Tom Murphy – Murphy's Law

In the past eighteen years I have attended, participated or given innumerable media training sessions.  I’ve also had the opportunity to see first hand why media training is important – in positive, negative and often entertaining ways.

Regardless of the emergence of social media, and your views on traditional media, training remains important.

Media training is useful not only to people facing journalists or bloggers, but in fact anyone in the business of communicating – which these days means pretty much everyone.

The basic tenets of media training are constant.

• You need to prepare.
• You need to know your audience.
• You need to listen.
• You need to think.
• You need to stick to the facts.

These may sound pretty obvious, but it’s amazing how often people communicate without thinking, preparing, listening or talking about what they actually know.

My favorite media training team was always David Tebbutt and Martin Banks.  They brought great common sense, humor and a strong methodology to help countless people communicate effectively.

David recently pointed back to a series of posts he published in 2005 on how to handle the press.

I strongly recommend you click here and go and have a read. It’s always good to refresh the basics.

David has also recently published an interactive version of the methodology diagram he uses in his media training.

Take a look.

Posted by Tom Murphy

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