That’s what a series of experiments conducted at Princeton revealed.
Given that, it’s imperative that you choose carefully when picking a spokesperson to represent your brand. You want someone that people not only will like, but trust.
Hold a media training session, with an emphasis on spokesperson training, for your company.
Our advice: cast a wide net. Your goal should be to identify a handful of spokespeople, who can help you in a variety of situations.
For example, think about inviting some “up and coming” young leaders to your spokesperson training session.
It could also be very helpful, depending on your industry, to have a couple of parents in your back pocket as spokespeople.
Lastly, give serious consideration to adding multilingual people to your spokesperson team.
Generally speaking, in the United States, a Spanish-speaking spokesperson is a good idea given the popularity of Spanish language news programming.
In addition to Spanish, take a look at the customers/communities that you serve and research the most popular languages that are spoken.
Try to identify people within your organization, who speak these languages, to potentially serve as spokespeople.
Identifying spokespeople before you need them i.e. you find yourself in the middle of a crisis, is critically important to your success in handling the situation.
If you start to look for people to deliver your messages, in the middle of a crisis, you will be playing catch-up for a really long time.
Instead, be proactive. Take the time to identify spokespeople and train them now. That way, when a crisis hits, you will have spokespeople in place, who are prepared to handle the fallout. As a result, you will have a much better chance of controlling the narrative during the crisis.
One last note: consider training spokespeople in different regions/ countries. When a crisis occurs, you won’t have time to fly people in to be the face of the crisis. You are going to need people, who are at least in the region, to handle the media until the heavy hitters arrive.
We pride ourselves on creating customized programs for our clients, based on their individual needs and goals.
Whatever your media training goals, we will create an executive media training program to help you become a more effective communicator across multiple platforms and channels. Please click the Learn More link to get started.
Coaching You To Be On Message…. On-Air, In-Person and Online.”
