The Media Coach

Hi John,

On Sunday, I get to spend the day as a polar bear.

I do it every year (that's me last year in the middle of course).

It's all in a good cause, naturally. A huge number of good causes to be more accurate. The occasion is the London Winter Run - a 10k event where thousands of runners will be pounding the streets of central London raising money for dozens of different charities.

There'll be half a dozen of us polar bears at the finish giving high fives, posing for selfies and generally saying well done.

Over the years, I've appeared in thousands of photos on phones, but they'll never know it's me!

Last Friday, I was at the wonderful old Hackney Empire here in East London to see the UK Americana Awards.

Winners included Robert Plant, Mike Scott (of The Waterboys) and Judy Collins, who treated us to a wonderful live performance of "Both Sides Now".

For me, the highlight of the evening was to see Hannah White win the song of the year award for "Car Crash".

Hannah and her husband Keiron Marshall run The Sound Lounge in Sutton - a superb music venue that has won many awards for sustainability.

Hannah will be a guest on my radio show again soon, but for now may I congratulate her again.

My guest this week, Elliott Randall, has recorded and performed with artists as diverse as The Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, The Blues Brothers, Carl Wilson, Peter Frampton, James Galway, Richie Havens, The Rochester Philharmonic and The American Symphony Orchestra, among many others.

His guitar solos on Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In The Years” and “Fame” (the motion picture) have entered Rock history annals.



I spent a fascinating time talking to him a few days ago. We talked about his time in Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers as well as his skill as a producer.



Listen to our chat in the Media Coach Radio Show.

And there's a superb track from Elliott Randall that may well be familiar to you.

The MediaMug this week is O2 - again - for yet another ticketing fiasco. A couple of months ago, it was Peter Kay fans trying to buy tickets that crashed the website.

This week it was tickets for Beyonce's tour that caused immense frustration.

While some fans were lucky enough to secure tickets, others have claimed that they were never able to access the pre-sales. “First the O2 Priority app was down. Now I’ve waited in an O2 Priority queue on the Ticketmaster website behind 200,000 people and it still won’t let me access Beyoncé tickets. Waste of time,” one fan wrote on Twitter.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that there will be tremendous demand for tickets for a big star. It's not difficult to provide enough capacity to prevent sites from crashing. Poor show, O2 (the Beyonce shows will be fabulous of course).

For a while, I ranted against using any slides when speaking, for reasons too numerous to list here. Then a couple of things happened. I delivered a talk in Estonia, where people said that without my slides, they would have been lost. I also observed fellow speakers explaining how slides can make a speech better. So now I use them when I need them.

Here's my updated advice on slides:

Visuals, if used at all, are there to enhance your speech. In my opinion, the default position is not to use them (the reverse of most business presentations). I think there's a law of visuals, which I've just made up.

Let's call it Stevens' Law: "The more important the speech, the less useful visuals will be".

Whenever you are interviewed on radio or TV, try to introduce something into the dialogue that will make the interviewer pause for thought. These "nuggets", or "killer facts" have to be rehearsed, and delivered in context, and can prove to be very powerful tools.

For example, if you are discussing the growth of your business, don't say "We have increased our customer base by 13% in Q1". It may be true, even impressive, but it doesn't sound very interesting. If instead, you were to say "In the first three months of this year, we experienced record growth, adding customers at more than double the rate of any of our competitors", it becomes far more memorable.

Use analogies that make sense the listener or viewer, and ensure that you have several nuggets in your pocket. I advise clients to keep an up-to-date company fact sheet with them at all times, including the crucial nuggets, which can be reviewed before any media interview. All company spokespeople should have this document, both in hard copy and electronic form. It will prove invaluable, since you will be able to deliver the killer phrase from memory.

Record the "nuggets" in your organisation, and use them whenever you can.

If you're a successful business, the temptation to broaden your appeal, by offering new goods and services, often becomes overwhelming. I remember the days when Boots was just a chemist, and Tesco just a supermarket.

A strange affliction seems to come over people on social media too. They want to respond to every request, offer their services to anyone who asks, and continually add courses to their training portfolios.

The thing is, people like simplicity. If they come to your Facebook page and can't figure out exactly what your business is, they will go somewhere else. That's why I am always amazed at sole traders (who often us the giveaway tag "....and associates") who offer a bewildering range of services, most of which they probably never deliver.

If you want to run a different business, set up a different page and profile. It's easy and it's cheap. By all means link your pages together. Don't offer a smörgåsbord of products unless you're a Swedish delicatessen.

With the Superbowl imminent, it's time to see what our friends at Bad Lip Reading think the players and coaches are saying.



If you're looking for a speaker this year, just get in touch. I now have all inclusive pricing.