a clean lens of how can I get the most. I want the messages, I want the quotes I want. In this final story, I'm TJ Walker. I help people speak more effectively, whether it's to live audiences or to the news media. Every month in New York City, we have a live public media training workshop. If you'd like information on that, please click the information below the website or give us a call. I also do private one on one and group media training sessions, plus live on demand video based media training courses. So check it out, give us a call.
