Prepping for media appearances

Community Events is in the middle of creating/managing "Columbia Business Times Entrepreneurial Excellence Week" and this morning we scheduled two of our sponsors (David Keller from Bank of Missouri and Cathy Atkins from Sandler Training) for a TV appearance to promote the event.

They both did a wonderful job and I'll tell you that it was quite a relief. There's nothing quite so professionally depressing as creating a media opportunity and having it go poorly. The worst part is that the only thing the client remembers is that you put them into a situation where they looked bad. Thanks goodness that was not the case here.

One of the reasons they did so well (in addition to natural ability, which they both have in abundance) is that we took time to prep. Surprisingly, people skip this step far too often. Honestly, we could have done more, but what we did worked so I'm not going to worry about it.

The key was that I created a prep sheet with the key questions that we could expect in a general interview about an event -- such as "What is it that you are doing?" and "Why are you involved with this?"

The prep sheet was intentionally just one page because a longer document would have made it harder for the sponsors to focus on our key messages. In addition to a list of six broad questions, with suggested answers based on our messaging, the sheet included the three key points that the sponsors should stress above all others. If they couldn't think of something else to say, these three points could fill in the gaps.

When interview time came, both sponsors were total pros and repeated back a combination of the prep sheet with their own personal backgrounds.

Team work at its best.

- sean

Sean Spence
Community Events
www.commevents.com
seanspence@earthlink.net
573-823-1308