Is your crisis plan ready for the real world?

Great reminder for the start of a new year – are your crisis plans up to date? Read on for a 10-point checklist from Brian Shrowder.

The Comms Counsel

“It’s all covered in the crisis plan.” Few statements are likely to do more to instil a false sense of security in leadership ranks. Office bookshelves abound with detailed plans lying unread: many organisations which do have crisis procedures fail to test them on an annual basis.

This ten point checklist will help determine if your plan is ready for the practical challenges of a crisis:

1. Is it easy to read and to use?
If not, it’s at risk of being ignored. Increasingly, crisis plans – or manuals – are adopting a slimmed-down look, addressing core issues such as team member roles and responsibilities while separating out the ‘toolkit’ details of template materials and contact lists. ‘Plan-on-a-page’ versions are valuable as a ready reference tool.

2. Do team members understand their roles?
The plan itself is only one element of crisis preparedness: selecting and training crisis team members is…

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Trust the major issue for Victorian business and government in State Election

Yesterday I had the great fortune of joining the VECCI Business Leaders Lunch (#VECCIBLL) at Crown’s Palladium. With a State Government election only days away, the discussion at my table and on stage was heavily geared toward the election.

November 29 has been billed as the ‘infrastructure election’, and the key policy divide has been picked up in the media as an over-simplified debate over whether or not we get a new tunnel. However this wasn’t the gaping hole that everyone wanted to talk about.

The real issue of the day was trust. Not for the first time in this decade, the conversation turned to the trust the Australian (Victorian in this case) public has in its elected officials. The defining concern of governments in Australia at the moment is not simply winning an election, but winning with a sufficient majority to have a clear mandate to govern. Consistently, trust is the reason they aren’t doing just that.

It’s a problem, because the electorate has lost trust in government – perhaps not in the institution, after all, we get the governments we elect – but in the individual leaders. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, which is about to be superseded by the 2015 survey, identified that Australians have huge trust issues when it comes to leaders in government, and leaders in business. This was despite the fact that trust in the institutions of government and business actually increased.

Check out the infographic for more details: 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer Australia

One of the key words of yesterday’s discussion was ‘short-termism’. It’s a real problem when governments behave this way, because business leaders make decisions for the long-term sustainable growth of their companies, and while three years in business can seem like an eternity, it’s not the long term.

Perhaps part of the solution is for business leaders to help set the community agenda, by acting with a purpose that transcends profit. This is a view Edelman’s CEO and President, Richard Edelman, has expounded energetically on the world stage – what he calls “Business’ license to lead“.

My take-out from yesterday was that maybe Victoria needs a little more globalisation, a more worldly form of leadership.

Interestingly, the tunnel itself had little airplay yesterday. Everyone knows where the major parties stand, and at the end of the day, no-one disagrees that Victoria’s transportation infrastructure needs upgrading to deal with a growing population.

Here are some quick stats reflecting that, courtesy of VECCI CEO, Mark Stone:

• Melbourne adds around fifty thousand adults to its population each year
• Since the year 2000, Melbourne’s population by 1.5 million people
• No other Australian city has ever added so many people, so quickly

Golden Target winners reflect the changing landscape for PR in Melbourne

Last week I was honoured by the Edelman team’s effort to secure two wins for the Victorian Golden Target Awards. This institution of Australia’s public relations industry relies on peer judging to determine winners across multiple categories.

Hat-tip to Will Collie for making this just the best all-round presentation slide ever

I joined Edelman a little over four years ago, and here in Melbourne we had a stable but small business operating out of a business park in South Melbourne. Today we’re more than double the size, with a Collins Street address, and a talent mix that matches goes head-to-head with the best of our peers in Australia. Our wins are testament to those people, the team members who show up differently every day with a commitment to exceptional client service and bold creative ambitions.

Having served as a GTA judging coordinator for the first time this year, I had the benefit of seeing behind the curtain. What impressed me most was the diversity of entries in each category – in most cases, larger multinationals and local boutiques were submitting campaigns in the same categories.

What’s gratifying is seeing the thinking of agencies and consultancies of all shapes and sizes starting to change.

Australia has a strong international reputation for developing great marketing and communications talent, and we do a fantastic job of exporting that talent to the world.

But we need to do a much better job of bringing international thinking and global trends back to Australia in turn, and particularly to Melbourne where the big ad agencies are just as likely to pop up in a PR campaign awards category as dyed-in-the-wool PR firm. The fact that more Melbourne ad agencies have won Cannes PR Lions than all Australian PR firms combined is both exciting and deeply depressing for our industry. Great talent is here…but it’s in the wrong places.

Clearly articulated business objectives, a deep understanding of audiences and stakeholders, strategic thinking and clever use of creative services and talents should all contribute to the best possible solution to a business challenge, regardless of budget or brand.

The underlying purpose of public relations – the building and maintenance of mutually beneficial relationships – has not changed in the past decade. The environment in which public relations practitioners operate has changed dramatically, and it’s incumbent on each of us to learn new skills, understand a wider range of marketing services and bring that thinking to the table when reviewing a brief or a problem.

Specifically rewarding low-budget work because of a historic animosity with the advertising industry (the old ‘PR’s more effective than advertising because it’s cheaper’ argument) is stupid and wrong, and it’s invigorating to see big campaign thinking being recognised by leaders within Australia’s PR industry, as much as clever, low-budget programs that are equally as important for the organisations they benefit.

The evolution of public relations is not about spending more on PR, it’s about doing a better job on every brief, and bringing better solutions together to solve bigger and more complex problems.

In the meantime, the Edelman Melbourne team has its eyes on the national awards ceremony to be held in Brisbane later this month.

The local face of global crisis management

There’s a saying that all politics is local, and in crisis management the same truism applies. Despite the worldwide implications of online publishing and social media, the reality for anyone at the coalface of crisis management is that the problem right in front of you is your problem to solve.

Contrary to popular belief, this problem won’t be solved with a comprehensive global policy

For many years multinational corporations have worked to centralise crisis management functions, with really intelligent, logical frameworks in place to help structure and coordinate multi-market responses.

Typically, these systems try to provide balance between local office needs and global brand protection. It’s a bit like trying to balance a culture of transparency with the brutal reality that during a crisis you actually need to limit the number of people who are all trying to help – someone has to keep getting the usual stuff done.

In business as in life

It’s an ongoing challenge for businesses to address because no-one ever has all the information. Currently, crisis management practices tend to rest on the decisions made by those responsible for the outcome. In the case of reputation damage on a global scale, this typically sees an escalation process put in place to give local operators proportional responsibility for dealing with a local crisis, but seeing some of that responsibility rescinded as the crisis grows beyond borders and/or business units.

What makes that a good decision? Who’s to say that a “regional hub” crisis specialist has a better point of view than the local managing director who’s on the ground with the problem?

These are some of the challenges I’ll be discussing this week in Singapore with my Edelman Crisis & Risk team colleagues from around the world. I’m sure we won’t have all the answers, or even most of them. But in crisis management we know that we’ll make better decisions in a planning mindset than a response mindset, so we’re taking the time to give these very real issues the consideration they need. Stay tuned.

Is your crisis management plan ready for action?

Next week Edelman’s regional Crisis & Risk practice will convene to explore the changing face of crisis communication. The role of crisis communication within PR firms is evolving at speed, particularly given growth in the range of digital marketing services provided by the industry. One of the challenges we’ll be tackling next week is understanding how the lessons from evolving in the communications marketing space can help shape the next generation of crisis communication thinking.

Crisis management plans are one of the areas under the microscope. As more and more crisis communication takes place online, in an evolving and responsive community conversation, the traditional role of the crisis management plan comes into question. What good is a pro-former manual in an era where every brand’s relationship with its audiences is unique? Is it fair to say a recall is a recall is a recall? And if not (hint: it’s not), how do we preserve the institutional knowledge of “best practice” while at the same time building in the capacity for flexibility and responsiveness?

My take on this today is that while crisis management plans are important, they should always be regarded as a tool to help your crisis management team do what you need them to. The reality is that your crisis will be managed by real people, who make real decisions, which have real consequences. And in a social world filled with living brands, you should expect those consequences to become apparent in real time.

For this reason it’s essential that your crisis management team is well trained. In fact, training for capability is arguably more important than planning for contingency, in the case of reputational issues. Governments and emergency services run highly sophisticated training drills to keep skills up to date – and so should your organisation. Crisis management teams tend to involve people from quite disparate roles within the business.

A crisis should be an unusual event, which means in an ideal world there won’t be many reasons for the crisis management team to work together in their crisis management capacity. Unless you’re regularly experiencing business-wide crises, your teams’ skills will deteriorate over time. You literally must “use it or lose it”.

Here are three things you can do today to immediately make a difference to your crisis management team’s preparedness to handle a real crisis:

• Establish a regular training program or schedule for the crisis management team. This needs to take into account your organisational culture, team members’ day-to-day responsibilities, and the physical location of team members, but ideally some kind of formal crisis management training scheduled every six months will help mitigate the risk of losing institutional knowledge through staff churn and attrition. To this point, inducting new team members into the team should be in addition to your scheduled training to ensure planned program.

• Conduct a technology audit for your crisis management team. As many of us rush out to upgrade to the latest smartphones, it’s incumbent on crisis communication managers to ensure the team can remain in contact in the event of an incident. Similarly, make sure your designated control room is equipped with the technology the team will need to do its job.

• Build and nurture relationships within the team. Crisis management is a serious business, which means you need your team to be comfortable working with each other under intense pressure. During a crisis there’s little time to nurture those relationships, so getting together in a more social sense can help here. There’s something disconcerting about watching a crisis team meeting each other for the first time five minutes before running a crisis simulation.

Marissa Mayer: the woman in the room (or: why Han shot first)

Reading this morning that Yahoo(!) has hit the 800 million user-mark(!), apparently a 20 percent increase from where it was prior to the appointment of CEO Marissa Mayer. At the very least I think it’s a great story, so congratulations to the Yahoos.

Since I last posted on here, a lot of things have happened, but in the world of Yahoo there have been a number of interesting developments that started with Mayer’s appointment. At this point: disclosure. I don’t know whether or not Yahoo is a current client of my employer – but it isn’t especially relevant to this post.

So – the developments:

1. On 16 July 2012, Mayer was appointed as CEO of Yahoo! – and started work the next day.

2. In December 2012, Mayer gave birth to a baby boy (it’s important in a minute, hold onto your flamewars). On her return to work, she had a nursery built next to her office.

3. In February 2013 (this year, folks) Mayer wound back the company’s telecommuting privileges, attracting much expert commentary from a bunch of people you’d expect would know a thing or two about business.

4. Later in February, that bastion of business leadership thinking, Forbes, had this to say on the matter, and conceded that perhaps there’d been a bit of premature shooting from the hip.

5. In May of this year, Mayer led Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr in a deal worth more than a billion dollars.

And now, not even 15 months after her appointment, Yahoo is celebrating a new milestone in user numbers, following improved profit conditions (albeit with lower overall revenues). Obviously many other things are being skimmed over, but this being the internet I have to keep it short.

My point is simple: it’s easy to judge a decision from outside the room in which the decision is made. It’s far harder to evaluate it from outside the room though, because you don’t know what was discussed inside the room. You weren’t there. Even if you have a transcript, you don’t have tonality, pacing, body language, temperature, humidity, political tensions, the ominous sound of a ticking grandfather clock in the corner, or the complicated backstory that leads to a Han-Greedo stand-off to either deal with or understand.

This is a topic I wrote on back in February 2010, on another platform where I no longer own the credit. However I think it’s worth continually reminding ourselves that while experts, commentators, bloggers and the meeja are all entitle to an opinion on events of the day…unless we ourselves were in the room at the time, we don’t really know. It’s the reason I don’t pass judgement on how companies are handling their crises – despite frequently being expected to have a professional’s opinion of the issue, I honestly can’t say I know what was going on inside the management tent.

If you look at any large-scale disaster of the last decade, the one thing I can guarantee is that no management team ever sat in a room and asked: how can we screw the absolute pants off the people affected by this crisis?

It’s the responsibility of an informed public to analyse and critique the information they consume. The rush to convict Mayer of a seemingly heinous breach of modern leadership principles points to society’s over-investment in what we believe we should say/think/feel. It’s the corporate equivalent of the Greedo shot first argument – as a society we consider Han Solo to be a heroic figure of the rebellion, and shooting the unsuspecting bounty hunter in cold blood doesn’t tally with our ideals of what heroism looks like. Likewise, in an age of enlightened corporate leadership, “old fashioned” directive management can seem out of place, and jarring when we encounter it.

But unless we’re inside the room, we don’t know what the decision-makers know. And perhaps Mayer’s leadership is all the more courageous for knowing the internet bubble in which Yahoo exists was going to burst around her.

Han knew that too. Which is why Han shot first.

 

KPMG survey identifies concerns over companies’ risk management and crisis readiness programmes

See on Scoop.it – Crisis communication and management

KPMG survey identifies concerns over companies’ risk management and crisis readiness programmes

Grant Smith‘s insight:

This is a good read, although I find it peculiar that people still seem surprised by organisations being under-prepared to handle a crisis. Crisis preparedness and risk mitigation are expensive practices, and evaluation of ROI is difficult when the objective is to prevent an unknown thing of unknown scale from happening at all.

 

More openness from companies that have experienced real crises would help educate organisational leaders far more effectively…but if successful crisis management means getting the problem fixed below the radar, then no-one has a vested interest in promoting the ‘crisis you never heard about’.

 

This means crisis case studies will continue to be derived from those that happen in the public sphere, which means industry perceptions of risk are going to be skewed towards only those disasters that are so catastrophically bad/tragic/stupid as to be unavoidable from a media standpoint, and irrelevant for the vast majority of business managers.

 

It’s a challenge not easily solved.

See on www.continuitycentral.com

Why should public relations own online communication? No, seriously, why should it?

Melbourne blogger, copy-writer and waffle-lover @LouPardi sent me a link to The Death of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content a while ago now (it numbers in the months rather than the days). Thanks Lou.

At the time I got myself nice and fired up about why I was going to agree with the post, albeit with a gripe that a made-up term like “social media” was trumping the decades old practice of public relations in the headline hierarchy. But I got over that.

Hey, he’s Gandalf AND Magneto. I’m doing what he says.

To summarise the part of the original article I believe was most likely to incite the flamewar of all time, here’s a quote from Ken Krogue, the author (it’s nicked from the actual post):

“The bottom line is that all external SEO efforts are counterfeit other than one: Writing, designing, recording, or videoing real and relevant content that benefits those who search.”

While originally I was keen to post on this, it’s taken me until now to actually form a point of view on the topic. In the style of supporting my own pre-existing biases I’d like to whole-heartedly agree, and the fact it’s published by Forbes means I would feel smart agreeing with it.

Check out this guy – he’s spelling it all wrong!

The problem is, I kind of disagree that public relations will necessarily “own” online content, search and social (whatever that is), because at its heart the public relations industry is captivated by words. It makes sense given the inordinate number of print journalists that helped found the industry before TV was invented, but it has also led to our over-reliance today on media relations as a core tactical skill set. It also makes sense because regardless how we think about an idea, the bulk of our day-to-day interpersonal communication comes as words.

And so even away from media, much of a public relations practitioner’s historical skillset comes from verbal communication rather than visual. We make phone calls, we have meetings, we do coffees or lunches or breakfasts…all in order to facilitate conversations. Exploiting new technology is a historical weakness for the PR industry because new stuff is expensive, and if we can get an outcome with a phone call then why would we buy a fax machine?

These are still a thing, right?

When it comes to new forms of communication, whether they be web-based, “social” (you mean, two people talking to each other? No fucking way?!?), or anything else, first-mover advantage always belongs to people with a lot of free time who are able to experiment with the tech, followed by people with a lot of resources behind them who can afford to spend those resources seeking to exploit it.

The rise of the digital agency has shown this – so many great start-ups built on a handful of really smart IP, either growing to a decent small-business size, or getting themselves bought by a wealthy ad agency along the way.

The SEO business is arguably the same. Great technological insight, really clever people, and enough free time to establish a first-mover advantage. BAM – new industry, based on exploiting a loophole left open by the last new industry to arise (i.e. search in its own right). For all the stealth updates to search algorithms there will always be a new generation of wunderkund with enough RAM and ditched class time to come up with a smarter mouse to defeat the trap.

Seriously, this one stunt is going to revive my career and start a whole copycat thing, it’ll be awesome. Who’s got a sofa I can jump on?

So rather than buy into a debate about whether one technical skill set is going to defeat another in the battle for the marketing/communication dollar, I propose that in order for public relations to succeed over the next decade the industry has to attract diversified communicators.

Whether SEO is “counterfeit” as Ken claims, or whether ad agency studios are going to have higher production values than social media agencies shooting everything on hand-held kit, I think the bigger issue is really going to be: who understands the audience best?

Clearly the answer is “Stephanie Meyer”, so long as the question involves…well, anyone who’s into vampires and predictable fairy-tale endings. Oh, did I just give it away? *spoiler alert*

Planted content, if good enough, will always find a willing passive audience. Similarly, invasive communications in any medium will piss some people off, although to be fair I still use the free Spotify despite the ads. What we should be discussing is the route to the most effective communication outcome rather than which horse to ride there.

In this arena I think public relations does have an advantage because as an industry we are not bound by the need to make products. We can write a press release, but we don’t have to if a phone call will also get the story up. We can hire a cammo and an edit suite for a few days to make a video, or we can make a donation to a film school and ask them to do it for us. What’s more important is that as individuals, public relations practitioners develop something of the hacker mindset, and invest some personal time in learning how technology can be used to enhance the communication experience, both for our client organisations and our own relationships.

The rise and rise of self-selection (or, why the mass approach to media is doomed)

The perpetual challenge for public relations practitioners is measurement. If you’re a regular reader of this blog – and good luck, considering my average post rate is aligned to the landing of robots on Mars – you’ll know that my personal view is that public relations measurement should be binary. If you set a SMART objective, you’ll either achieve it, or you won’t.

No, no, no. I set “set a SMART” objective. Not a Get Smart…never mind. #artdepartmentfail

However in the case of an integrated marketing team, it’s difficult to separate out the relative value of each discipline. While this is true overall, the fact remains that the marketing disciplines associated with paid media have a fixed commercial value for their outputs.Page space is worth a retail value to a publisher, regardless of what you put on it in the form of an ad. A TARP is a TARP is a TARP. Surely Twain said that.

I swear Cat, you shall judge my wardrobe only so many times, or so help me…

The challenge for public relations has been that the value of our worth is in influence, not presence. A journalist can kill a pitch if it’s a crap pitch (although to be fair, they shouldn’t have to if we’re any good at our jobs). A sub-editor can delete a quote if it doesn’t fit the available space (although if the quote’s good enough it should be in the first third of the story anyway). And if something more newsworthy happens overnight, well the PR-led story was always a chance to be bumped.

Despite all this, the marketing mindset has, for the life of  my career at least, maintained that “more is more”. Brands (companies) rightly want to maximise their return on investment. They and seek to do this by targeting the highest-circulation publications, be they tabloid newspapers, glossy magazines, or week-night current affairs programs. This is because if a press release costs $5,000 to research, draft, pitch, follow up, arrange an interview for, monitor for, cut out of a newspaper, scan and email to a client, then a circulation of one million readers is conceivably a lower cost-per-touch than if the circulation was one hundred thousand. It’s basic maths.

If a train travelling at 60km/h leaves Station A at 5:10pm, and another train travelling at 80km/h leaves Station B at 6:20pm, how many lotto tickets should the punk buy?

Except, it isn’t. And the reason it isn’t is because…you have stuff-all idea how many people actually read the story. Or who they were. Or why they read it. Or anything else.

I’m seriously so excited about the way you’re a leading company leveraging your innovation platform to provide peerless consumer solutions. Where’s my wallet?

In contrast to this, web-based news gathering skews audiences smaller – because it’s precise. If I click on a link, I register a hit for an article. If the owner of the article wants to she can determine how long I sat on the page, and how far down I’m likely to have read. This precision creates three major problems, all associated with knowing exactly how many people read (or watch/listen to) your stuff, and for how long:

• It’s a smaller audience than the overall ratings or circulation catchment, so advertising real estate must become cheaper in order to represent real value
• Development of content to fit the space doesn’t get any cheaper, so the cost-per-touch is comparatively more for advertising or PR, while lower for media buying since the real estate is cheaper
• It’s interactive, and when people are busy you only attract advocates and detractors. Busy people don’t indulge in ambient news-gathering, they only read what’s important to them, so the comments that eventually appear won’t be representative of the entire population who may be interested in your product/brand/company/story. Your data will be compromised by the selection bias of your audience – a bias that existed before they ever saw your story

What selection bias?

An example of this can be seen in the analysis/commentary of this week’s speech by Australian Prime Minister, Hon. Julia Gillard MP.

Here’s some of the Fairfax coverage. I couldn’t include the News coverage because the site’s search function was down for the hour I spent writing this post, but if you click this link instead you can see some of the other news coverage of the world’s reaction.

Selection bias in media is powerful for media relations strategies because it means your audience has pre-determined a willingness to engage with your story. The implication of online media proliferation is that audiences will increasingly self-select, and self-segment, to the point where an audience may come together to focus on one single point of common interest, completely unrelated to all other socio-demographic factors.

As above.

What’s most important is that the investment in marketing acknowledges the consumer trend towards self-selected news consumption, and that investment is increasingly directed in more targeted, strategic ways than just mass-awareness. It will happen, when marketing as a discipline recognises the opportunities presented by a more engaged customer, regardless of channel. The challenge will come in identifying the right time for a given organisation to take the leap, knowing that going first is always the hardest, and going last is guaranteed to loose you market share.

Three important PR questions answered by Zuckerberg’s interview

In case you missed it, Facebook’s share price recently went up. Thanks Mashable, and @AlexLefley. Yes, the Zuckerberg + Facebook combo is there for Twitbait.

The diagram in the lower right gives it away really. Pity there isn’t an “affiliate marketing for your WordPress blog for Dummies”, otherwise I’d be making half a cent for every click on this frickin’ image.

This is a Very Good Thing (thanks Pooh), because of the correlation between the rise and Mark Zuckerberg’s highly publicised interview with Tech Crunch.

Let’s have a look at the three important PR questions answered by this interview and resultant impact on share price.

Question 1: Can I measure the value of media relations / PR?

Answer 1: Yes. In this case, 4.6%. Although to be fair if you’re on here this is probably a no-brainer, so here’s how you can explain it to your friends. The impact of PR is highly measurable, so long as your unit of measurement is: benchmarked (it has a resting state of some kind), binary (it changes or it doesn’t) and relative (end state is comparative to resting state). For cases where PR is part of a wider marketing mix, it’s also helpful to make your unit of measurement unique (only applicable to the PR activity), both to evaluate the effectiveness of the work, and also to create a cool acronym like BURB (benchmarked, unique, relative, binary). There are more parentheses in this paragraph than my last five posts.

Answer 1.1: The problem with the above answer is that it highlights a bigger problem. When people ask “is PR measurable” or “what’s the ROI of the PR”, what they’re really asking for is a comparative metric that enables evaluation against more traditional marketing metrics, like TARPs. Zuckerberg’s interview doesn’t answer that question.

Question 2: Why do you PR people keep telling us to do trade media? We want to be in [insert lifestyle brand media outlet here].

Answer 2: That’s a good question, and actually doesn’t require the Zuck to answer (but he helpfully demonstrates the point). One of the main reasons is that consumer media tends toward longer lead times (less so with the interwebs, granted, but seriously half the schlebs on the cover of the glossies put the weight back on before their issue’s even out). That’s probably not true. The Zuck’s interview was with Tech Crunch, and yet the impact of the interview was visualised in the share price (aka Wall Street).

I wanted to call this “2007”. But I didn’t do it, so you should click the link to find out what it’s actually called.

While Tech Crunch has arguably left its “trade rag” status well behind it, it is still seen as a go-to for sector content. The important point here is that with the integration of online publishing and social media, influential people who know things about your brand and can influence its success or failure, will do exactly what they’ve always done. They will self-select their media consumption, and will do so based on their existing biases (culture, political leaning) and the perception that “news” from a given channel is a product that they trust.

By focusing on trade media relations, we build relationships with expert commentators who spend 40 hours a week or more looking at a narrower pool of companies. It makes sense that this would improve the depth of the reporting, because we’re talking to journos who focus on brands like ours. Importantly, higher-quality reporting attracts more discerning audiences – made up of people who have a reputation for “being informed”, so the trust in those media makes them increasingly relevant in their niche. Developing the reputation for quality improves search rankings, leads to contra deals with mainstream news broadcasters, which then leads to mainstream commentary – but through the lens of people actually knowing what they’re talking about.

Answer 2.1: Really smart people get their news as close to the source as they can get. Influencers who value their reputation are masters of this, so they’ll default to the media that asks the kinds of questions they want answered. Trade journos are just more like your actual influencer base, even if that means they’re very dissimilar to the bulk of your customers. The key here is “bulk”. Discerning information consumers do not make up 80% of your market. They do, however, buy earlier and more often.

Question 3: Do I really need to do an interview? (also: can’t we just get them to send an email with some questions?)

Answer 3: Yes, you do. Read this sentence from the Mashable article: “From the moment he took the stage, Zuckerberg made it clear that his intention was to appease investors.” Key word: intention. You can’t convey intention via email. At least, not without some very fucking explicit language (see what I did there). Actually participating in an interview gives you the ability to fill in the corners with impression, intent, context – all things that don’t come across simply in words. A former client, who is a very smart bloke and reads this blog diligently, referred to this as “corporate body language”. By reinforcing your key messages through some kind of physical presence, even if it’s over the phone, it makes your actual message far more powerful. This could be interpreted as “interesting enough to survive sub-editing” or “easily understood as the point you want to get across”. Given that, why would you want to reduce your impact by sending an email?

Answer 3.1: There are a lot of ancillary benefits to being the spokesperson who actually fronts up for an interview. Here are a few: you form relationships with journos so they think to call you for a quote next time there’s a positive category story; you get to correct mis-interpretations of data that may arise from the journalist not having all the information they otherwise need; you get to address follow-up questions immediately. This last point is interesting because from the hundreds of media training interviews we conduct each year we consistently see the best performances from spokespeople who handle follow-up well.