The Melbourne Herald Sun had a great story by Roger Franklin last week with the title of Mumbo Jumbo Bunkum and it is the latest example of how executives get themselves tied up with business speak or officialese and how the media (and the public) absolutely hate this type of language.

The story tells of Ford CEO Marin Burela announcing the latest job cuts. He didn’t use the words sacked, laid off or made redundant. Instead, he spoke of a ’separation program’. The story went on: “Leaping over a stack of dictionaries and weaving through a thicket of management-speak, he vaulted to the floor of a metaphoric tyre showroom, where ‘right-sizing’ Ford’s plants demanded ‘rebalancing and realignment’. There was quite a bit of ‘down shifting’ as well, and ‘preference shifting’ too.”

The journalist then spoke of the union boss there whose message was short and blunt and to the point. “And, unlike Mr Burela’s performance, it was chillingly comprehensible.”

This must be a malaise of the car industry as the Australian boss of Mitsubishi committed the same mumbo-jumbo sin earlier this year when announcing the company was about to follow a “full import strategy” - that’s how he announced the SA plant was going to close!

Back to Marin Burela - he could do with some media training and, if it was with me, I’d be telling him not to run onto the stage like a teenage cricketer might when you are of a certain age and build - it doesn’t look honest or real, only symbolic of an older man trying to look youthful and energetic.

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Politicians on both sides of the Pacific Ocean have shown recently that they might be getting a tad too clever for their own good. In the dying days of Hilary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination she arrived in  Charleston and pretended to wave to supporters as she stepped from the plane. In fact, she was waving to 10 photographers under the plane’s wing. Then she pretended to spot an old friend, pointed and gave another wave when, in fact, she was waving at an aide she’d been talking with on the plane only minutes earlier. Clever - and it shows she understands the media process with pictures.

Here in Australia a new Labor backbencer has admitted to The Australian newspaper that the federal government has a roster of MPs primed and ready to deliver the message of the day via doorstop interviews on their way into Parliament House. The same story mentions the practice of seating the most marginal members of government behind the leader in the House so they’re framed on the TV coverage of Question Time. My theory is that the government is being even more clever here as most of the faces behind the leader belong to women and I reckon they’re deliberately pushing that image to distance themselves further from the old male dominated government of John Howard who lost the election last November. Very clever, whichever way you look at it. 

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Marius Kloppers has been at the helm of the world’s biggest diversified mining house, BHP Billiton, for less than a year but at a recent news briefing for analysts in London, he showed how to win them over.

Mark Leftly, writing in The Independent, said Kloppers was an intimidating presence, revelling in his position as the room’s alpha male. He allowed himself a half-smile when J Michael Yeager, the bushy-moustached head of the group’s petroleum business, referred to him as “Boss”. When Yeager was asked what he thought the oil price could rise to, Kloppers barked: “If you answer that, I’ll kill you, Mike.”

Though he spoke with a broad grin, Kloppers was demonstrating his authority so clearly that it was hard to believe he had been the “boss” for little more than a year. He was at it again when Yeager was asked about the possibility of renegotiating less than successful contracts – an issue that had been raised at an earlier briefing. “Stop!” Mr Kloppers ordered. Yeager and journalists alike obeyed. “I nearly did my nut,” he barked, “when someone said we renegotiated. If we do a bad business deal, we live with it.”

For all his authoritarian manner, Kloppers disarmed his audience with his plain speaking and relaxed posture, leaning far back into his chair as he explained just why BHP is so special.

That’s what we keep saying - be relaxed and have a banter with the journalists - it pays off.

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How to blow a political honeymoon early - send Kevin Rudd on his first extended overseas trip as Prime Minister of Australia and let him write his own speeches. Wow, did he pepper those pages with jargon, goobledegook and the odd acronym.  The following headline was only one of many that lambasted our new leader for his unintelligible drivel.

We keep saying - drop all jargon, acronyms and business speak when talking to the mass media or you too could end up with headlines like the one above - ouch!

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If a TV or newspaper video camera person asks you to walk for them so they can get footage for the reporter voice over, PLEASE try and make it look natural. So many TV news bulletins show business people, lawyers and other leaders looking ridiculous as they walk in funny self-conscious ways.

How to do it? Ignore the camera and the cameraman and think about something else – that way you’ll look more natural.

(If you like these tips, you’ll love our free report at www.mediatrainingebook.com.

The Australian womens’ magazine, New Idea, has become the latest perpetrator in breaking an embargo - and this one with safety ramifications for a Royal.

New Idea (inadvertently, it says) broke the story, along with German tabloid, Bild, that Prince Harry was secretly serving in Afghanistan. The leak broke a media embargo on Harry’s deployment which was designed to protect the third-in-line to the British crown. New Idea said in a statement it had no idea any such media embargo existed and would never have knowingly broken it. By mid morning today the gossip magazine had pulled the story from its website.

With interest in the young royals a worldwide phenomenon I can’t understand why Buckingham Palace agreed to an embargo in the first place - much too risky, as this expose shows. Mind you, he had been there for several months with the world not knowing so it was working - until Aussie journos got involved!

PR people have known for some time that to place an embargo on information as you feed it to the media is to put temptation in front of those journalists. It’s always interesting to see who will fold to that temptation. Melbourne journalist Derryn Hinch broke so many of these that any self-respecting journo long ago lost any respect for him, me included. Now I see that Anna Coren of Today Tonight is joining the fray. Last Friday night she broke the Government embargo on the names of the Australian of the Year and the Young Australian of the Year.

Amanda Meade points out in the Media section of The Australian yesterday that “Coren opened the show saying she was ’so proud to announce’ the names of the winners as if it were a scoop, when all she was doing was breaking an embargo on information all the media had.”

The rule remains - be wary of using an embargo. A safer option, particularly in this day of instant email communication, is to withold the information till you’re happy to put it out there. 

The media revolution continues unabated. Newspaper crews now turn up at media events complete with camera operator; radio bulletins are tagged with Fairfax Media, a name synonymous with newspapers, and radio shows can be viewed on the Internet. To me, television is the medium that has changed the least in this revolution - TV stations don’t have newspapers or radios as part of their TV service.

Latest figures from the USA show that the Newsday site pulled 6.45 million unique visitors in December, an increase of 183% from the previous year. The New York Times says the huge jump was in part attributed to the popularity of an animated cartoon by Walt Handelsman, an editorial cartoonist at Newsday who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice. You can see his work here - http://weblogs.newsday.com/news/opinion/walthandelsman/blog/.  One of his recent cartoons that attracted viewers featured a baby boomer couple coping with problems like knee replacements, using the song lyrics “Bored, tubby and mild” sung to the tune of Born to Be Wild.

Here’s his latest effort:

The Age Diary today has a few good tips from its two working journalists, Suzanne Carbone and Lawrence Money, to all of you who seek publicity and guess what? These tips haven’t changed in decades (except they now refer to emails) and I can’t see them ever changing.

1. Don’t be falsely perky with emails that start with “Hi, hope you’re well.”

2. Don’t mention “touching base.”

3. Don’t talk about “giving you a heads up.”

4. Don’t mention “let me know what you think.”

5. Don’t place a followup phone call to see if the journalist received your email.

Journalists are busy people and nothing will make them dislike you more than committing those sins. Oh, I’ll add one of my own to the list and it’s one no-no this journalistic duo made in today’s story - don’t use the phrase “listen up” - it’s an American phrase that should definitely stay there. At least they didn’t use my other pet hate - “outcome” rather than “result”.

Our Prime Minister of the past 11 years has gone and lost the election and probably his seat as well. Oh well,  Johhny, nothing lasts forever I guess. What will last forever though is his ability to deal with the media. He may have lost the plot in launching a rather strange campaign and not reading the electorate properly on climate change, Iraq etc but he rarely lost his way in dealing day to day with the media.

There would be no-one in Australia who’s had as much media experience as John Howard and it showed. He was masterful in staying on message in interviews, in controlling those interviews and in repeating his message with subtle differences to be more sure it was used in pre-recorded interviews. He took no rubbish from interviewers as well.

All in all, he remains a role model for anyone wanting to improve their media performances. We will continue to use his examples in our media training workshops (http://www.kelly.com.au) as we know people who follow them improve their own media handling capabilities.