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Years ago press teams used to compile highly detailed Q&A documents with a whole list of 30 questions and responses. Whilst brainstorming can be useful a long list of questions are likely to overload you as a spokesperson. We do not want to be over scripted.
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Press guidance / talking points documents
You will most likely have press guidance or talking points documents to work from. These documents provide you with a useful framework of the positions and facts that you should talk about. But the talking points need to be refined and expressed in your own words. We need to avoid speaking in mechanical soundbites. Instead, we are looking for the personalised stories and language that feels and sounds natural to you.
During this training we will spend time helping you to refine your messages from these press guidance notes.
Story telling
Story telling is the “art” of giving shape and meaning to a piece of information that’s dull and boring.
The reason that the worlds of advertising, public relations and media are so obsessed with storytelling is that we tend to remember stories in more clarity and with more purpose than features and benefits of aid programs, government positions or policies.
Our goal is to organize our thoughts in a compelling way to help draw the listener into our narrative, to interest, entertain, inspire or educate. We may have one big story or use little stories to make up the whole.
In the training we aim to help you to take your message and develop stories that you can tell. This takes time and practice but it is a skill worth developing.
Why should we use stories?
Storytelling work very well because the “cause and effect” narrative structure is the same one our brain uses to configure thoughts, everyday speech, and decisions. This formula is present in common day-to-day dialogues between lifelong friends and colleagues, for example, telling them what happened after work, about meeting their husband / wife.
When stories are well constructed and narrated in storytelling, and its characters are authentic, exciting, and the experiences that are transmitted are rich, real and universal, a strong and powerful product that moves us and makes us feel is generated.
Uniting an idea with an emotion, and in turn being able to feel, allows the concepts, ideas, statistics, dates, colours, and all that comes with the story, to be stuck and retained in our mind.
The old way of pushing messages or ”advertising” works less and less each day. It gets really difficult to get someone to stop on the street to look at a graph, or to not skip a commercial on TV, or to not close an advertisement window on a web page, or find someone who actually wants to open the 200 promotional emails coming into their box.