In my last post I wrote about booking yourself on call-in radio shows. This can be the easiest access you’ll have to media, but live radio is very unforgiving in a number of respects, so let’s deal with live radio media mastery today.

There are some basic radio rules. Last time I emphasized the need to brand. In fact, I put it in all upper case — BRAND — because it is so important. On live radio no one will know what company or product you’re talking about if you don’t tell them.

It is a rule of all media mastery that you speak clearly, simply, and in short but complete sentences. Nowhere is that rule as critical as it is in radio where you have only one tool, your voice, to capture the listener’s attention. In Addition, you need to speak slowly enough for listeners to hear and understand you. But at the same time you need to energize your voice. Make your voice commanding by using inflection and stresses, not by talking at machine-gun speed. A lot of professional radio personalities achieve vocal energy by acting out as they speak or read. That is, they grimace and gesticulate with exaggerated movement. To brighten their speech, they do something old radio pros call “putting teeth in it.” Putting teeth in a line means delivering it with a huge smile on your face. It looks ridiculous but sounds great. And, since it’s not TV, no one sees the jack-o’-lantern grin.

Here are some more live radio rules:
Be Brief
Keep it Simple
Never Pause

Be Brief: You already know that radio is a non-visual medium without a reread factor. A very long statement can sound like a speech or a sermon, rather than a conversation. Also speaking at excessive length may spur an interruption by the host. And even if he doesn’t cut you off, your long-winded answers are sure to frustrate listeners and cause their attention to wander. Brevity is not “Yes” and “No,” by the way; “Yes” and “No” are not answers but are the beginning of answers.

Keep it Simple: Radio listeners get one brief shot at comprehending what you’re saying. In media training sessions I used to tell participants that rather than “dumb down” their answers, just pretend to be talking to their aunt across the table at Thanksgiving dinner and speak at the appropriate level for her to understand without condescending to her. Simplify as much as you can without changing the meaning of what you’re saying.

Don’t Pause: Just as nature abhors a vacuum, live radio abhors silence. A listener hunting through the radio dial and hearing no talk, no music, nothing but the “sound of silence,” assumes that there’s no station and moves on. Radio interviewers know this and don’t want to lose the station surfers, so if you are silent for too long after a question, it’s likely your interviewer will begin talking to fill the void. When he’s talking, he’s using the medium’s most precious commodity – airtime – and you are not; you can’t deliver your message when he’s talking. In print interviews and in edited broadcast interviews, there’s nothing wrong with pausing after a question is asked, thinking for a beat and then launching into your answer. But in live radio — and live TV, for that matter — you can’t afford the luxury of thinking before you speak. And that’s why it’s extremely important that you never go into a live broadcast interview without a well-thought-out, well-rehearsed agenda.

Shortly before the 2008 election, a large financial services company asked me to come to a corporate retreat and give a speech to 100 or so of their counselors from around the country. My subject was: “How to Become the Go-To Guy for Your Local Media.”

My first piece of advice for them was “book yourself on local call-in radio shows.” Call-in radio has a voracious appetite, many programs appreciate expert advice from callers and more than a few are happy to give a good call-in guest repeat exposure. The operative word in the last sentence is “good.” Being good in any media encounter means having a message and expressing it coherently, entertainingly and concisely. In previous posts, I’ve written about the need for an agenda in an interview and I’ve given a series of tips on how to turn your agenda points into compelling soundbites that viewers, listeners and readers will take away with them.

Since most call-in segments, especially unsolicited ones, are short, your agenda should only have one, at most two, points — rather than the four or five I recommend for a typical media interview. Your message point — or points — should be sharply honed and compelling; it’s unlikely you’re going to have an abundance of time to sell them — either to the call screener or to the audience at large. So use your most startling, stunning stuff right up front with the call screener; don’t save your best lines for air because if you don’t deploy them to the screener you won’t get on the air. Let me use the financial advisors I addressed to give you an example. At the time I gave the speech the wheels had come off the economy and confusion reigned everywhere (especially in the media, which had been mindlessly cheerleading the boom and — with few notable exceptions — was totally surprised by the downturn). Looking around the crowded room before going on, I joked to one of my hosts, “I’m glad so many of your folks have ground floor offices.” She answered, “Actually, they’re all fine; it’s the clients who are suffering panic attacks. Our guys have to talk the clients off the ledge.”

She was speaking metaphorically, but that was a great line to use with a call-in radio screener.  So I ad-libbed it into my speech:  “If I were you, and I were phoning a call-in screener, I would say something like, ‘I’m Joe Smith from XYZ Financial services.  And I think you’d be interested in how I talk my clients off the ledge during this economic free-fall.” Chances are very good, I told them, they would wind up on the air and that before they went on the screener would remind them, “Be sure to use that talking people off the ledge line.”

Once you’re on radio, it’s vitally important to remember to brand. Let me put that in all upper-case: BRAND. Other media channels are forgiving. If you forget to mention your affiliation, a newspaper or magazine reader enjoys the reread factor — she can hunt back in the story and find out who you are. In television the production often does you the service of putting your name and affiliation in a lower-third graphic below your image. But there is no re-read factor or lower-third in radio. A good radio interviewer will identify his guest and the guest’s affiliation. Unhappily, good radio interviewers are few and far-between. I’m sure that as a listener you’ve joined an interview in progress and heard an interesting discussion about “the book,”  “my book,” and “it.” Maybe you were interested enough to want to buy the book. But while you listened, the author failed to use its name and the interviewer — who should have known better — failed to name the volume AND his guest. If you turned off the radio before the interview ended, you were stymied. Try asking for “It” or “The Book” at Barnes & Noble; they  have thousands of volumes — none named, “It” or “The Book.”  So on radio it falls to you to do your own branding. The medium is unique in other areas, too. And next time, I’ll go give you additional tips for radio mastery.