When they don’t play the media relations game
3August 14, 2008 by Colin
I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets when noting that effective media relations specialists have particular tricks to convey information – tricks that prevent journalists, authors and even bloggers from quoting the media relations folks directly.
After all, who wants to be part of the story?
These tricks including only communicating in broken sentences, bullet points and long tortuous sentences. Avoid proper grammar, personal nouns, technical terms that effectively describe the topic under discussion, or even the appearance that you are providing a direct response to their questions.
And, most importantly, never say anything definitive. An air of certainty and willfulness only prompts individualists (like journalists and graffiti artists) to frame your comments as a counterpoint to their central argument.
For example:
“There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover”
Metropolitan Police Spokesperson
Found, of course, on the back cover of Banksy: Wall and Piece.
That’s one of my favorite books.
I grabbed it the second I saw it, Parker. And my girls have already read through it.
What starts out as tricks ends up becoming a habit… when I did more media relations than I do now, I had to make a conscious effort to break those speech patterns after a hard day taling media calls. That’s something you don’t want to bring home!
Real-life snippet of the technique, from a few weeks back…
Reporter: Do you agree with what xyz said this morning?
Flack: No.
Reporter: No… and why?
Flack: Just no, you’re not getting a quote from me.
Reporter (laughs): So what he says isn’t true?
Flack: I’m sending you a link to one of our web pages. You’ll see that… (summarizes the relevant point but leaving out the critical terms). The reporter got the info, understood our position and ended up quoting from the web page.
So you can use Flackspeak and still transmit valuable information. Reporters respect that – although radio reporters still want to get their clip. Steering them toward people I know will give them a good quote (on my side of the issue) is something I do a lot when we don’t want to comment on something. So you end up playing your primary function to them (a resource) rather than playing reluctant spokesperson.
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