Mr. Media Training

The Mr. Media Training Blog is proud to present the five worst video media disasters of September.

These politicians did themselves proud, with gaffes ranging from headless bodies and awkward dead air to on-camera profanity and death threats. And then there’s the guy with what could only be described as an overly-enthusiastic delivery. So without any further ado, this month’s top five:

#5: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer misses an opportunity to admit there aren’t headless bodies in the desert.

Click here to read our full analysis of this incident, called “Jan Brewer’s Staff Failure.”

#4: Maine gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage storms out of a press conference and yells “bullshit” on-camera.

Click here to read our full analysis of this incident, called “Turning the LePage.”

#3: New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino threatens the life of New York Post reporter Fred Dicker, saying, “You send another goon to my daughter’s house, and I’ll take you out, buddy.” When Dicker asks how, Paladino chillingly responds, “watch.”

#2: Making a repeat appearance is Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, whose 15 seconds of silence was painful to watch.

Click here to see our full analysis of this incident, called “Jan Brewer Debate Freeze.”

And coming in at #1 (quite deservedly) is Phil Davison, a Republican candidate for treasurer in Stark County, Ohio.

Don’t forget. HE HAS A MASTER’S DEGREE IN COMMUNICATION!

Click Here to See the 5 Worst Video Media Disasters of October 2010.

This is the third in a seven-part series that will teach you how to create effective and memorable media messages.

In part two of this series, I encouraged you to create three messages that represent what you most want the public to know about your organization’s work or project.

But there’s one problem with that – those three messages may be all about you, not your audience.

In order to test your messages, put them aside and brainstorm about your audience. For the sake of this exercise, let’s use a general audience – you can do this exercise for more specific audiences (e.g. employees, shareholders, donors) later.

Write down everything you can about the general audience. What does the general audience want from you?

For example, one of the messages in part two was, “If we don’t pass this bill, thousands of pregnant Pennsylvania women will have to drive more than 100 miles to find a doctor to deliver their baby.” In that example, the public might want these three things:

1. 1. More doctors
2. 2. Someone to fight for us
3. 3. To protect the health of mother and child

Once you’ve brainstormed what your audience wants from you, select the top three items. Now pull out your messages. Are those three items explicitly represented in your messages? If so, you’re done. If not, work to articulate your messages in the context of their wants by embedding their wants into your messages.

One final thing: read the final messages aloud. Do they sound like everyday speech or corporate-speak? If they sound too corporate, make the messages sound more like everyday communication. Lose wonky process words and replace them with language a 12-year-old would understand. (Click here to learn how to lose the jargon.)

Part four of this series will help you develop compelling stories to reinforce your messages and captivate your audience.

This is the eighth in a weekly series looking at possible 2012 presidential contenders. Click here to learn more about the series.

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), a 39-year-old Indian-American who became the nation’s youngest governor when elected in 2007, is considered by many to be one of the brightest young stars of the Republican party. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied at England’s Oxford University.

He has some gifts as a communicator, but does he have the seven traits that all eight winning presidential candidates have had since the beginning of the 24/7 media age in 1980?

He’s strongest on articulating a clear vision for the future, and paints a picture of creating cross-aisle solutions. In fact, he uses the word “bipartisan” five times during the six minute clip below. That gives his messaging a bit of forward-thinking optimism, a trait regularly rewarded by general election voters.

“I think there are productive solutions that conservatives can offer. It’s not enough just to point out why we’re opposed to the other side – I think we’ve done that well and I think we have reasons to worry about the tax and spending increases – but now’s the time to show how our ideas can actually move the country forward.”

As you’ll see in the clip below, Mr. Jindal displays a mastery of policy and delivers his points with confidence. 

I’ll review Mr. Jindal’s flaws as a communicator and give him his grade after the clip. 

Gov. Jindal speaks a bit too much like a Rhodes Scholar. In the interview above, he uses words and phrases such as, “segregating risk,” “tort reform,” “demonstration projects,” and “transparency of pricing and outcomes on the Internet.”

Those words mean little to a large percentage of the electorate – I’ve followed politics closely for 15 years and have no idea what Demonstration Projects are. (According to C-SPAN, they are “funded by the federal government in order to test new technology or policies” for “technology which might not find private funding.”)

Although he has an  “intellectual” charisma, I question whether he’s going to be able to reach a broad public on a more visceral level.

Mr. Jindal would be well-advised to drop the awkward smile that follows many of his answers. He comes across as authentic during the rest of the interview, but the forced smile undoes some of his otherwise good delivery.

You may know Gov. Jindal primarily for his disastrous response to President Obama’s 2009 Joint Session Address. After that widely-panned performance, Mr. Jindal was unfavorably compared to 30 Rock’s Kenneth the Page.

But my sense is that Gov. Jindal is smart and self-aware enough to learn from that mistake. Mr. Jindal has several of the seven winning traits, and he would likely fare well during a general election.

GRADE: B-

To see the other candidates I’ve reviewed so far, click on their names: John Thune, Mitt Romney, Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich, Jeb Bush, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum,Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Gary Johnson, Jim DeMint, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama

A reader of The Mr. Media Training Blog recently sent me an e-mail about a speech he gave earlier this month:

“I had a talk yesterday that could fit into the classic ‘Murphy’s Law’ category for presentations. 

The panel started 15 minutes late due to technology difficulties. The first two speakers managed to get their PowerPoint slides up and running, but when I got up to talk, the computer froze again, and I couldn’t access my slides. I had about 10 minutes before the scheduled session was supposed to end (and we were to have Q&A at the end).  I basically had to wing it. 

I wish you were there, so I could learn about the 1,000 things that I did – but should not have done – in a moment of speaker crisis management. I kept my cool, tried to make light of the situation, and focused on audience needs, interests, and priorities, but I think that’s about all I had going for me yesterday.”

Actually, it sounds like this speaker did just about everything right. He maintained his humor, exhibited his flexibility and remained focused on the audience’s needs – and by doing so, he demonstrated his competence as a speaker.

Here are three suggestions for what to do when the technology fails:

1. 1. If Your Audience Doesn’t Know, Don’t Tell Them: If your technology fails before your speech begins – and without the audience’s knowledge – don’t tell them! Little is more lame than speakers who start their presentation with an apology, such as, “I was supposed to show you a PowerPoint, but it’s not working, so we’ll just wing it.” Instead, just wing it! Remember – PowerPoint slides should be used to reinforce your story, not tell your story. Therefore, their loss should merely be a bummer for you, not an obstacle for your audience.
2. 2. Remain Calm: Things happen. Your audience understands that. So demonstrate your competence as a speaker by remaining totally nonplussed while working to solve the problem. If the problem can’t be solved within a minute or so, stop trying. Move on to your “Plan B” – delivering the talk without slides. 
3. 3. Have a Plan B:  Always, always, always print out a hard copy of your PowerPoint slides before your talk. Those hard copies have gotten me through a couple of speeches when the PowerPoint crashed. Don’t tell your audience what the non-existent slide was going to show – just explain the concept to them. For example, if you were going to show a three-legged stool, just say, “Imagine a three-legged stool. The first leg represents…..”

Do you have a question related to delivering a more powerful media interview or presentation? Send it to Comment@MrMediaTraining.com, and I may answer it in a future column.

This is the second in a seven-part series that will teach you how to create effective and memorable media messages.

Today, you’ll learn how to begin crafting your messages.

What is a message? For the purposes of this series, I am defining a message as a one sentence statement that clearly articulates your goals and reflects the core values of your audience. Messages also often include a call-to-action, in which the audience is asked to do something specific. 

Here are three examples of messages:

“If we don’t pass this bill, thousands of pregnant Pennsylvania women will have to drive more than 100 miles to find a doctor to deliver their baby.”

“We are taking the hassles out of air travel by offering passengers the airline they’ve long wanted, with easy itinerary changes, more legroom, and free meals.

“With more senior citizens living in poverty than ever before, we’re asking seniors to call their members of Congress today to tell them to pass the Fair Social Security Act.”

In general, aim for three messages. Three is regarded as the right balance between too few (leading to audience boredom) and too many (leading to low audience retention).

So, now it’s time to open up that Word document and get started.

Begin typing some ideas for main messages. Don’t be self-critical – just brainstorm and type anything (a word, a phrase, a complete sentence) that comes to mind.

When you’ve exhausted your ideas, save the document and put it away. Come back to it a few days later with fresh eyes and add anything you may have forgotten.

Now that you’re finished with the brainstorming, select the three most important thoughts that represent what you most want the public to know about your organization’s work or individual project. Write them out in sentence form similar to the examples provided above.

Reducing messages to your top three means you’re inevitably going to edit out some points you think are important. Do it anyway. Until the public has a firm understanding of your first three points, you’re only going to confuse them by adding a fourth, fifth, and sixth message.

Finally, don’t be discouraged if you aren’t creating perfect messages immediately –good messaging takes time.

Part three of this series will help you align your message to your audience.

When you’re asked a tough question, you may unconsciously react with defensive body language. It’s a normal response, and we see it all the time in our media training sessions.

But defensive body language sends a powerful message to the audience, even if your words are exactly right.

In this video media training tip, I’ll give you a suggestion for how you can help master your body language when confronted with a negative question from the press.

This is the first in a seven-part series that will teach you how to create effective and memorable media messages. To learn more about the series, click here.

Best-selling author Seth Godin estimates that the average American is barraged with one million marketing messages each year.

That’s about 3,000 per day.

And that figure only includes marketing messages, not messages delivered by media spokespersons in news stories.

So let’s call it 3,100 per day.

Now consider the average American – full-time job, children, carpool, social obligations and a chronic lack of sleep. Not a whole lot of time for messages about anything to slip through.

So how can your message break through and reach those exhausted people? The two most important elements to any messaging campaign are repetition and consistency. Did I mention repetition and consistency? Oh right, I think I mentioned repetition and consistency.

There’s a reason advertisers run their ads hundreds of times. A few airplays accomplish little, but repetition works. 

That’s why many advertisers have kept the same slogan for decades (“Breakfast of Champions,” “Good to the Last Drop,” It Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.”) And it’s why winning presidential candidates stick with one theme (“Morning In America,” “It’s The Economy, Stupid,” “Hope”) throughout the campaign instead of regularly overhauling their messages. 

Of course, consistently repeating a bad message doesn’t work. In Part Two of this series, you’ll learn how to create three messages that work.

Over the next few weeks, the Mr. Media Training Blog will teach you how to create effective and powerful messages for virtually any media interview.

Whatever you do, don’t just read these articles!

Instead, open a new Microsoft Word document and begin crafting your messages as we go.

At the end of the series, you’ll have three messages and numerous message supports (stories, stats, and sound bites) you can begin using in your media interviews immediately.

As an extra incentive, I’ll review the messages you come up with for free. When this series ends, send your completed messages and message supports to Contact-at-MrMediaTraining.com. (Here comes the disclaimer: limited to the first five e-mailers; batteries not included; tax, title and license extra.)

1. Part One: Why Have a Message?
2. Part Two: Creating Your Messages
3. Part Three: Aligning Your Messages With Your Audience
4. Part Four: Telling Powerful Stories
5. Part Five: Don’t Use Numbers – Use Social Statistics
6. Part Six: Preparing Sizzling Sound Bites
7. Part Seven: Preparing For The Interview