The Ultimate Interview-Karaoke Challenge
By Nathan Rome

Perhaps you’ve noticed the latest reality TV craze, karaoke. Geared toward America’s middle-age viewing audience, shows like Don’t Forget the Lyrics and The Singing Bee have challenged America’s knowledge of new and classic song lyrics in an appealing and energetic fashion. The point of these shows is to have an audience member sing along with a live band to popular music. At some point the music stops and the participant is expected to sing the rest of the lyrics without assistance from the band. While I will leave it to you and the rest of America’s viewing audience to decide the success of these shows, I can say with confidence that they are doing one thing that’s unexpected – they are showing the basic principles behind a successful interview.

An interview is, for the most part, an exchange of ideas, albeit a little one-sided in your favor. Your job is to get reporters to see why your idea is reasonable and has grounding with respect to the topic at hand. Basically, you want them to get to the point that they are thinking like you are thinking. You want them to sing with you. Once they are doing that, you let them follow the beat, and eventually they will start singing your song for you.

So what do you do to get the reporter to believe in you enough to sing your song for you? That’s a little complicated, but I can assure you that you’ve done it before. You just didn’t realize it. You’re working with M/C/C, and we only work with companies that we believe in; therefore, you’ve convinced us to believe in your company’s philosophy and reasoning, and now we preach that to hundreds of reporters every day.

The trick is to believe in what you are talking about. Stay away from specific products or services except to provide an example to support the overall idea. People don’t believe in a product or service, they believe in what that product or service provides to them and the industry as a whole. Think of it in terms of the music industry. Songs that are based solely on a certain experience or relationship might break the Top 40 but they probably won’t become classic. Songs that get people to believe in something seem to last forever. It’s why 18-year-olds can sing along to John Lennon but probably couldn’t name a single song by The Monkees.  

Once you’ve laid out your reasoning, you need to tailor that reasoning to the publication. Lee Iacocca once said, “Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they'll say, 'God, he said exactly what I was thinking.' And when they begin to respect you, they'll follow you to the death.” It’s absolutely crucial that you get reporters to realize how your reasoning or philosophy is affecting their industry and their audience and why they should care. Every publication writes differently and has a separate target audience. Ensuring that you make your case unique for that audience and present it in a way that fits that publication’s writing style can dramatically influence the outcome of the article.

Now, obviously, there are more complexities to this than are contained in this short article. That’s why you have a media relations representative on-hand and why you always have media training available to you at any time. At M/C/C, we are experts in communications and understand how to develop and convey key messages in ways that turn your messages into reasoning. It’s a lot to harder to argue against reason than it is to argue against a message. This is the point you want to get your interview to. A reason is something people can believe in, and they are far more likely to remember the lyrics to a reason they believe in than a message they don’t.

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