It is a tricky balance to be clear, concise, articulate and also plausible. I was thinking about a podcast interview I heard by a titan of industry. He had obviously been trained in how to handle the media, so as soon as he spied the microphone, he went into media interviews 101 mode. Media interviews by their very nature are a fake environment. Those being interviewed are taught to be glib, keep it short, think in sound bite terms, don’t reveal too much or you will get yourself into trouble. Many journalists are looking for a scoop, a chink in the corporate armour, a gotcha moment. You may come away from the interview with the gold still in your teeth and relatively unscathed, but how did you come across to the audience?
We don’t sound authentic. Well this is entirely natural. You are under siege, so forget about authenticity and focus instead on survival. We don’t sound conversational because we are avoiding conversation and trying to chop our thoughts up into media bites bite sized pieces. We are always aware that unscrupulous editors can rearrange our comments with a later recorded overlay, that makes us look bad. There is a lot going on in the mind when being interviewed.
Here is a little word to the wise. If you are ever being interviewed by the media, whether it is audio or video, always assume the camera or audio recorder is still rolling when the journo says “thank you - that is the end of the interview”. They have learnt from experience that this is when we relax and they get us to make an off-hand, untoward comment, which we will make in haste and later regret at leisure. This offering gives the interviewer a big score and big kudos from their boss and journo colleagues back at headquarters.
The interview I referred to earlier started out wound up like a tight spring. The corporate titan’s propaganda blitz on the worthiness of the company came across as a total fizzer. Pumping out the party line is a dud in these interviews. Trying to make the firm look good in an obvious, self-congratulatory manner is self-defeating. It begins to sound like the type of drivel a lot of people posing as PR types try to foist on us, to get us to like the company.
Fortunately, finally, the interviewee realised this wasn’t a gotcha, media style interview and just a humble podcast seeking insights. Once he relaxed, the entire line of the conversation moved from fake to real. You could literally spot the transition point. The quality of the answers, the elongation of responses and the credibility of the speaker all lifted.
It was almost as if there were two people being interviewed – the fake and the real. We have to be clever with interviews and work out who is the audience, what is the interviewer’s “form” from past interviews and understand how we can add value to the conversation in a relaxed and natural manner. We want to connect with and engage the listeners. If we try to be too smart, too smarmy, we will trigger warning signals in the minds of our listeners. We have all been trained to be wary of the smooth talking conman and anytime we hear something that smacks of that effort, we become uneasy about the person and what we are hearing.
Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is infamous for dropping in very erudite, learned words into his speeches. He went to Eton College and Oxford university, so he is well educated and he doesn’t brook from flouting that fact. He also drops a “big word” and then as a throw away remark says “look it up” to acknowledge that he knows he is using vocabulary which is beyond the understanding of his audience and he does it in a humorous way to reduce the rejection facet. I always feel undereducated about my English ability, so I have bought a number of his books, because they are positively brimming with vocabulary which is rare or entirely new to me, in a desperate effort to expand my vocabulary range.
The point is Boris somehow manages to get away with it, but for the rest of us, let’s do our best to be clear, without being glib. Let’s be concise without masking our valuable thoughts. Let’s strive to be articulate and do so in order to add value, rather than to come across as a smarty pants. If we deem the interview to be “safe”, then let’s relax during the interaction and try to connect with the audience in a way they will appreciate. Explaining complex ideas or information in a simple manner requires a certain level of genius and this is what we should be striving to achieve. Let’s drop the corporate doublespeak and be authentic in our revelations about the contributions our company makes to the world.
