I’ve been a media trainer for over 20 years now and one of the things that strikes me, often, is that people don’t understand the value of their knowledge. I was the same when I started. This stuff I had in my head about relating to journalists, about ensuring that messages were clear; it was commonplace, right? Nobody would or should pay for what I regarded as common sense.
I was wrong then in the same way many clients are mistaken now. What I thought was common sense when I started wasn’t that at all, it was experience. I might consider it commonplace but if that were true at all it was true only if other people had the same levels of experience in journalism as I did. I thought:
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- Everyone would realise the journalist didn’t write the headlines
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- Nobody would expect to be allowed to check a journalist’s copy prior to publication
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- Nobody would decide something was off the record when they’d already said it
…and soforth. Naïve? By all means. But with anonymity assured, here are some of the things my clients have thought were commonplace.
1. The analyst who didn’t realise he was analysing things
OK, that’s an exaggeration. Of course, the analyst I was training understood what he was doing for a living, it would be absurd to believe otherwise. It’s just that when I asked him to break a report he’d written along territorial lines he started with “well, we all know that…(cites industry figures only someone with an extensive background as an analyst and commentator could possibly have known).
He wasn’t stupid or naïve. He just thought, as this stuff was self-evident to him, that it would be pretty obvious to everyone else.
2. The storage specialist who thought everyone knew the cloud wasn’t automatically backed up
I’m treading on thin ice here so I should clarify I was training this delegate to speak to the consumer publications rather than the technical press. And you can see where those consumers are coming from. They start a document on their laptop at home, they move to the desktop computer at work and it’s there automatically once they’ve logged on. That must mean that if the two computers in question were involved in separate fires and destroyed, they would be able to log on and finish elsewhere.
That makes sense as far as it goes but a technologist will understand that’s not back-up. If the hosting system were involved in a fire and there were only one of them – say a really small business deciding to engage a cloud provider hadn’t checked that back-up was in the contract because they thought it went without saying – there could still be a problem. I know these things, I had a website developed a couple of years back and assumed (quite wrongly) that they would have put some sort of spam-catcher into the “get in touch” form – not until I’d asked for it they didn’t…
And yet storage specialists assume it’s of no value to inform people of these things during their interviews. They just assume everyone knows this stuff.
3. Ancient history: the company that didn’t realise the US Navy was quite a big customer
Decades ago, before we all had smartphones that could fit into the most awkward spaces, I was training a company that worked in the data compression space. Their issue as they saw it was that “we make things smaller” was just never going to be interesting enough to attract a journalist’s attention. Yeah, they said, you can carry things around with you that you couldn’t before but nobody would be interested in that (I’m afraid I nodded my agreement at this point which really wasn’t very far sighted).
I asked if they had any interesting examples, any case studies. Not really, they said, although there was this thing called the Blue Books which was probably not all that thrilling.
I sipped my coffee and braced myself for something pretty dry. They explained to me, unenthusiastically, that until their involvement the US Navy had to have all of its shipping manuals – called the Blue Books – in hard copy and they were big. So, someone doing a repair would have to go and have a look at what needed doing, come back and have a look at the Blue Books – hopefully armed with a photo of the relevant section although you couldn’t be sure of even that in those times – go back and double check and do the repair. It could take some time.
Once they’d compressed the data it was possible to carry the Blue Books on a hand-held device, not necessarily a phone yet but something like the old PalmPilots with an OK screen. So, an engineer could squeeze into a space, check the Blue Books and do a repair on the spot in some cases, reducing hours and, at times, possibly days of work to minutes..
No big deal, then…
My point is that whether it’s me doubting my own insights or someone else assuming what they contribute to their clients is dull and not newsworthy, we all need to get a grip. Clients (in my case) and journalists/bloggers/podcasters or whichever other media professionals you need to talk to are hungry for our input. This may need formulating and shaping, it could be that you need to understand some of the rules by which journalists operate before imparting it, but those journalists and in particular their readers will thrive on your expertise. And the fact that you’ve been doing something for a while is going to deceive you into undervaluing that expertise, thinking it’s not worth sharing.
It almost certainly is. Have a bit of confidence. Journalist wouldn’t be talking to you if they didn’t have faith in your expertise. Go ahead, share it with them and prove them right – your company and its profile can only benefit from it!
