Good media skills take practice. Just because someone is the CEO doesn’t mean they are the best media spokesperson. Often at our media training sessions, we find the person the company least expects is amazingly good a media in delivering the key messaging and sticking to the scripts. When you have eight to ten people in a room all practicing you can learn a lot about who is comfortable presenting specific topics. These media training sessions with practice sessions can be a positive exercise for your company. Practicing should be an ongoing exercise to ensure successful media communications.

Key Messages

A company needs to have key messages to start any media communication. A service CIPR offers is helping organizations develop their key messages. Having media training sessions will allow your team to review those key messages and ensure everyone is on the same page. It is also an opportunity for companies without key messages to see how differently people are talking about the same thing.

Skills You Learn in Media Training

There are some particular, technical skills that you and your team can get out of media training. These include:

• Blocking
• Bridging
• Key messages
• Trigger words
• Holding statements
• Speaking to get sound media clips
• Body posture
• Presentation

Learning these skills gets you ready for being in front of the media and can allow you to be mindful of the little things down to the colour of your clothing. Media is changing in light of COVID, and new skills need to be learned and should be incorporated into your PR strategy. Things that make you look polished and professional in a studio do not always work well over Zoom or Skype.

Media Training with CIPR

Traditionally media training is done with a professional coming in and playing the role of a reporter and quizzing you, giving tips. CIPR uses a different approach that begins in the first half of the session with learning the technical skills you will need about going on camera, being on the radio, or doing a podcast, as well as responding to media contacts. We feel it is important to learn or review what media relations are and what media is. Our second half of the session comes down to practicing those techniques and delivering key messages.

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