I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr DeMille

Your heart is racing. There are little beads of sweat on your brow. Your mouth is so dry you could scrape a match along your tongue and it’d light up (don’t try that at home, folks).

In two seconds, you’ll be appearing on live TV. You thought you could handle it. You thought it was a waste of money employing a professional to help you to prepare. Now you’re wishing you’d listened to your colleagues and not thought you knew it all.

Your head is now an empty place with tumbleweed blowing around and you’re grasping around for any words that you can string together to make rational sentences. What will they ask me? What can I answer? Who am I and why am I here?!

This is a familiar position for people who are asked to take part in interviews for the media, whether on TV, radio or for an online platform, who haven't prepared properly. Your performance in front of the cameras or on the radio can mean the difference between getting your messages across succinctly, on point and professionally, or rambling incoherently, losing the plot and damaging your reputation. Which would you prefer?

It’s a no-brainer - get professional training. 

Here are some of the benefits:

•  You'll find out who's the best person to use
• You'll learn how to prepare, visualise and rehearse
• You'll get skills to get the job done effectively
• You'll learn how to calmly deliver key messages
• You’ll look the part and feel more confident
• You’ll know what the journalist is looking for
• You can raise your brand awareness
• You'll understand what soundbites are and how to deliver them
•  You'll keep your cool in a crisis
•   If relevant, you'll grab the opportunity to turn a negative into a positive

Choosing the right location is important too

To find out more about our media training courses and bespoke in-house training for your company, check out Chimera Courses.

Our trainers are industry experts with many years of relevant media and training experience, not novices or copycats. We’ve handled press and crises in-house for small to large companies and not-for-profits, as well as been media interviewers, journalists and producers, so we know what we’re talking about. 

Altogether in our team, we have around 200 years of experience in PR, sales and marketing. That makes us very old or very knowledgeable, our clients judge which. 

Hint: none of us are collecting our pensions just yet…

Epic photography for business

People engage more through a powerful image than text. That’s why you should use the best possible photography for business. It’s a no-brainer yet it’s amazing how many people use out-of-focus, badly lit and unclear images.

Oops!

Impactful photography is crucial to promoting your business especially with the power and immediacy of social media. That means using relevant images.

It’s also essential to have an approachable, professional-looking photograph of yourself so your potential customers can see the face behind the business, making it more personal. People are more likely to do business with someone they know and trust which is why you should have an image as your avatar on social media, rather than the default ‘egg’.

Your products and services should have fantastic professional-looking photography too although sometimes you might not have sufficient budget to hire a photographer.  Well taken photos will enhance your organisation’s PR whether it’s online or on printed media. Flyers, exhibition material and leaflets are much more likely to be read if they are covered with eye-catching imagery.

With the advent of mobile devices with good camera facilities, you can create good photos yourself although for high-level corporate work, you should still try to find budget for a professional photographer if you can.

You can get stock images from the internet but beware copyright and licensing laws.

If you decide to take your own photos, you need to consider subject, lighting, composition, quality etc and be aware your brand reputation might be tarnished if you don’t do it well.

Please don’t assume images you find on Google are free to use. From the time an image is created it is automatically protected by copyright, which is protection provided by the law applying to all images. To use an image without having permission or purchasing a licence is known as infringement. 

Infringement of copyright can be very costly and result in lawsuits, legal fees and even criminal charges. There are ways you can be found out if you think your use of an image from the internet can’t be tracked, so beware!

Now that local papers particularly have fewer staff photographers, they’re on the look-out for creative images to be sent in … but only if they’re good quality, in the right format and size, and tell a story.

To find out lots more about this subject, check out our #ChimeraCourse photography session: www.chimeracomms.co.uk/courses.php

Think of the damage limitation involved if you get it wrong!

Training? Bah humbug!

Giving your teams the skills to do their jobs properly is good for your business and good for everyone.

Training and development improves your business through performance, profit and staff morale. 

Naturally anyone who’s tasked with doing a job needs to know how to do it, yet firms often give people an additional remit but don’t train them. It’s as if there’s an expectation they’ll suddenly know how, which means that probably the job will get done badly or not at all. Wasted time, possibly damaged organisational reputation and certainly a frustrated team member.

Key benefits of giving your teams the training they need:

·         better customer service through better communication

·         improved productivity and profit

·         people who feel up-to-date on latest technology or industry best practice 

·         better loyalty and retention as people feel you’ve invested in them

·         retention saves you money

In addition, your people will have valuable new skills, increasing their contribution to the business and building their self-esteem. The training they do can take them into other positions within the organisation, positions with better prospects and/or better pay and which help your business. And they have fresh skills to do new and different tasks, which keeps them motivated and fresh.

So if you think training is a waste of time or resources when people should be at their desks, think again. If you don’t train your teams to communicate better, your key messages won’t be getting to the right customers or potential customers. That could be wasting the money you might already be spending on PR and marketing, and damaging your organisational reputation.

What if they take the training then disappear to a competitor, you ask. That's life. As I always say, it's the real world. Stuff happens. Deal with it but don't dwell on it.

If you’re using so-so photography to promote your business, you’re wasting time and money, and giving your competitors the edge.

If your personal brand doesn’t match that of your organisation or business, you’re potentially damaging your chances of success.

And if you want to know how to use social media to promote your organisation effectively, don’t just assume everyone can do it. It could all go horribly wrong!

Check out #ChimeraCourses – a range of training sessions with skilled, experienced and knowledgeable industry experts not copycats or wannabes www.chimeracomms.co.uk/courses.php

Don’t be a training humbug. Skills are for life, not just a sweetener!

“Imitation is a kind of artless flattery”

“Imitation is a kind of artless flattery”

English writer Eustace Budgell in the newspaper The Spectator No. 605, October 1714

Once again, we’ve been copied. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.

We’re always flattered and delighted that our clients love what we’re doing and we’re also flattered that other companies in our industry find our ideas and writing so wonderful they have to cut and paste without a second thought. But I often wonder why they don’t come up with some original stuff of their own.

We’ve all used ideas from others over the years, after all it’s the real world and there’s no copyright on ideas. But really, are these people so desperate or uninspired that they can’t put their own grey cells to work and shine on their own?

We’ve had our website images copied on other sites, text lifted for social media profiles (yes, word for word), our training courses and our business model replicated. 

As I’ve said, it’s the real world and there are, I suppose, only a finite number of ways in which you can set up a business. After 13 years trading our particular way, someone was bound to copy the methodology at some point, and probably this has happened already more than once.

One company actually had the chutzpah to email under the guise of a student, asking for our fees and what would be included, in an effort to tease out how we go about things – without thinking that we would see through this immediately. The student was working as their intern and named on their website! Most likely, if they'd come and asked me in an open and honest way, I'd have helped them with advice if they weren't aware how much they should be charging.

Source: seanwes.com

So, I say to those companies out there: You know who you are. And we know who you are. So get on with running your own businesses, be successful in your own right, and look up what ‘integrity’ and ‘professionalism’ mean.

My own 30+ years’ knowledge, wisdom, experience and intuition for what we do and who we do it for, plus those of my whole team - together with proven results - are elements of a business which can’t be replicated.

“Imitation is a kind of artless flattery” said Eustace Budgell. To paraphrase The Eurythmics, “Who are we to disagree?!”

There’s plenty of business out there for everyone, so stand on your own two feet and be proud.

We certainly are.

You talking to me?!

If you’ve attended any of my training courses, you’ll know how frequently I stress the importance of talking to your target audiences (the different groups of people with whom you need to communicate) using language they understand. By this, I mean making it easy for your customers and potential customers, as well as any others important to your business, to ‘get’ what you’re all about, why you do it and how you can be of value to them.

No jargon, no patronising sector speak, just simple, straight talking.

The Chimera Communications strapline of ‘Simply Delivering the Message’ says it all.

I’ve come across several situations recently where organisations and businesses have made the mistake of assuming customers understand their language. With some sectors like finance, there’s no getting away from regulations requiring information to be delivered in certain ways. There are some companies incredibly effective in translating this to customers, but many are not. People get confused, and results can be misunderstandings, wasted energy and resource, and duplicated work as well as products.

Understanding your customers means knowing when you need to go the extra mile to explain things in the right way. It’ll save you more time and effort later on.

With online polls, surveys, questionnaires and emails, as well as the good old-fashioned method of actually talking to someone, there’s no excuse for not qualifying what your customers need.

So here are some tips:

·      * Ask your customers when, how and what information they’d like from you – in other words, what is of value to them

·      * Know your customers so well that you understand the language, tone and messages they need to receive, rather than what you churn out to them

·      * Ensure all your teams (if you have rotas or shifts) know what’s going on so customers don’t have to repeat themselves again and again, which is not only frustrating and irritating, but can lead to negative PR through word of mouth and bad online reviews

·      *Make things simple and easy to understand – that way, you’re far more likely to engage and do more business with them

If you don’t connect and build a relationship with your customers, the risk is they’ll go to someone else who ‘talks their language’.

I recently took part in a Dragons' Den event where I was a Dragon, along with three other eminent business people.

In one respect, it was a very different way to spend a morning. I learned much about the approach taken by the start-up businesses we met. But in another way, I realised it represented some of the conversations I have with potential new clients who have gone ahead and started a business without enough prior preparation and thought.

Our brief that day was to imagine ourselves as the Dragons on the TV programme, with a large pile of money on the desk in front of us. Which business would we invest in? The start-ups we were seeing had been briefed to use the time with us as a useful opportunity to practice what they might well have to do in the real world later on, but in a safe and 'friendly' environment.

Photo source: Thameside Media

First of all, it was particularly interesting to see that none of the start-ups actually asked for an investment. If you don't ask, you don't get, right? Will there be investors lining up to contact the start-ups, begging them to let them invest? Unlikely.

Secondly, each was incredibly emotionally involved in their businesses which is perfectly natural, but there needs to be a reality check which can't take place if you can't disassociate yourself from your business persona. 

My next observation was that some of the candidates had taken a perfectly good hobby and thought they could make a business out of it. Whether they'd read something in a magazine which said it was easy to do so or not, I don't know, but there had been little or no market research (professional or not) to see if there was a need for the product/service nor any real life experience or consideration of sourcing products, manufacturing, distribution, business management or marketing.

At some point, our role as potential investors turned into 'critical friends', and our feedback became as realistic as it had to be. Some must go back to the drawing board; some did have a sound business idea but needed a rethink on their strategic direction and some should go get a job working for someone else. 

Did we feel we could 'invest' in any of those start-ups? Sadly not, but let's hope the start-ups took on board our advice and will come back to us another time to wow us into handing over our imaginary dosh.

Managing social media for a charity

Guest blog by Kerrie Carter, Worthing Churches Homeless Projects

As a PR and Social Media Apprentice, I know first-hand what it takes to get a charity noticed online. There are so many platforms out there and it can sometimes be hard to choose which is best for the needs of your particular charity. You should really stick to two and do them well. Develop these platforms so you have a good following on each, aiming for key decision-makers and opinion-formers. It’s important that your followers should be invested in the service you’re providing.

Working for a charity that helps the homeless, I have to be incredibly careful about the message I put on social platforms as it can so easily be misinterpreted. There is a huge stigma attached to the topic of homelessness and every person has their own opinion to give, which they like to do on social media. It’s important to be neutral to all of this and remember your charity’s aims; those are what you have to deliver no matter what.

Besides, the majority of people who follow you on social media are genuinely interested in the service you give and want to support it in any way, and that’s the valuable thing you need to focus on.

Facebook is a popular platform for our target audience so I tend to post on there the most as we get more engagement. Occasionally we get a negative comment which I may hide if likely to cause offence to clients/supporters, but in most cases I don’t delete a comment as everyone is entitled to their opinion. When posting, I try to stick to the same tone and this is reflected by my colleagues as well so the audience knows what to expect from the charity. We also get the chance to be quite personal as it’s a fairly small, local charity and those in our area are the audience we want to be targeting. I find posts with photos attached to them always work the best for our audience as they like to see the work the charity is doing.

Twitter, on the other hand, is less prominent for us. We get more support from local businesses on here but mostly through the form of retweets and favourites. When we team up with other organisations, Twitter is a valuable tool for tagging and updating people on what’s happening. The same goes for fundraising events however, it’s easier to document these through photos on Facebook as this is where our dominant audience lies.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite are brilliant for managing your social media accounts and for us, ensures there is content going out over the weekend so the account doesn’t suffer with loss of traffic.

There are other platforms we are considering using, such as Pinterest or Instagram, and we do post appropriate videos on YouTube, but since our following is constantly growing, Facebook and Twitter are the main forms of promotion. They are easy to use and can put out a powerful message although restricted to 140 characters on Twitter. Now that’s what I call effective marketing.

Kerrie had 1-2-1 social media training with us as part of her development as an apprentice with Worthing Churches Homeless Projects www.wchp.org.uk