podcast interview tips Archives

Video: How to be a great B2B podcast guest

So you’ve been asked to be a guest on a B2B podcast; how do you make sure your audio interview goes well?

Business podcasts boomed during the lockdown, so the chances of being invited to talk on one as a guest are increasing. You may even be pitching to podcasts to be a guest as part of a communications and content strategy.

Audio interviews are similar to any other interview in that you need to prepare, but there are a few other things you need to do to make sure you are a great podcast guest.

In this video, I give a few tips I’ve picked up from my years doing interviews as a journalist – including podcast interviews. More recently, I’ve been helping clients with their podcasts and hosting interviews.

I’m also in the process of setting up my own business podcast, but more on that another time.

Hope you find the video useful, let me know your thoughts, or if you’ve already been a guest on a podcast, did you enjoy the experience?

More stuff on podcasts and press interviews:

Should I start a podcast as part of a B2B content strategy?

Press interview tip: Understanding the journalist’s agenda

The reason some people get quoted more in the press

Interview tips, Training

How to rock Zoom and podcast media interviews

The pandemic has made video and audio interviews more commonplace.

Being confined to working from home has accelerated the use of video calls and opened up a new, easy and accepted way for the media and businesses to create video content.

Similarly, podcast interviews can be recorded online with participants sitting anywhere in the world.

Many of the UK’s biggest broadcasters have switched to online recording as safe way to produce content instead of in-person interviews.

Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s Ways To Change The World podcast (a favourite of mine) is just one example.

What all this means is the likelihood of being asked to do a video or audio interview is increasing.

But do you know the dos and don’ts so that you look and sound your best?

Here are a few key pointers:

Zoom video interviews

Camera position: Have your computer’s camera (or external camera) at eye level so you are looking directly at it, rather than down or up. (It’s generally a more flattering angle too.)

Interview tips, Training

‘Will a journalist correct my grammar in a quote?’

When I do my media training sessions a common question is about how the journalist will quote you.

There is a fear that what you say will appear verbatim regardless of repetition, verbal ticks such as using ‘like’ and slips in grammar.

What you have to remember is that very few of us speak with the sort of grammatical precision you’d see printed.

Live news presenters are perhaps the most polished but they are highly experienced and they still don’t always speak perfectly.

We all repeat ourselves, stutter and stumble over our words occasionally. We speak in incomplete sentences or miss words, say ‘um’.

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