Make a Strong, Positive Impression on Your Target Audiences
At The Media Trainers® we call this the “interview objective”
When possible, your “objective” should include an emotional appeal since, in the final analysis, it’s how you make people feel that counts. However, with or without an emotional element to it, the interview objective (impression) is designed to be the most important thing you can leave with audiences; the most important thing you need them to remember. And, just like any other message you deliver, your objective should be stated, several times.
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently gave us an excellent example of communicating the overall impression he needed to make, backing it up with a couple of strong individual messages.
Being interviewed about the sudden (and surprising?) positive surge in high tech stock prices, Schwartz responded with an objective and supporting messages targeted to his industry, his customers, Wall St. analysts and individual investors.
His intended objective/impression: the demand for innovation drives his company and industry.
Individual messages that supported and validated his objective:
- business looks to technology for efficiency and a way to grow;
- consumers look to the Internet for video downloading, social networking, or just to make a phone call; and,
- those are trends and expectations that will be around a long time.
And, he delivered these messages quite concisely. In less than 20 seconds
The Media Trainers® Re–winder Reminder:
- Message delivery is very much akin to the way marketing works to communicate advertising messages. The one caveat is that this is news, so don’t try to get by with marketing slogans. The key is repetition and frequency, as long as what you’re saying is newsworthy.
- Go into every interview opportunity with an overall objective. When audiences may have forgotten what you said, they will remember how you made them feel. Your interview objective is the impression you need to leave with them.
- Create opportunities for yourself to restate the objective several times, in different ways, helping audiences to lock in on what you need them to take away.
- Each objective should have three to five individual (singular) messages that help validate and reinforce it so your intended impression is made.
The Media Trainers®, LLC, has a Tough Questions eBook on our Web site that you can download free for easy reference.
The Media Trainers®
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