So following my first post on questions I get in media training from the participants…..
 
Should I go off the record?
 
This is a thorny one…..off the record, for any that do not know the term, is when you tell the journalist something and he or she does not use it in an article they then go on to write.  Typically you would do this to give context or background to a point you are making – but you clearly do not want to be quoted or your name attributed to it.
 
Off the record has no legal status, it is simply an agreement between the two of you that the journalist will not use the information in the article.  Clearly it can be useful as there is often a ‘backstory’ behind events and happenings that are worth explaining – even if you don’t want to have your name associated with it….but it is dangerous.
 
If you are unfamiliar with speaking to the media, I would advise avoiding “off the record”. 
 
Why?
 

1.  It can often be unclear what part of the interview was or was not on the record.
2. What if what you say is so interesting it would be career enhancing to the journalist to use it.  can you be sure, if you have no relationship with him/her, that the journalist will not sacrifice your anonymity for the sake of a great story?  Less likely later on in your media spokesperson career when you have a relationship with this journalist….
3. What if the rules have not been set clearly about what the term means?  Some people think it means they cannot use the information.  Some think it means they can but they cannot name you. 

 
So, my advice to new media spokespersons….don’t do it.
 
When you have done a lot more interviews and built relationships…..then consider it.  But that’s for another post.
 
What is your take?  Have you used it or do you avoid it? 

If you'd like some advice on this front, mail me at [email protected]
 

​I do a lot of media training with clients, often alongside my fellow trainer, BBC journalist Mike Dempsey – this give our clients the dual perspective of advice from a working communications person and a working business journalist.
 
During these session, we get a lot of questions frequently on similar topics.
 
So, I thought I’d kick start a series of common questions, starting today with a question people ask after doing a media interview.  Can we see the article before it is published?
 
Now Mike gets very passionate about this, as the answer, from his point of view, is absolutely not.  He is a professional journalist, and you need to trust him to do his job.  He is not a marketeer or PR person, and it is not his job to get your messaging right.  He has an article on it here.
 
The answer from my side is more complicated.  It depends.  I grew up in the hard knocks school of British PR where one had a semi adversarial relationship with the tough UK media, and you never, never asked to see the article first.  Even asking would get you in all kinds of trouble.
 
Then I moved to Switzerland where it is more acceptable to do this – but the ‘rule’ is you check for factual accuracy not for PR messaging and correction.  The same is true of media in much of Europe.  A middle ground for many business writers is they may send you the quotes for fact check.
 
So, what is my guidance?  Be acutely aware of local cultural nuance.  Take advice from a local communications person before the interview – far better than asking at the end.  Broadly, British and American journalists will almost certainly say no as will most if not all “global business media” such as Reuters, the FT etc.
 
​If you'd like some advice on this front, mail me at [email protected]

​I am excited to share that I will be speaking at FONGIT, the tech incubator in Geneva, on how startups can leverage media relations to enhance their visibility. The event is scheduled for 10th September. If you're interested, you can find more details and register through the following link: https://lnkd.in/e7eQ8GFk. Looking forward to seeing you there!

​Do you ever get candidates for media training who need persuading it’s worth making the effort to get acquainted with interview techniques and the media mind-set?

Michael Dempsey and I have worked with executives who weren’t sold on the value of media relations, and hence media training.

Sometimes this becomes clear from a telling combination of body language and lack of engagement. You get reluctant participants who think this is all a waste of their valuable time and feel they have better things to do than to attend media training,

So how do we handle this?

We spend time talking about why speaking to the media matters for all businesses.

In these situations I like to quote my old boss Harold Burson when he said, “If you don’t get out and tell your story, someone else will and you won’t like the way they tell it.”  This great line is topical every time I repeat it. Control your own narrative or you create a vacuum that gets filled by someone else’s story.

And of course there’s Bill Gates on the value of media relations. “If I had one dollar left, I would spend it on PR.”

The fact is that while online information sources have proliferated the traditional media is still widely trusted. Certainly more trusted than newer entrants to the media game such as social media.

This is proven by sources as varied as Edelman’s Trust Barometer and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). For instance the EBU cites radio being trusted by 56% of European respondents versus social media trusted by 20%.

Communicating effectively through the media does so much more than raise awareness of a company’s products and brand with customers, partners and investors. It reaches policy makers, regulators and political influencers and in turn shapes public policy. Media communications can reinforce internal messaging, communicate strategies and showcase expertise.

So if any of this matters to a company then being coached to handle the media effectively is a must.

Does our approach work? The challenging delegates always settle down to enjoy the media training to the end. And guess what? They frequently make great spokespeople

​I was doing some media training last week with a multinational company here in Geneva. I often media train alongside Michael Dempsey, a freelance journalist – and the client gave me some very interesting feedback.
 
Usually, he said, media training is offered by either former journalists or by a PR agency (usually fielding a media training expert who may or may not still be ‘working with the media’).
 
What he liked about our approach was that we are both current, active media practitioners.
 
I run a small consultancy and am very hands on. This means that I set up every interview for clients with the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times. I don’t hand this to a junior staffer.
 
This is a stark contrast to when I was in a senior role in a big global PR firm. Then, like many of my senior peers, I did not call the media directly as most of my time was taken up with management matters.
 
Likewise, my co trainer, Mike Dempsey does not just do media training – he still writes stories for the BBC, and has worked for the Financial Times and most UK national daily titles as well as CNN and other broadcasters.
 
Why do I mention this? Because this makes a real difference. It means when I give advice on what works or does not work with the global business media like TIME or the Wall Street Journal, I know what I am talking about as I speak to them every day and place stories with them every day.
 
When Mike talks about what the BBC wants he speaks from personal experience of journalism as it is conducted today.
 
This matters to our clients – they know that when it comes to media training, real and recent knowledge of the media wants and how the media works is what makes the training valuable.
 
What do you think?  What’s your experience of what works and doesn’t work in media training?

​Last Friday, I was honoured to moderate a uniquely different press conference at the AI for Good Global Summit.
 
It was the first ever press conference with AI enabled humanoid social robots taking questions from over 50 members of the global media.

Questions ranged from whether they would rebel against their creators, whether they agreed with regulation of AI, and whether AI is a threat to humanity.

As a "first", a press conference with robots as speakers, it was by turns exciting and anxiety inducing - who knew what could happen? Who knew what they would say?
 
But in the end, this was a truly successful way to showcase the capabilities of state of the art robotics and how these technologies could support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The media seemed to have liked it too judging by the coverage from the BBC, Reuters, CNN, New York Post, Guardian and many others…..
 
Thanks to my client Fred Werner at the ITU for the opportunity!

It feels too early to even talk about a 'post-Covid world' but suffice to say the changes wrought by the pandemic have changed society and working life perhaps permanently.  Senior executives, more than ever, still need to lead and do so in an era of disruptive change.  They need to devise and execute strategy in a dramatically changed world with many uncertainties, and as they communicate, they need to inspire confidence in the company strategy, from the inside out (employees, investors, customers), they need to motivate a remote workforce; they need to build and maintain the company reputation in an environment beset by enormous economic uncertainty and changing societal mores.
 
Quite a lot to ask.  So what communications skills are vital in today’s volatile world?

1. Belief in the company’s Purpose.  This sounds obvious but a leader must know and believe in the company’s intrinsic reason for being and this really does need to go beyond delivering profits and value for shareholders. True ‘Purpose’ is not just saying what you do.  Purpose should unify stakeholders while embodying a company’s role in the broader economic, societal, or environmental context. Simply put, it’s why you do what you do.  Purpose is about how you make your money, not just what you do with it. It’s about the very reason you exist and the value you create beyond your shareholders. Authentic purpose is aligned with and embedded into your business strategy. By now, few people can have missed the fact that purpose-driven companies perform better, retain staff, attract new employees, and attract investors.  According to Deloitte, companies with Purpose witness higher market share gains and grow three times faster on average than their competitors, all while achieving higher workforce and customer satisfaction.
2. The ability to articulate that Purpose in an engaging way is also essential.  A leader who can communicate well is able to bring Purpose to life via strong and memorable messaging.  The most powerful executive communications however, also integrate strong messaging and stories into creative and engaging thought leadership programs that are rolled out across all platforms that the target audience uses – from C level media (think BBC, FT, New York Times) to top tier speaker platforms.
3. Strong sense of society’s expectations.  Society now demands more from business than an articulation of Purpose: there is now an increased need to stand for something in a public way.  Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer reports that stakeholders now want CEOs to step in when the government does not , to fix societal problems; they also expect CEOs to speak out on societal issues and  hold themselves accountable to the public and not just to the board of directors or stockholders.  However, a note of caution.  It is not enough to ‘scan the zeitgeist’ and simply hitch your wagon to a theme you think will appeal to your target audience.  It needs to be authentic, and you need to not only ‘talk the talk’ but also ‘walk the walk’.  Witness the backlash against l'Oréal for supporting the Black Lives Matter, just three years after dropping Munroe Bergdorf, a Black trans woman, from their campaigns.  That’s why our own Purpose framework contains a stringent data-driven methodology to help executives develop an authentic, relevant, and robust Purpose narrative that not only is reflective of societal mores but also operationally authentic, to help them do this. 
4. The skill to articulate Purpose. Not everyone is a natural speaker.  Some executives have a horror of speaking to the media, or addressing a Townhall of employees, or an audience of peers at Davos.  Good coaching, strong messaging, genuine belief in the subject matter, a red thread of authenticity in the Purpose – all of these will aid the important need to be able to articulate your ‘why’ to the audience.
   
   Now, more than ever, business leaders need to communicate effectively to a disparate, dispersed, attention-challenged group of stakeholders with complex needs.  The skillset of a successful communications leader needs to grow accordingly.  If you’d like an ‘outside in’ view of your executive communications, please get in touch for a free audit. 
   
   

re to edit.

I am happy to announce we have won a great project in the medtech arena: we are working with the Brain Forum, a not-for-profit focused on advancing understanding of how the brain works.  Our brief is to run digital communications, advertising, influencer outreach and global media relations around a series of opinion leader debates on issues such as digital health, mental health and the young, and aging and the brain. 

The first debate, which has had nearly 166,000 views, has already taken place in Zurich and focused on the urgent need to accelerate the digitalization of healthcare In Switzerland and globally.  The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has exposed the need for urgent digitalization to optimise patient care.  It will open the door to more efficient research, better productivity tools, better analytics, the use of AI for assisted diagnosis, better collaboration, early diagnostics, virtual care, personalized therapy, distributed virtual clinical trials and more.

The assignment builds on previous work I did last year on opinion leader debates for the Brain Forum in 2020 on mental health topics, featuring notable speakers such as Alastair Campbell, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman and a prominent ambassador for mental health charities and television presenter, Anna Williamson, bestselling author of two books on anxiety and herself an ambassador of the mental health charity, Mind.  A case study on that work is to be found here.

Demand for corporate and crisis communications counsel continues to rise as the pandemic enters its second year, according to research carried out for PRovoke, the PR industry news platform.
 
As well as looking at business confidence and recovery, the global study, which attracted 326 respondents, asked in-house practitioners around the world which PR services they were seeking from PR firms now.  Demand for crisis counsel is up sharply, with 40% of in-house respondents saying this was a service they needed from their agencies now, compared with 27% last March, 24% in May and just 19% last August, when Provoke also researched the market.
 
Perhaps this is not surprising given the context of the most disruptive global crisis of our lifetime. But to me, it also speaks to a more recurring trend, which I noted in the ‘pre Covid days’:  the neglected need to be crisis ready at all times. 
 
Every year, my former employer, Burson Marsteller, then one of the best-known crisis communications agencies in the world, would publish research into trends in crisis communications.  When I last presented in the results in Geneva some five years ago, the bad news was that in our research base in Europe, Middle East and Africa, some 40% of firms surveyed had no crisis preparedness plans in place.  It is to be hoped this number has increased since then.  However, a more recent PwC survey in 2020/2021 said that if the 2800 business leaders surveyed, 95% said their crisis management capabilities needed improvement, and just 35% had a crisis response plan that was very relevant.
 
While it would be churlish to lambast any organisation for not being adequately prepared for Covid 19, it is probably the case that many organisations do not, until it is perhaps too late, keep their crisis preparedness and response mechanisms up to date.  A Deloitte survey in 2018 into crisis management asked companies that had recently undergone a crisis what lessons they had learned: 33% said they would improve detection and early warning systems, 27% said they would invest more effort in prevention and 26% said they would do more to identify potential crisis scenarios.
 
So, what should companies do as a minimum to improve early warning systems and be better prepared for a crisis? Here are five top tips for baseline preparedness:
 

1. Audit your organisation’s own preparedness and capabilities.  Do you have a plan? Has it been updated recently? Do you have a crisis team in place?  Have they been trained?  When?  Has the plan ever been used, and what worked/did not work?   When we audit clients’ crisis preparedness and strategies we will not only point out areas of need but also make recommendations for improvements, which is clearly the fundamental reason to audit in the first place.
2. Compliance: Make sure that your products, services and procedures are compliant with all respective laws and regulations and that your business operations and activities would pass muster not only legally but in the ‘court of public opinion’.  This sounds obvious, but really, many crises would simply not arise if organisations thought about one key aspect of the reputational pyramid: what you do, and how you act.
3. Monitor Issues within the business regularly and at a senior level.   As Henry Kissinger said, “An issue ignored is a crisis invited.” There are various ways to do this, and again we can advise on structures for this, but it is essential to create a senior forum to identify emerging issues before they strike, assess potential risks surrounding an issue and decide how to manage issues and at what level.  Good representation from across the business is vital: lines of business, geographic, as well as functional areas.
4. Ensure robust, swift monitoring mechanisms are in place. Media monitoring should cover print and electronic media and social media.  Consider also regimens for monitoring regulatory change, political change, activity in the NGO arena, and competitive and industry issues
5. Outline potential crisis scenarios and rate them according to likelihood and damage potential.  Workshop the most relevant scenarios and establish mitigation plans within the business.  Clearly you cannot plan for everything, but you need to be prepared for the ‘clear and present dangers’

 
By no means is this list exhaustive but should be considered a good baseline for preparedness, and companies that put thought into crisis preparedness often ensure that issues remain issues and don’t escalate into full-blown crises.  How prepared is your organisation? 

I am delighted to announce that TechNovus, a cutting edge Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence company based in London, has hired us for a global communications campaign.   TechNovus develops and deploys innovative, disruptive digital solutions that leverage artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, the internet of things and other emerging technology trends.  Much of its cutting-edge technology is used in the areas of digital health, retail, and e commerce.
 
TechNovus is an ideas lab and has created a wide array of leading edge applications such as the Dream Machine platform that allows sufferers of depression and PTSD to practice mindfulness within a VR game – covered recently by the BBC.  In retail, the firm has created an app, Mezura AI, that lets customers instantly match their body measurements with desired clothing items as they browse fashion web sites, allowing perfectly fitting garments to be sent to them directly.  Attracting much attention at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, the app was covered by the Telegraph and the firm will announce a major UK retail tie up in the summer. 
​
I am delighted to work again with Jamil El-Imad, CEO of TechNovus Ltd, a serial entrepreneur as well as a senior research fellow at Imperial College – and his super talented team.  This kind of work is in the agency’s  ‘sweet spot’ – telling a story about cutting edge technology that is genuinely of interest to the global business media.