Eat healthier. Exercise more. Sound like your New Year's resolutions? Add one more to your 2024 to do list: media training.  Executives, small business owners, physicians, attorneys, authors, politicians or anyone with a public presence should make media training a priority. It doesn't have to be a long, expensive process.  Whether you are pitching your products or services, dealing with a communications crisis or have a desire to share your expertise with a wider audience, media training prepares you.  From upping your social media game to mastering TV interviews, your goals are attainable.  A few tips to get you started:

• Determine what is unique about you and what you offer--to set yourself and your business apart from competitors.
• In media training, we help you craft those thoughts into sound bites for broadcast  interviews.  Your sound bites should be concise and memorable.  
• Trying to jam too much into one interview can leave the audience overwhelmed.  Much better to hone in on three  main points.  
• Remember to work your website into interviews to drive viewers, listeners, readers and followers there; where they will learn even more about what you provide.
• Your social media posts (especially videos) could lead to traditional media interviews.  You need to be able to navigate both social and traditional media comfortably.  Style will differ by medium but your main messaging needs to be consistent across media platforms.
• If yours is a high-risk business, you need to have a written crisis communications plan in place.  Then, media trainers can conduct drills on-site and coach you how to face aggressive media and protect your brand/image.  No one likes to field media questions in the midst of a business or personal crisis, but isn't it better to have gamed out worst-case scenarios beforehand?

If you're an executive who is too busy for in-person media training, considervirtual media training now and plan for a more intense on-site session later in the year.  You wouldn't go into a board meeting unprepared.  Neither should you try to wing it with media.