IABC Media Relations Commons

When Barbara Gibson, ABC, worked on the corporate side, she couldn’t find a company capable of conducting an objective assessment of spokesperson skills during media interviews. Like hundreds of other communicators she had talked to during her career, she had worked with spokespeople who were less than competent or simply unwilling to take advice that would help them improve their skills.

So when she left corporate life, it seemed logical to fill the void.

“I couldn’t find anyone out there, when I was in a position of needing it, who was providing any sort of (spokesperson) assessment,” she says. “So I developed a methodology of assessing all of those skills that go into making a successful interview.”

Today, Barbara is president of SpokesComm, a U.K.-based company that provides objective assessments of a spokesperson’s strengths and weaknesses, from the view of both journalists and communication professionals. The assessment provides a detailed analysis of capabilities and recommendations for further development.

Barbara began this process with a list of 10 competencies she felt were important to spokesperson success, based on nearly 20 years of experience as a corporate communicator. She took that initial list to 100 journalists in the United States and the U.K. and asked for their feedback. From there, she developed a final list of 12 competencies that combine both the corporate perspective and the journalists’ point of view.

The skill areas range from establishing rapport with journalists to providing good examples during interviews. They include the spokesperson’s ability to advance corporate objectives during an interview, as well as his or her ability to deal with difficult questions and not become defensive.

“Seeming at ease came across from the journalists’ perspective as very important,” Barbara explains. “If the spokesperson doesn’t seem at ease, that affects the level of trust.”

The assessment is conducted in an environment that is designed to be as close to reality as possible. The spokesperson is prepped for the interview by his or her PR team, and a working journalist interviews the spokesperson for 40 minutes, which gives a real sense of the spokesperson’s strengths and weaknesses across a range of skills.

The interview is videotaped. Both the journalist and a PR assessor complete an assessment immediately after the interview, and a report is provided within 24 hours, which provides a score on each competency and an overall score on a seven-point scale.

In conducting these assessments, Barbara is finding correlations between certain skill areas. For example, if the journalist scores the spokesperson high on the category of ’seems open and honest’, the journalist will be more willing to develop a relationship with this spokesperson in the future.

“(The assessment) enables the PR person to know which of their spokespeople are strong in which situation,” Barbara explains, “so they can choose the right spokesperson for the journalist (and the situation).”

Bottom line? Better understanding and use of spokespeople means better use of media relations resources.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 7:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.