Media Training for Mobile and Other Crisis Communications Tips

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

Media Training for Mobile is a new crisis communications and public relations specialty. It is the latest addition to our 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications series for the new year.

Quick recap – this is the fifth week of the new year. You have been challenged in the previous four crisis communication blogs to end the cycle of broken New Year’s resolutions, in favor of achieving consistency.

Media Training as a Bucket List

Media training is too often treated like a bucket list item that an executive does once in life. Our challenge to you is to conduct one thorough media training for your key spokespeople each year, along with a thorough practice training before every interview.

Today’s video goes deep into media training for mobile, as well as the use of crisis communications scripts for crisis events. Both of these techniques are great ways to improve and intensify any media training that you have done in the past.

I encourage you to watch the complete video, because it will go much deeper into the techniques than this blog will. Warning – it goes so deep that today’s BraudCast video runs about 12 minutes.

In the BraudCast, I share some media training and crisis communication tips that I don’t normally share with anyone except my clients.

Give Up Old Media Training Techniques

This episode of the BraudCast encourages you to give up the old, failed media training techniques of the past in favor of new techniques.

As more people transition from traditional media to news on their mobile devices, you need to recognize that how a spokesperson delivers a message greatly affects public perception and how a news story is edited.

When someone reads news on a mobile device, they primarily see a headline, followed by the lead sentence. Most people draw their conclusion from those two pieces of the news story. Likewise, most people seldom scroll to read anything else about the story, unless it directly affects them.

Therefore, your media training for mobile needs to focus on teaching the spokesperson to deliver a compelling preamble statement at the beginning of the interview, as a way to mimic a reporter’s lead. Your goal is to be so profound and natural in your wording of that preamble, that the reporter wants to capture the essence of it to write their lead.

Control the Lead; Control the Headline

When you control the lead, you then control the headline. That’s because the person writing the headline only reads the lead sentence, in order to gain the information they need to write the headline.

Can You Control the Edit?

When you control the lead, you control the headline, which means you control public perception.

…And More Control

By watching the BraudCast video, you’ll also learn that the way to eliminate bad adlibs during a crisis is to use a well-worded script that anticipates all of the questions you’ll be asked during a crisis news conference.

Bottom Line The bottom line is that media interviews are hard. The variety of ways people receive their news is expanding. This means you must expand your media training to stay up with the times. It’s one of our secrets to effective crisis communications.

Crisis communications and media training expert Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC is based in New Orleans. Organizations on five continents have relied on him to write their crisis communications plans and to train their spokespeople. He is the author of “Don’t Talk to the Media Until…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash