So what is this interviewing stuff all about anyway? Well the point is that we want to put a show on the air that people are interested in. Now it is not just anyone that we want to hear the interview, it is someone from our target audience that we want to be interested in the interview.
You have to know your target audience in order to find interesting interview subjects. You can’t use your own opinion of who or what to put on, or your show will fail. You need input from your audience to help you select guests or subjects. If you have an existing show, always make an announcement that you want suggestions and study each suggestion that comes in. Believe it or not, you advertisers may be able to give you some input, they understand what people in your demographic want and may give you some good suggestions. To the extent you can, get out and mix with your audience, talk to them, watch them, and learn from them. What do they eat, where do they eat it, what other programs do they follow, what do they read, and so on. And course you can always copy the competition in some way. If there are similar shows to yours on the air, see what they are doing. Many of the most popular interviews shows cycle the same guest or subject around to each other. Also check out press releases coming into the station, some of them will be quite useful. And of course don’t forget to surf the web for sites frequented by your target audience. Blogs and forums and be goldmines for what your audience is interested in.
The key thing is that it is not your opinion that counts, it is your audience and only they can tell you what is interesting to them. Go to “Audience College” and learn all there is about them and there interests and you will be on your way to the top.
I think that as a broadcast interviewer, you should only have one persona for your show. Now you may want to develop other personas to use in other shows at other times, but offering more than one persona to your audience in the same show just confuses your audience.
Take Katie Couric in her CBS Evening News show. One of her recent shows had her doing a hard interview with President Bush and then doing a soft interview with some children in Iraq. Both interviews were well done by themselves, but when you saw them in the same show it did not compute. This type of persona conflict is common on the CBS show since Ms. Couric took over as Anchor. Ratings on the show have not been good compared to the other evening news shows. Compare that to the rise in ratings for Charles Gibson at ABC. Mr. Gibson always projects the same persona, show after show. The lack of success for Ms. Couric has been heavily debated and certainly more than a case of mixed personas is at work here, but I think we can learn a valuable lesson here.
Viewers need to have one persona from you as the host. If you change styles during the show it does not go over well with your audience. Certainly you see this type of mixed personas showing up on a number of shows, but it rarely occurs on every show, as it does with Ms. Couric. As an exercise, describe the persona of the CBS show to yourself, and then describe the persona of the Charles Gibson show. See how hard it was with Ms. Couric. If we ask our audience to take time to figure out who we are now, versus who were earlier in the show, they will reach for the remote. Also it is harder to build a loyal audience with mixed personas, as half the time people will like you and half the time they won’t, all in the same show. Not good scenarios in a competitive business such as we are in.
I think one of the most annoying thing I see when I watch or listen to hosts interviewing guests, is that it is obvious that the host is not really interested in what the guest is saying. I can hardly stand to watch or listen to it and I wonder why they bother to air the interview because other people in the audience must be reacting in the same way.
I am sure you have your own list of worst offenders in this category, but one host at the top of my list of hosts that do not pay attention or are not interested in their guests is Paula Zahn. In my opinion, Ms. Zahn has a habit of interrupting or running over her guests comments and pushing her own agenda as to where the interview should go. The guest seems like an irritation to her that should be ignored.
I also find that the larger the show, the more common the issue of not being interested in the guest comes up. I am sure it is a matter of the host not having time to get involved the guest selection process, and many times it seems, as the guest is a complete surprise to the host being interviewed. The host then generally proceeds to read a list of questions the host has been given and try to make it look like they are interested. What results is a real example of how not to do an interview.
I guess this system must work because the bigger the show, the more common it is and yet ratings do not appear to suffer. Yet I can’t help but wonder what effect putting on a much more effective interview would have on the ratings. I for one would watch a lot more of the shows if we had more hosts truly interested in what the guest has to say.
I recommend that you wear a suit and tie or business oriented dress, even if you are doing a radio interview and the guest and/or audience can’t see you.
The way you dress affects how you act and talk, even if you don’t realize it. Dressing down pulls your professionalism level down in a very subtle way. True very few of the radio hosts you see pictures of while working appears to follow this advice and are doing just fine. However, in my option, they would move themselves to an even higher level if they move their dress code up a notch.
Think of how you behave when you meet people, versus how you behave when you are in a business suit or dress. And think of how people treat you when you have a dressed casually versus when you have a suit or dress on. I think you will pay more attention to your choice of words, your speech patterns, your style and much more, as a result of the very subtle effect your dress has on you.
Of course you need to take the persona you want to project into account to see if dressing better takes you where you want to go. If you are doing “car talk”, you might deliver a better show wearing coveralls than a suit, and conversely a wall street show would benefit from wearing pin stripes.
Why not experiment with this. Next time you do an interview on radio or podcast or even doing a teleseminar, step up your dress code a notch and compare that show to a previous show and see what you think. You can even try this on the phone with business contacts or friends, and see if you notice the difference.
You want to be the best you can be in this business and that requires you utilize every trick in the book to help you stand out. “Dressing for success” may be just the thing that gives you that extra edge needed to put you over the top.
As they say in the commercial “I guarantee you are going to like the way you look”.
