Spokesperson Media Training: How to Represent Your Brand with Confidence

Being a confident speaker doesn't automatically make someone confident when they're representing a business. Whether you're talking to a journalist, presenting to customers, joining a panel or speaking to other important audiences, you're representing something bigger than yourself.

Spokesperson media training has traditionally focused on preparing people for interviews: handling difficult or unexpected questions, communicating clear messages without sounding scripted and staying composed when the conversation moves somewhere you weren't expecting. These are important skills, but they're increasingly useful far beyond a traditional media interview.

In this video, I look at what spokesperson training can teach us, why I've come to think more broadly in terms of developing Brand Champions, and how the right preparation can help people represent their organisation with confidence whenever they're asked to step forward.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

'Having your name and organisation mentioned in a media publication or podcast that's trusted and respected by your own target audience is a huge feat. And it's why spokesperson training and media skills training are still popular today for organisations.

In fact, I still run Brand Champion training workshops around the world each month.

Now, the reason why I call them Brand Champion training workshops, and why the Bootcamp is the Brand Champion Bootcamp, is because I see the role of a spokesperson as being far more than someone, in a traditional sense, who would be handed a script to represent what the organisation is trying to say.

A Brand Champion needs to do more than that. And there is an expectation today for those people who are interacting with stakeholders, external and internal, to champion the brand, be an advocate, help others feel reassured and trust the values, and feel inspired and engaged with the news that's being shared, or reassured by the facts and the new things that are changing for the good.

But what is spokesperson training? How does it help? What does it do?

So there's a difference between public speaking, where you own the agenda, you can pull together your messages and your presentation and deliver it, and perhaps bite your nails about the Q&A session that might come afterwards. But ultimately, you're owning that space.

With an interview, it's the person who's interviewing you, the podcaster or the journalist, who owns the agenda. And it's fair for many people to feel concerned that they don't know what questions are going to come their way, and what happens if it's something they don't want to answer or just can't respond to.

And this is one of the fundamental tools that people are armed with, the skills that they learn through training workshops.

Because there are times that you are ready to launch a new service or talk about a wider campaign for a particular audience, but you know that to try and build that brand awareness and the service awareness, you need to speak to third parties who will have their own agenda to ask questions that go beyond the scope of what you want to discuss.

It's a chance for them to bring in things that may have happened a year or two before, where investors weren't investing or financials weren't that great, or people were leaving, or the organisation diversified or made people redundant, or loads of things that aren't relevant to the actual topic at hand.

But the journalist or the podcaster might bring it in because they recognise that their audience could be interested. And that's what they are looking for.

They are looking to speak to people who can be engaging and interesting, share things that people might not have thought of, explain things that need explaining, or even validate opinions that they might have or that have been shared with them, trends that are happening where they just want some proof points.

All of this can work well for subject matter experts or senior leaders that know the organisation, but there are times that we need the skills to be able to convey this in a concise way.

I've met hundreds of participants who have either been so willing, wishing and enthusiastic to share information and help explain that they tend to lead into waffling and over-explanation, where messages can be lost.

Or there are the people who are, not terrified, but perhaps concerned about having their words used in the wrong way, so they become too concise, too defensive, too constrained. And so they're unable to become the storyteller or give that interesting insight that they actually could do if they were just speaking to someone next to a water cooler.

So the idea of the training is to help either of those camps meet in the middle and feel their way through to becoming someone who is authentic and engaging and credible, and most importantly, confident. Because we often have the things we can share, but we're not necessarily confident in how to do this.

It's why spokesperson training has to include frameworks, not just to say what to do and what not to do, but how to do it.

Because when it comes to interviews with the media of any kind, it's not about surviving the interview. It's making the most of the opportunity.

Consider it a conversation, not an interview. A way that you can work with this other person to combine your skills and your knowledge to give your combined audiences something that's worthwhile listening to, reading and taking something from.

Because that's the value in you investing your time. You will be remembered for the right reasons.

So look for training that supports your current concerns, and make sure that you are trained and don't just wing it, because actually that's probably the worst thing to do of all.'