Читать книгу On-Camera Coach - Reed Karin M. - Страница 10

After a successful 15-year career in television news, I left the business after one too many “team coverage” snow-mageddon events, holidays spent on set and middle-of-the-night phone calls to cover whatever news was breaking. I moved to what I called “The Dark Side” – doing on-camera and voice-over work for any corporation interested in hiring me to serve as its professional spokesperson. I quickly realized how transferable and in demand my skills would be. Video is pervasive throughout the corporate landscape.

However, over the past decade of doing this kind of work, I have noticed a trend. More and more companies are forgoing the “professional spokesperson/actor” and are instead opting to put their “real” employees on camera, people who usually have had no prior experience or training in how to communicate through a camera. To me, that's unequivocally unfair.

I have spent more than 20 years honing my skills in front of the camera and have discovered what works and what doesn't, often through trial and error. My first stint in TV news was at a CBS affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio. Who knows why the news director hired me to be the weekend reporter and weather anchor? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I said I would do this for free. (They did pay me, and as a senior in college, I considered it more than adequate. Heck, I lived on Taco Bell.) I was awful on camera initially, but I learned my craft and eventually became a well-respected, award-winning journalist and anchor.

The only training most of these corporate execs have had is a quick reminder to smile right before the red light goes on. And yet hiring someone like me to be the mouthpiece for the enterprise is becoming less and less common.

Blame it on Steve Jobs for helping to create this age of the celebrity CEO, but be aware that the days of sending out the professional spokesperson are numbered. Your customers, your employees, and just about anyone else who is watching your video will want to hear from the decision makers, the doers, the C-suite executives – and more and more often, that means speaking on camera.