How To Prepare For A Radio Interview

I've been invited to talk on the local radio station UK Away FM today. I'm on there to discuss social media and how, as a tourist island, we can benefit from it. I'm looking forward to it, and hope to influence many local businesses to get going on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else they can be a part of the conversation about the island.

I wanted to share with you some of the preparation work I've done, as a kind of template you can use when you get a similar call.

What do I want from this?

This might sound cynical, but there needs to be a pay off for you. I'm not being paid to appear, and it's even a holiday here, so I want to derive some business benefit for my time.

I have the obvious pay off for any blogger - traffic. And I'll certainly be mentioning one of our sites, and perhaps some others if I get the opportunity.

But I have two other specific aims as well. I want to fill the final few places at the Social Media Seminar we're running next week, and I also want to mention Booost Oxygen (website in progress), as I'm looking after the on-line marketing for this exciting new product.

So to sum up, my objectives are:

• Fill final Seminar places
• Traffic to Camel Media Group (and our other sites if applicable)
• Mention Booost brand

What can I say?

You can't script a radio interview, but what you can do is anticipate questions and have some short sharp "Bites" you can use as answers. So for the last few days, I've been doing just that as I wander around the garden in thought mode.

You can even lead the conversation to your prepared question if the presenter doesn't ask it. As you finish one point, move on with "And, you know, something else I get asked about all the time is.."

Let me give you an example.

Every interview I've ever done about social media has had a question along these lines: "Yes, but on Twitter, you're just reading what people are having for breakfast, and that's stupid!"

My sound bite answer is: "You know, I agree, and that's why people don't tweet about their boiled eggs on the kitchen counter every morning. That's a complete myth. But what they do tweet about is their breakfast when they're about to head for the summit of an Andean mountain, and how hard it is to boil an egg at that altitude. And they'll often accompany that with a photo of the view. Now that is interesting!"

What else should I do?

Prepare a landing page! This is essential as you're likely to get a lot of first time visitors to whatever site you're promoting. Sending them to the homepage of your blog is like sending them into the middle of a conversation.

Create a landing page that welcomes them from wherever they are coming, and then gives them clear options about where to go from there.

And make sure the URL is as clean as you can make it. How often have you heard people on TV or radio trying to send people to a www with dashes and dots all over the place?

Here's the landing page I've created for today's interview: Camelmediagroupdotcomslashukawayfm (Try saying that, it's quite easy)

What would you add?

You can tune in to the show here: http://ukaway.serverroom.us/ukaway I'm on at 1450 GMT

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