Spokesperson media training for geeks

When news breaks at your company or nonprofit, sometimes the only expert you can find to appear in front of the TV cameras is a geek.

Usually, it’s somebody who wears a white lab coat and talks in industry lingo that only other geeks can understand.

For example, let’s say you do PR for a pharmaceutical company, and a TV crew is coming to the company to film a segment for that night’s news on a new medicine your company is bringing to market. You want to make your chemist appear in a “natural” setting. You you ask him to stand in front of a row of beakers and other equipment in the research lab.

Chemists, college professors, engineers and other left-brain types feel uncomfortable talking with the media anyway. So asking them to just stand there and do the interview in a “natural” setting will make them appear stiff and awkward.

Media trainer Al Rothstein suggests that, instead, you should ask the expert to demonstrate something during the interview.

“If there is a way to do something where it’s a little more touchy-feely, where they can actually point and touch and walk around something, or do something where they can actually have something in their hands, that usually helps them feel more comfortable,” Al says. “If they appear only with something in the background, and they’re not media-trained, they tend to slide back into their uncomfortable zone, and then they’ll start to do what is most comfortable for them, which is to repeat the lingo and look kind of stiff on camera.”

Al trains people to be media spokespersons. During a teleseminar I conducted with him called “How to be an Expert Spokesperson the Media Love,” he said companies and organizations don’t always have the luxury of training every media spokesperson, particularly experts who are called on at the last minute to do media interviews. So the best advice is to tell them to just be themselves and to talk in language that anybody can understand.

It’s also good idea to do mock interview with your spokespersons who aren’t media trained, so that they’re ready for prime-time.