Okay, so we all know about social media now and we all recognize its importance to us. But, did you realize how much pressure social media is putting on you and your ability to get a message out through mainstream media?

It has always been the case that media would beat any large business in getting a story out there. The big companies with their PR and Legal Departments and their “agreement by committee”way of working were always going to be beaten to the punch by an aggressive journalist working for mainstream media. That used to annoy the hell out of them when I was working on crisis management exercises for companies like BHP, Woodside, Shell etc. Now, with smartphones, Twitter, Facebook, blog posts etc that time to refine a message (like a defensive position when the brown stuff hits the fan) has fallen even further.

I saw a quote the other day that Burson-Marsteller did a global study of crisis preparedness and found that of the 826 companies surveyed in the Asia-Pacific region, 75% of those that had experienced a crisis only made their crisis communication plan after the fact. Wow! In my media training workshops I often quote Muhammad Ali who used to say “I run on the road long before I dance under the lights” – prepare a plan beforehand, not while the emergency is underway or afterwards!

We were in the process of preparing a crisis plan for one client when a real crisis erupted. That certainly focused their attention on how important a crisis plan would be to the organisation and our subsequent media training workshop refined that focus.

But back to social media. It robs you of a considered response which makes it even more important that you prepare some considered responses to a range of potential problems. Then it’s only a matter of tweaking those prepared responses on the day in question.

Don’t respond at all, did I hear someone say? Good luck. If you don’t respond to the media they will still do the story – without your input which could be vital for the truth to come out. Of course, Murphy says they will still use speculation or untruths that others have fed them!

Be prepared to tell the truth, apologise if that’s called for and then outline what is being done to ensure this problem never happens again. That’s the way to handle a crisis. Unfortunately, the lawyers have got to a lot of our big companies and told them that opens them up for liabilities. That’s usually what makes a crisis even worse or makes it linger longer than it should. Think John Howard and the apology to the Aborigines!

There was a lot John Howard did right in media relations but I still would have loved him to be in one of our media training workshops. I would have told him to stop speaking the more formal written word and to take Queensland Premier Peter Beattie’s line and fess up when you had to.

Yet another reminder today about how bad corporate speak really is. Charles Moore, writing in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper about the phone hacking scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch and his media empire had this to say:

When you meet him (Rupert Murdoch), it’s impossible not to be impressed and charmed by all this (his remarkable media achievements). Unlike his son, James, who uses the wretched jargon of the business school, the old man speaks directly, wittily and even affectionately about his trade.

Down with business school jargon, I say! And we stress that in our media training workshops.

Australia’s Minister for Agriculture, Joe Ludwig, is caught in the cross hairs this week over his bungled handling of our live cattle export to Indonesia where animal cruelty was so visually proved by the Four Corners program last week.

Speaking to the media yesterday, Ludwig used the term “animal welfare outcomes” 14 times and “supply chain assurance” eight times. When asked why he had suspended the live cattle trade with Indonesia for only six months, he said “We need to put in place that supply chain assurance so as soon as we can move to a supply chain assurance then we can transition for the longer term.”

He wouldn’t be a lawyer would he? Where do people learn to speak like this?

One of the main points in our media training workshops is to abandon all such speak and not only use words that everyone can understand but put them into sentences that are in everyday use.

The actual headline in today’s paper says “Corporate Speak Sucks The Life Out Of Our Education System” but I prefer my headline as I’ve been railing against corporate speak in my media training workshops for quite a while now.  Ron Forbes is an English language teacher at Kyneton Secondary College and he reckons the primary purpose of corporate speak is to obscure meaning. He says “this is a language with the blood and muscle of actors and verbs removed, leaving the hollow bones of its noun phrases clanking against each other.” Sadly, education is now being steadily corporatised too.

Forbes says the education sector is being encouraged to use words like “pedagogy” instead of teaching, “cohort” instead of student group, and “stakeholder” instead of parent.  He claims we are in danger of corporate-speak sucking the life out of our education system and says that for us to hold on to our humanity, let’s use and value plain-speak and stamp out officialese.

All I can say is “hear, hear” – please let business people and politicians take note so we don’t end up with a society of automatons sprouting empty slogans.

Here’s a new tactic to tuck away in the PR saddlebag. The Federal Government has answered a reporter’s questions via a media release and, as The Australian reported today, this disseminated her story to rivals and killed off her chance of a scoop.

FOI requests are being handled this way too with Treasury and the Reserve Bank now releasing FOI documents on the same day to all journalists without warning so the journo who submitted their request sees their exclusive evaporate instantly.

While journos might be aghast at what they term a “breach of trust”, I can see how some companies might just use this tactic.

There’s non doubt about it, handling a tough electronic news media interview is not easy. I was reading only this morning how the Australian Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has been shirking such interviews when compared to Prime Minister Gillard. This year Abbott has appeared twice on The 7.30 Report compared to six times for Gillard; no appearances on Q&A but one for Gillard; one on Sky Agenda compared with four for Gillard and none on Meet The Press where Gillard appeared once.

Looking at the softer options, the tables are turned. Abbott has appeared 10 times on The Today Show while the Prime Minister has turned up only twice. Abbott also comes into his own on talkback and shock-jock radio with 16 appearances on 2GB (2 for Gillard); nine on MTR (0); 5 on 2UE (1); 9 on 2SM (2) and three each on 3AW.

This fear of Abbott’s for tough electronic news media interviews is not his alone. Most business people we media train share that fear. Those who undertake our media training workshops lose a lot of that fear because we put them through very, very tough interviews that are so realistic we’ve had participants not want to do a second interview. Not surprisingly, when they do, they give a much better performance thereby proving the value of media training when it’s carried out properly by people who have a strong history both in the media and in media training.

Did you know there was such a field? Well, there is and it involves helping companies who have bad PR from not showing up high in Google searches.  If people are bad-mouthing your company on blogs, forums or Facebook and that information is showing up in Google, the SEO Reputation Manager gets multiple “good” PR stories to show up and push the “bad” PR stories off page one of the search results.

The most recent example I saw was a a man wrongly accused of murder. Whenever anyone searched for this guy’s business or his name they saw a lot of listings talking about this murder. This was obviously affecting his business (not to mention his sense of humour I’d say) so the SEO Reputation Manager got the first page of Google completely filled with good stories about this man and his business. This pushed all the talk about the murder way down in the search results where hardly anyone would see them.

A neat trick eh?

A few weeks ago, former Labor Minister Lindsay Tanner released his book aptly named Sideshow in which he lamented the demise of big issues and the rise of petty intrigue, gimmicks and stunts in the world of politics – well, at least that was the sub-headline written by Michael Gordon in The Age.

Let me tell you Mr Tanner, petty intrigue is a way of life in the media world too and that world has absolutely shifted to the realm of entertainment instead of information. Watch any commercial TV news service at night and you’ll be bombarded with court case after court case, celebrity tittle-tattle after celebrity tittle-tattle and just a lot of rubbish that has very little to do with news that matters.

From a media training point of view this means it gets harder and harder for any corporate person, or politician, to get a reasonable say on these programs let alone get their story covered at all.

Our training exhorts business to take a leaf out of the political world and rely more on stunts to get your message across. You won’t change them so you may as well join the media in its circus – if you want to be heard, that is!

Memo to the Australian Prime Minister:

Julia, you have to rediscover how to talk naturally. I have several videos of you being interviewed on A Current Affair last year (just after you toppled Rudd for the top job) and you spoke far more naturally – but passionately – than you do now. Here’s a sample from that interview.

Dean Frenkel, writing in The Age last month, agreed with my view saying it was time for Julia to drop the twang as it was really beginning to annoy us. He said the PM’s tone had become more robotic and less melodious. I agree entirely. She also has become far too slow in her delivery which is rather the opposite of what people do when under pressure.

In most of our media training workshops I can’t recall telling anyone they needed to speak faster. They normally speak too fast because of nerves and need to slow down.

Julia – please take note – quicken your delivery and pretend you’re just talking to that First Bloke beside you and you WILL give a better performance. Alternatively, book into one of our media training workshops and I’ll make sure you improve!