Media & Your Message - Avoiding Mishaps & Dodging Mayhem

For the last few years, I have helped to plan an annual legislative visit for our  Democratic Women's Club members across the state of Florida. Last year, we added a media event to our visit.

Throughout the year, in my role as Communications Chair for the state organization I receive many requests about how to work more effectively with the media.
 
In preparing for this year's annual visit to the Capitol, I started doing a search for any well-articulated "Working with the Media" tips or fact sheets I could share with our members.

While I was immersed in this process, I also had one eye on a little media drama unfolding for an organization I follow and generally support. I'm a big proponent of getting out in front of  a story. I advocate trying to be sure you tell and manage your own story rather than letting it be told by others for and about you. As a writer, I think of this as narrative management. As a social scientist in my academic life, this is part of image or schema management. In business and organizational lexicons, this is also about brand management.

I ran across these two key tips on a page from The McCarthy Group titled "Buzz Cloud":

• Don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t know the answer to a question but instead offer to find the answer and get back to the reporter before their deadline.  Never respond to questions based on unfamiliar facts.
• Don’t be rushed into answering.  Don’t feel obliged to fill “dead air” after a tricky question.  Just pause, think… and then answer.

  These tips came from a media professional named Jim Cameron.

This line at the end of the presentation also resonated, "Jim’s bottom line: having a proactive media strategy and the proper training to handle any media situation can help promote your business, and take it to the next level."

In actuality, having a proactive media strategy and proper training can also help your organization handle any media situation to recover from potentially catastrophic events.

My next reading pick will be a book called Crisis Tales:

CRISIS TALES: FIVE RULES FOR COPING WITH CRISES IN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND LIFE
By Lanny J. Davis
Threshold Editions, $27, 381 pages

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/18/book-review-crisis-tales/#ixzz2P4nOEKdm
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

According to Davis, " no matter what the public crisis or who the person involved, there are five basic rules for combating it:1) Get all the facts out; 2) put the facts into simple messages; 3) get ahead of the story; 4) fight for the truth using law, media and politics; and 5) never represent yourself in a crisis. These principles, Mr. Davis writes, grow out of one guiding principle: “Tell it all, tell it early, and tell it yourself.”

However, I think professional crisis manager and the real life inspiration for Scandal's Olivia Pope, Judy Smith, had a great take on how to handle a crisis when she said, "“I like to believe in the good in people. But we’re all going to screw up from time to time. It just happens. It really is how our best growth occurs. A lot of times, the flip side of a crisis can be an opportunity.”

Now that sounds like a potential book title, Turning Crisis into Opportunity....