Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

CNN.com recently ran a fascinating piece about the “GOP’s secret school,” in which candidates learn how to interact with the media. The school is a reaction to the high-profile crises the GOP has inflicted upon itself in recent years—from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment to Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch” ad—and party officials are determined not to repeat past mistakes.

According to the article:“Since the beginning of 2014, the RNC says it has graduated over 200 operatives and placed many of them as communications directors and press secretaries in Capitol Hill offices and federal campaigns nationwide…[Instructor] Rob Lockwood has also conducted media training boot camps with nearly 1,000 candidates, staff and local political figures in a dozen states.

”It appears that this GOP training class is doing everything right in its effort to improve external communications. There’s good advice here for everyone involved in politics, regardless of party or cause. In this post, I’ll highlight the excerpts that caught my attention most....

In 1999, upon reporting for my first Sunday shift at CNN, I was invited into a “question” meeting with Wolf Blitzer and his executive producer.

The three of us sat around for 15 minutes, coming up with questions for former Vice President Dan Quayle, who was mounting a bid for the 2000 GOP nomination.

We developed a seemingly impressive list of questions, but I noticed that the questions all fit inside certain categories. Some questions were intended to be “stumpers”; others called for speculation.That taught me an important lesson. Spokespersons don’t have to prepare for every possible question. They simply must prepare for every type of question. Below, you’ll find the types of questions reporters always seem to ask—and how to answer them with ease...

When one major athlete confronted people who were booing him, their reaction was priceless. And it teaches you a good lesson about why you should engage with your critics.

The seven-second stray can be deadly. It can damage your reputation and drown out everything else you’ve said.

... Years later, I developed a name to describe that phenomenon: “the seven-second stray.” I call it that because if a spokesperson is on message for 59 minutes 53 seconds of an hour-long interview but says something off message for just seven seconds, I can virtually guarantee that the reporter will select that seven-second answer to play over and over again.

The seven-second stray can be deadly. Not only is it often damaging to your reputation, but it drowns out everything else you’ve said, becoming the only quote the audience will remember from your interview....

When the CEO of a company responsible for contaminating drinking water tried to walk away from a press conference, one reporter refused to let him leave.

You’ve just delivered the perfect media response. Your answer is on message and perfectly quotable. It will accomplish everything you had hoped.

Then…you say more.

It pains me to see an answer that was brilliant in its first 15 seconds become diluted when it lasts for another minute. An extended answer also risks introducing secondary and tertiary points that offer reporters the ability to quote something relatively unimportant. And sometimes, those unnecessarily long answers lead to a “seven-second stray,” an off-message line that becomes your only quote from the interview.

When I see our trainees deliver a great answer—and then keep going—I tell them this: “When you score a touchdown, get off the field!”...

The prevailing wisdom in PR has been that you should keep hammering away at the key messages you're trying to get across in a media interview, no matter what.Is the reporter asking you a completely unrelated question? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.

Do they want to speak to you about an issue or topic your key messages don't even cover? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.Is the interview a fairly relaxed conversation about your company's strategy, rather than a reputation-destroying crisis?

One size fits all—just repeat your key message.If you do this enough, this line of PR thinking goes, your points will stick and the reporter will repeat them. The industry even gave this approach a name of its very own: "block (the reporter's actual question) and bridge (to your key message)."

Great—except it rarely works....

The question he feared most looked something like this:

“What would you say to one of your customers who purchased one of your older—and therefore less safe—products?”
To help the executive develop an answer, I asked whether he viewed the older products as unsafe. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Best in the marketplace. But the new ones are even safer.”

Based on his response, I immediately categorized the question as a “false frame” question, because it contained a logical-sounding but incorrect assumption. The question’s frame was wrong, meaning we’d have to create a new and more accurate one.

To do that, I advised him to quickly rebut the false frame and then immediately make a positive and confident case that looked something like this...

After concluding on-camera practice interviews with our clients, I often ask them to rate how much energy they thought they had, on a scale of 1 to 10. “Oh, around an eight or nine,” the trainees usually guess. “That was probably a bit over-the-top, right?”

I then ask the other people in the room to rate their colleagues’ energy during the interview. They usually rate it a 4 or 5. The trainee is always shocked....

Get inspired with these thought-provoking utterances from Henry Kissinger, Jerry Seinfeld, Mark Twain, and others.

I’m a bit of a word nerd. I jot down every good media-training quote I hear. I occasionally get to use one of the witty quotes in a speech or training session. Too many of the quotes just sit, unused, in a computer file, but they shall remain unused no longer.

Here are 20 of my favorite media training quotes....

I often ask my clients a deceptively simple question: What is your big, shiny object? Until they can answer that clearly, they're not ready to present.

If you tell an audience everything, you’ve told them nothing. People can only take in so much information in any given amount of time, and loading them with too many new facts can prevent them from absorbing your most important one. That’s obvious, I know, but many speakers—even some of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know—try to put too much content into their presentations.

As a result, the main point they really want to shine through gets obscured by an overabundance of rhetorical clutter. So I often ask my clients a deceptively simple question: What is your big, shiny object?