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Stop with the “Uhs”. Surely, someone much more adept than I, is media coaching her and advising her that it’s very distracting when someone finishes each thought with an “Uh” afterwards. It’s probably something very unconscious on her part, but someone needs to make her aware of it.

One of the tricks you can do when you’re working on getting rid of the “uhs” is to practice taking an extra breath after you finish a response to a reporter. This helps lessen them immensely.

It’s a similar thing when people say, “You know?” after something they’ve just told you (so of course you know because they just told you!).

My grandfather cured me of saying “you know” one particularly hot summer in Texas when I was twelve, by making me put a quarter in a jar each time I said it. It was his jar, not mine.:>)

So uh, you know, how uh, that’s a meaningful memory, uh, you know?

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So with that said, I also want to quickly touch on why it’s wise to think before you ask a journalist to sit through a one hour briefing. This is espescially the case when the journalist literally has only about a 300 word story to write.

(If you’re an author or musician of course you want the journalist to read your book or listen to your CD so they know what they are writing about!)

But if you’re a tech company please don’t encourage your PR folks whether they be in-house or outside agency to force a journalist to sit through a one hour briefing for an updated product release. (Unless this product is going to take us all to the moon, then we don’t need a one hour briefing on it.)

Journalists that cover your industry are smart and generally savvy folks who really know the products etc. they are covering so they don’t really need a one hour briefing on an updated product release.

Also, on the journalist side, it’s not all that great to have a PR person on the phone while you’re doing an interview. It’s not that journalists don’t like PR people, it’s just that it tends not to make the conversation as convivial and lively as it could be. And when I say lively, I don’t mean your CEO spilling company secrets, I just mean letting the journalist ask questions without prompting or response from a PR person.

Be open and authentic, that goes a long way.

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Here are the story highlights according to CNN:

* Talk about what motivates you, excites you, why you are in your industry

* Stay away from your health history — mental and otherwise

The CareerBuilder story is titled, “Leave this info out of your Interview”, and it inspired me to add a few interviewing tips below that work well, whether you’re marketing a company, book, or product.

Here are additional tips on interviewing:

1. Don’t boast or exaggerate and don’t use the terms “leader or leaders” when responding to a question in reference to you, your book or your company.

2. Highlight the differences from competitors without denigrating competitors.

3. Make sure you’re familiar with the journalist’s or interviewer’s work so that you can understand how they interview and be responsive to their techniques.

4. Don’t fall for their techniques. (Don’t say more than you need to, don’t reveal something secret because they look sad and get quiet, and if they’re not clear on something you just said, make sure you take more time to explain it.)

5. Don’t be belligerent, haughty or snarky with the interviewer – they don’t get snark, and it usually doesn’t come across the way you meant it in print form. (Re: funny or humorous)

6. Don’t ask to preview the article before it comes out.

7. Don’t tell them about your latest breakup, your problem childhood, your greatest long lost love unless it’s absolutely necessary and the story happens to be titled, “How A CEO reeling from a terrible breakup, still recovering from his crappy childhood and searching desperately for his long lost high school prom love, successfully outpaced all his competitors to win top CEO of the year.”

8. Don’t lose your sense of humor when you interview. If you have one it’s ok to laugh and use your sense of humor as long as you’re not laughing at the interviewer.

9. Be charming and conversational.

10. Don’t over-correct the journalist or reword every question they’re asking. (Email me privately if you want to know how horrible this can be first-person and I’ll tell you my story about one of the main guys from Spinal Tap and my interview with him for the film, Best In Show.)

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Read it and be prepared! Marsha is tops in her field!

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Here is one clip of the interview featured on YouTube .

There are several things to learn from this particular interview and how it went from both journalist and media/pr perspective.

While Sarah is actually a good journalist and writer and no doubt has talent, she failed in this interview because she was more concerned with seeming cool and hip than smart, serious and engaging. People come to SXSW to learn new things, not see somebody being interviewed by a journalist who spends a lot of the time playing with her hair and touting her book being released in May.

Sarah was too casual in her interviewing style and she lost control of the interview. She engaged the audience and then belittled the audience at the same time. She evoked audience comment from the stage which enabled them to feel as though they had an opportunity to rate the interview live.

This is somewhat similar to a comedian letting a heckler take the mike. There are always going to be some folks in any audience who are ready to pounce (Not POWNCE) and as an interviewer you have to respect them but you also have to manage them.

The bigger point is for someone who is writing a column for Business Week and has made it despite all odds to this level of work, there’s no time in live interviews for hair-twisting or spending a considerable amount of time asking a CEO about notebooks they write their ideas in and then debating whether they actually burn them or not.

I’m curious to know if Sarah found time to ask Mark about Bill Gates leaving Facebook and moving to LinkedIn or whether Facebook is truly making a return for all those ad dollars companies are spending on it.

While Mark might benefit from some interview or media training it’s not really his job in interviews to move the interview along or make sure the audience is engaged and getting what they need.

It’s the interviewer’s job. From the three years I was the Managing Editor of a Texas arts and entertainment magazine in Austin, the very best lesson I learned was how to be both an engaged listener and an engaged interviewer. Celebrity interviews are in some ways the toughest to do because they are already very media-trained and prepped by publicists not to answer questions.

When I interviewed folks like Frances McDormand, Debra Winger, Jimmy Kimmel, Ben Stein (one of my faves) I went into the interview determined to get something new and meaningful. Ben Stein gave me his secret to making a living as a writer (thank you Ben Stein – to this day), and Frances McDormand was a new mom so I found a way to connect with her on that level and the interview was fantastically revealing. (It helped that I was a new Mom too and Moms are always ready to talk about being a Mom.)

These skills served me well when I started writing online and managed the Ibizinterviews.com site (now gone) and interviewed all the early Net folks that were quite literally changing the way we would all do business and live.

In the mid 90′s, one of my favorite interviews was with Nelson Carbonell who was at the time CEO of Cysive and ended up telling me how he started the company in his basement with chairs purchased from Wal-Mart.

Or Jon Nordmark, CEO of eBags.com who successfully made it through the dot-com burst intact and said during our interview that luggage was sexy. (It is if you get it from eBags!)

In the late 90′s, I interviewed the CTO of Google – Craig Silverstein about Google and ended up getting him to talk about Star Trek and how it related to the Google algorithms. I knew he was a Star Trek fan and that helped move our interview into a real conversation. He’s still at Google today.

Oftentimes if you just do exhaustive research you can find a way to even help the most tech-centered folks have authentic conversations and illicit aha moments from them without berating them or belittling them.

The real key to being an adept interviewer is to help people tell their story even if they’re not comfortable with telling it. Mark was spending too much time in “company speak” but even that can be diffused if a reporter has really done background research and is able to pull the interviewee out of “company speak.” It’s a hard skill to learn, but it can be done.

There is also a lesson in all of this about how journalists often go into a story or interview with a set template or angle in mind. Sarah had a set angle she wanted to cover and did a poor job of stepping outside that angle. She seemed argumentative and that’s tough to handle when you’re the interviewee, espescially when you’re a tech guy.

I’m reminded of years ago how deft Sally Richards was and how much I learned from her in terms of getting tech guys to speak in real terms. Sally never sacrificed herself, or her intellectual acuity either. She succeeded because she had a great sense of humor, camaraderie and engagement with the Silicon Valley elite and it was never about “Sally”.

The Internet, the Web, Web 2.0 or Web 18.0 is still at the very base founded in technology and the brilliant minds moving us all along to a better place. It’s not The Actor’s Studio, it’s technology and if you’re a journalist it’s never about you. It’s about the news and how it will impact society as a whole.

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Keep in mind when you’re doing an interview that it’s usually with someone who doesn’t know you personally and may not get your humor, your personal asides or find your sarcasm as funny and charming as your spouse does.

Now here are some tips for interviewing:

1. Be honest

2. Take a deep breath before you answer each question and give a pause.

3. Journalists like to use uncomfortable silences to get you to fill them first with something juicy or something you might not otherwise say, so be conscious of that and don’t get uncomfortable if you don’t have a ready answer. Take your time.

4. Don’t bellow, belittle or besmirch the interviewer during the process of interviewing with them. (Email me and I’ll tell you about my interview with a hollywood A-lister who made me cry.:>)

5. Don’t be offputting. You’ve said yes to the interview, so don’t spend your time or waste their time giving bad soundbites.

6. Engage your smile. I tell clients to put a mirror in front of them (on their desks) if they’re doing phoners and the whole time they’re talking on the phone, to make sure they’re smiling. It’s amazing how just keeping a smile on your face while you’re talking to someone can positively charge your interaction and openess during an interview.

7. Laugh at yourself. Self-deprecation is funny in small doses. (Anyone watch Al Gore? He’s great at this.)

8. If you don’t know the answer to something, don’t make something up. Say, “I don’t know the answer to that, but can I get back to you?”

9. If the journalist or interviewer is becoming too aggressive, you can politely end the interview early.

10. Research the journalist and what they’ve written prior to the interview so you can really understand their style of writing and glean some good information about their style of interviewing.

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So if you’re inclined go check it out.

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Excellent!

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In a far and distant galaxy when I was some fifteen years younger and early in my journalism career, I got a monthly writing gig to interview bands for a feature and arts entertainment magazine. Those interviews, I assumed at the time were rocking and rolling. But looking back, after I had amassed around twenty, I saw a pattern of interviewing that didn’t work. All of the interviews revealed one inherent flaw and the flaw was my technique. During those early days of interviewing, I spent too much time trying to impress the band instead of just listening.

My breakthrough in defeating this flaw, came courtesy of exhaustion and the musician Willie Nelson, who I had the opportunity to interview for a full cover feature.

My interview with Willie was different because it was held at 2 AM, I was four months pregnant, exhausted, and a little bit loopy after turning someone down who had offered me $1000.00 just for my backstage pass.

With Willie, I was so tired, I just listened. I had a set of questions all prepared and I had done so much background research on him that I knew my stuff. But mostly I just listened to what he had to say, and when I started really listening and not thinking about the next question, or if his answer was on key exactly with the story I intended to write, I started enjoying the interview and it ended up being the best interview I’d ever done up to that point.

The integral thing I learned was how very important it is to take a “pregnant pause” during interviews. Letting there be a silent moment, the kind that’s awkward or seems to go on forever, but lets your interviewee think for a moment, and more importantly reminds you to be quiet for a moment.

The best interviewing is conversational and nothing else. It’s not over-complimentary, gushing or just about impressing your interviewee with your knowledge. Be careful of too much jargon in your questions, which will only engender too much jargon in their responses, leaving you with a bunch of scribbled notes, but no lyrics to follow.

From that start as a music journalist, I’ve interviewed well over a thousand folks in my life up to present. I’ve interviewed an astronaut (Buzz Aldrin), many CEO’s including favorites like Jon Nordmark from ebags.com, Peter Sealey, Royal P. Farros, and famous movie and celebrity folks like Ben Stein and Frances McDormand.

The worst interview I ever had was as it turned out with someone very famous I wanted to meet and interview all my life, and some of my best interviews have been with tech CEO’s who are in reality, just like the rest of us.

The strength of an interview comes in doing good background work, building a draft set of questions and then engaging your interviewee to have a real conversation.

The key is to start with one note and build. That first interview note can be as simple as saying, “How do you find your time being spent primarily these days? What are you solving with this?” One of my favorite questions surely to elicit a response is, “What keeps you awake at night about this solution?” When I interviewed the CTO of Google – Craig Silverstein and asked him that, it turned out that he was kept awake by trying to outsmart the folks trying to outsmart the Google engine rankings.

Here are some other notable interviewing pointers:

• Remember providing the silence for the interviewee to fill is golden.
• If there is something you don’t understand, say it. It’s ok to be a generalist and let your interviewee know they’re important because they are teaching you as well.
• If the interviewee is not responding to your questions, or it’s hard to get them to talk, try to personalize the interview or feed them some direction. For instance, “What is the question you get asked most about this product or book?”
• Bolster their confidence during the interview, with small, well-placed and sincere compliments.
• The interview is not over till it’s over. A trick I use at the end to get folks to talk more is to say, “Well, you’ve given me so much to work with (highlight something specific), do you have anything else that you might want to cover, it’s always good to have more than less.” This usually gets you one more good story. (Often it’s the best.) Moreover, because your interviewees are relaxed at this point, thinking the interview is for all intent purposes finished, oftentimes that perception allows them to let their guard down and tell you something noteworthy.

Finally, don’t turn down your interviewee’s offer to “linger over a cup of coffee.” What I mean by that is let them explain their view, solution etc. in more detail even if it does not quite fit with the story or case study focus you have in mind. With Willie Nelson in his bus at 2AM, he handed me a cup of decaf coffee, as he expounded on his childrearing techniques. It made for an amazing and surprising part of my article.

*parts of this story were originally published in WhitePaperSource.

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