Month: February 2015

Saving the best for last is often a great strategy. It seems logical to map out an interview that way, ending on a high note and leaving the audience wanting more. But, if anything, the opposite is true. The most critical part of an interview happens at the beginning. That’s when your audience is won or lost.

This idea hit home recently when I attended a wine talk by a Master Sommelier named Eddie Osterland. He preaches to dinner party hosts you have nothing to gain by waiting till later to surprise everyone with your finest bottle and a special hors-d’oeuvre. Instead, serve them first when palates are fresh and the capacity to taste and enjoy is at its height.

But there’s a more profound reason he advises to strike while the iron is hot. A fantastic wine and superb appetizer right from the start elevates the guest experience for the rest of the evening. Osterland has presided over thousands of dinner parties and he’s observed the phenomenon again and again—offer your best first, and people invest themselves more in the gathering, they have more fun, and fewer leave early.

The same idea is true of interview shows. What you serve first sets the tone for the whole show. Sweating the details of a great opening, a great guest introduction and a great first question pays off in attracting, keeping and ultimately building an audience.

Why Should Anyone Care?

When someone who’s never heard of your show tries it out, think of them as a director sitting in an empty auditorium about 5th row center, holding a clipboard… and you’re next on stage to audition.

You have about 30 seconds to show your stuff.

That’s about as much time, on average, you have to persuade the audience your interview podcast is worth their attention. For all intents and purposes you start with your largest audience at 00:00. How much smaller is it by 00:30? By 1:00? There are plenty of reasons to inspire someone to click the off button:

• Start with an ad.
• Wing it and ramble.
• Play music for a long while.
• Don’t identify the topic, guest or show.
• Read a long generic description of the show.

These can be summed up as:

• Fail to immediately tell the audience why they should care.

Granted, on the Internet any consistently published media will get some following. But to transcend that and to get people to stick with the show after they’ve clicked play, they need to be convinced they should care. And you tell them not with information but with a story, a very short one that presents a person’s challenge in a sentence or two.

For example, here’s a mundane circumstance related as information.

I went home to get my wallet so I could come back to the store to buy some great sale items.

But here it is framed as a story.

They were having a great sale at the store but when I got there I discovered my wallet was missing.

That’s a panic inducing moment we all identify with. Finding the story requires seeing the human drama in events as common as reaching for our wallet and not finding it. Sometimes a topic is about life and death—certainly, that heightens the challenge. But most topics are about the daily ebb and flow of life. Your goal is not to hype or overstate it, like a clickbait headline that doesn’t deliver on what it suggests. Rather it’s to appeal to our natural impulse to know what other people are doing through a story. Maybe the issue is whether enough rain will fall for this year’s crops or about an artist’s close call with almost choosing to become an accountant (or vice versa). In every person’s narrative abides the friction of action, change and realization.

This is what you want to capture and present in the opening of the show. You can write and voice it yourself or choose an excerpt from what the guest says in the interview. Once you start perceiving the story in events, you’ll be able to easily pick out (even as you conduct the interview) the best statements to use in the opening.

You might be asking, does it really matter that much to go to this trouble to frame the opening as a story? It depends on what results you want. If your podcast interview show is just a fun hobby, if you’re not interested in a return on investment, if the intent is just to merely make recordings and post them then by all means skip this. It’s work. But if you have something riding on your efforts to attract and serve an audience why overlook using basic techniques?

Before going further let’s get some terms down. Jargon isn’t necessary but it helps to organize one’s thinking. If the missing wallet statement were a clip from a recording it would be called a sound bite. A sound bite is more than just a sentence or phrase. It’s one that has import. Some sound bites are stories in themselves or story fragments. A compelling sound bite used as the first voice in the opening of a show is often called a teaser or at any other time in the opening it’s sometimes called a hook.

As an aside, I believe in mastering fundamentals but I also recognize the exceptions. There are probably great podcasts which violate the principles of presentation just as there are a tiny percentage of successful professional musicians who don’t practice and photographers who don’t understand the math of photography. However, there’s no blueprint. It’s not replicable for the rest of us. But the fundamentals can be learned and applied to great effect. If you want to break the rules at least first learn what it is you’re breaking.

Master Class: Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday

Oprah learned her craft as a television reporter and built an empire on understanding how to frame events in people’s lives—not as information but as stories. Although she uses plain old formulaic broadcast storytelling techniques it’s hard to argue with someone who built a billion dollar empire on it. Here’s an opening to Oprah’s interview show called Super Soul Sunday. Can you spot the story? How about the hook?

OPRAH: Today, on Super Soul Sunday, she is the ultimate seeker, someone who loves the big questions as much as I do; best-selling author, thinker, teacher and a friend; Elizabeth Lesser is here.

LESSER: Cheers!

OPRAH: For a long awaited heart-to-heart under the oaks in my backyard. Can you share with the Super Soulers what you have been through? A family crisis put the spiritual trailblazer to the test.

LESSER: It takes someone almost dying, for me to come into a whole and loving relationship.

OPRAH: How Elizabeth was able to dig deep, drawing on everything she knows and how digging deep can help you too.

The Super Soul Sunday opening is 2 minutes long but Oprah sets the hook at 23 seconds: “A family crisis put the spiritual trailblazer to the test.” Then Lesser completes the conflict-resolution scenario: “It takes someone almost dying for me to come into a whole and loving relationship.” It’s a two sentence story shouldering the argument of why the audience should care.

The interview itself is pretty basic. It’s in her back yard for crying out loud. But in the show opening she serves up a compelling story (not just one but multiple ones), an excellent use of voice-over, music dynamics and editing. It’s as if Oprah invited us in, immediately popped open a nice bottle of Sandhi Santa Barbara County Bentrock Chardonnay with hors-d’ouevres of scallops in truffle cream. It elevates the experience of the whole show. The audience invests more of themselves, they have more fun watching, and fewer leave early.

Your show opening doesn’t have to be as fancy as Oprah’s. Hers didn’t require much in resources but it did take some editing. The soaring music and choreographed voice-over adds to the drama but it’s not absolutely necessary. The attention-getter is the story, which is critical to attracting, keeping and building an audience. In the next part of this series we’ll discuss story the next short story you need to tell in the opening moments of the show that helps to launch the interview onto the wide open sea of the conversation.

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Stand-up comedy is simple. It’s just you, a microphone, and an audience. And interviewing is pretty much the same dynamic only with an additional person. As a stand-up your aim is to make people laugh but as an interviewer it’s to get them to care.

There are a number of potential pitfalls on the road to making people care. The big one is winging it, a popular stylistic “choice” of many podcasters. They rationalize it makes interviews authentic which is what audiences supposedly want. Why waste time researching the guest beforehand? It’ll sound more fresh to find out about the guest in the interview itself. Voilà, that’s a show.

But the interviewer pulling questions from you-know-where is like the stand-up comic taking the stage with no prepared material, trying to concoct new jokes from scratch in front of a crowd. The audience doesn’t come to see a joke writing workshop. This is a critical concept that applies to interviewing. The audience of the podcast interview isn’t interested in a fishing expedition for occasional good questions and exchanges.

So how do the pros do it? All those questions they ask that sound off the cuff… most are not.  The interviewers and producers spend hours mapping things out. It’s planned to sound as if it isn’t planned, as if it’s authentic.

Authenticity is ultimately a meaningless concept. True authenticity of an interview is essentially impossible to capture as a show—it requires that we be unaware we’re being recorded. What happens when we know we’re on camera or the mic is on? We all become self conscious of how we look and sound, and put on an act of what we wish the users of the media to believe about us. Creating this illusion is inescapable. That’s not a bad thing at all. The question is what illusion do you want to present?

Being unprepared is merely one kind of illusion. Another kind is talking with the guest beforehand, mapping out a story line, devising questions, and giving a good performance.

This was well understood before podcasting arrived in 2005. Show development, research, and planning were standard practices in radio and television. But podcasting shook things up. You no longer needed studios, transmitters, satellites, collaborators or editors to produce a show. Recording equipment was cheap and distribution was free. To the podcasting community this was more than just a technological shift. It was power to the people, throwing old media and its practices over the ship of modernity into the waters of oblivion—or so they thought. There were a lot of godawful podcasts and still are.

But the medium is maturing. Winging it is still a popular approach but more novice producers are embracing best practices to attract and serve an audience. And broadcast professionals are taking over the space as advertising grows. Still, podcasting is wide open for anyone with a passion for a subject, a $99 recorder and an iTunes account.

How do you rise above the noise? How do you take an interview show beyond vanity project or infomercial to really build an audience? If you’re serious about making shows that move people, it requires an understanding that interviewing is essentially show biz.

What Is An Interview?

Asking questions and getting answers happens in the interaction between an interviewer and interviewee. But that in itself is not compelling. The mistake is to approach it as if it is, as if people are attracted to information. The interview is merely a method to gather the data.

That’s not what gets the attention of an audience.

People don’t tune in to The Tonight Show to acquire information extracted from a guest. If that were the case, it would be easier and cheaper to email questions to a guest, and then publish their reply. Why bother with the pain of creating a show, scheduling guests, and doing all that production? This is a question I have posed to corporate clients who want to make an interview podcast but only want it to be about experts talking about product features and benefits. Putting the text of marketing talking points in the mouths of people with titles whom we never really get to know isn’t going to make the information any more compelling.

So, why do people watch The Tonight Show? They’re drawn to the interaction of Jimmy Fallon and his guests. All of the great interviewers do it every time they open the mic: Charlie Rose, Larry King, Terry Gross, et. al. They bring out the drama of what their guests have to say. There’s a beginning, middle and end. They tell stories.

The dictionary definition of “interview” is fine for everyday use: a meeting at which information is obtained from a person. This covers many kinds of interviews from journalists gathering comments for their news reports to employers talking with job applicants. In this article I’m only concerned with the interview as a show presented to an audience. I find the definition below more effectively captures the dynamics.

An interview is a nonfiction play of impromptu dialogue directed by the interviewer.

It’s a weighty description, certainly, but don’t let that deter you. Approach your podcast as a performance rather than a perfect verbal power point presentation to disseminate information. A performance opens up a world of possibilities

Chasing the Squirrel

An interview show’s capacity to attract and hold an audience comes down to human empathy. In this regard there is a format that reigns supreme: the story.

Why a story is so effective at conveying information is a vast subject. As early as Aristotle, philosophers delved deeply into its power. The historian Yuval Harari asserts all human thought from the hunter and gatherer stage until now is a narrative, whether it’s the politics of nations or something as mundane as how to put on a shoe. He famously describes therapy as an attempt to stop believing one story about ourselves and start believing another.

People crave stories. When Jack Valenti (former president of the Motion Picture Association of America) was alive, he appeared on panels at media and tech conferences during the height of the Napster controversy arguing that stories are so vital to human existence more people steal movies than steal money. There’s no hard evidence to prove it, but it’s obvious stories are fundamental to human life given the profound presence of movies, novels, social media, news, television, radio, and music in our lives.

Formal story structure has changed little, if at all, over thousands of years. It’s comprised of at least three elements: [1] exposition, the introduction to the character and the events leading up to his or her challenge; [2] conflict, the challenge itself; and [3] resolution, the character meeting the challenge.

Stories are always about people. Stories happen to people, but never to objects, ideas or products. An object can be in a story. An idea can be the meaning of a story. But objects and ideas cannot become nor face a challenge and meet it. People can.

Like a squirrel to a dog, so is a story to an audience. It gets our attention. Conflict and how a person deals with it—no matter how trivial—formatted as a story appeals to human instinct.

Am I splitting hairs? Absolutely. The effects of preparation, especially if you are starting at zero and are an unknown talent, won’t be felt immediately. It pays off over time.

Corporate Podcast Interviews

I’m not suggesting a compelling interview needs to contain spectacular stories of thunderous drama. The issue is framing things in stories versus delivering information. Take corporate podcasts, for example, which have the added task of persuading the audience to feel good about the company. They hit all the right marketing messages while the host and guests can even get personal and exchange plenty of pleasantries. And yet, it’s so often dreadfully boring. The conventional wisdom is people will like the company more if everything is perfectly in place. But, if anything, the opposite is true.

By default you have the ingredients to make a compelling corporate podcast: the human beings in the show. They have feelings, a history, and truth. The product is just the context. Granted, a corporate presence is inherently going to turn off some of the audience no matter what you do. Nothing you can do about that. But you can do something to maximize what you have.

YouTube is filled with corporate attempts to deliver information packaged to come off as not marketing. Audiences sniff this stuff out pretty quickly and when they don’t, sometimes feel they’ve been duped by fake media. As an industry, content marketing isn’t ready to let go of things like putting up appearances or using stealth to hide the producer’s intentions. But many marketers are seeing the value of simply being upfront, shifting from information to stories, and making real media. Tom Foremski pointed this out a decade ago when he said every company is a media company.

The Play’s the Thing

Your quest as an interviewer is to find your subject’s stories. If the interview is 30 minutes long does that mean 15 minutes of exposition, 10 minutes of conflict and 5 minutes of resolution? Maybe, if you’ve set down a good plan. But a good interview is generally made up of many small stories, some of them lasting a few minutes.

Your guest probably won’t be thinking in terms of stories but you will. Here’s an over-the-top example I’m using only for stark illustration. Suppose you’re interviewing a runner who just won $100 million and bought a beautiful home on a private island and a Bentley. They achieved it by winning an arduous 1,000 mile race through the Himalayas up and down treacherous roads where they almost died.

Do people care what it’s like to have a private island or a Bentley? Maybe, some. But as an interviewer the treacherous roads, big and small, are your stock in trade. If you look for them they are everywhere. And once you see them they become the foundation of the story structures of your interview.

The story is what you use to get your audience to care. Your performance is how you deliver it. Hamlet knew this when he hatched his idea to write a play so devastating to the senses, upon seeing it his stepfather would involuntarily reveal his guilt over the murder of Hamlet’s father. Hamlet predicts:

“The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”

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