By Tom Andronas
In radio world, we knew we’d done a great interview when someone told us they were driving their car when the interview started, got to their destination halfway through, but couldn’t switch the radio off before the interview ended because they were so engrossed.
So that became my goal and mantra: work hard to make every interview so good that people don’t want to get out of the car.
The pandemic has caused many businesses, including many of our clients, to reconsider how they communicate with their customers, stay in contact, share their expertise, and generate new connections.
One method that’s becoming increasingly popular is podcasting – it seems every man and his dog has a podcast these days.
And that’s understandable – podcasts make a great hero piece in a content strategy: easily consumable on the go, flexible in duration and style, accessible, marketable, and the level of production complexity varies directly related to how you want your podcast to sound.
But with the exponential boom of podcasts hitting the streaming platforms, there are a few things that separate the good from the not so good.
One thing that’s particularly obvious to the radio producer in me is the lack of interviewing skill from many podcast hosts.
The best interviewers, in my experience, go in prepared, know what they want to extract from their guest, listen deeply, and engage authentically. This results in a genuine human conversation and truly gripping content – the sort you want to stay in the car for.
So how do you do that? Here are a few tips:
Know what you want to know. That doesn’t mean you only ask questions you already know the answers to, it means being prepared. Make sure you do your research, possibly a pre-interview, and know what you want to extract from your guest that will create the most riveting listening.
Never provide your guest with a list of questions in advance. This will lead them to be over-prepared and sound mechanical because they’ll be trying to repeat thoughts they had at another time, and in the worst cases they might even write out their answers and read them to you, which sounds rubbish.
If your guest is nervous about flying blind, you can alleviate this by conducting a pre-interview where you cover similar ground and narrow down the range of your conversation. If you don’t have the time or resources for this, you can provide them a brief summary of your interview plan to give them an idea of the ground you want to cover.
Most importantly, whether you’re interviewing someone on their personal story or their professional achievements, assure them that they will know all the answers: the interview is about them.
Listen attentively and react. Asking a pre-planned question, switching off while your guest answers it, then moving on to the next pre-planned question leads to boring, inauthentic results. The best interviewers listen carefully to what their guests are saying, recognise when they offer an interesting deviation from the plan – something unexpected – then explore that.
Developing this skill will not only help you create truly engaging listening, but will also help you to be comfortable diverting from your interview plan and exploring something that’s possibly more interesting, while also keeping the interview on track.
Don’t let perfect get in the way of good. You’ve probably heard this before in other contexts. In this context it means that genuine human connection is based on imperfection. Don’t worry about making mistakes, don’t obsess over avoiding ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, focus instead on the conversation you’re having, exist within it, react to it, flow with it, and your interview will probably be pretty good.
So, they’re my tips from the producer’s booth. Next time you’re listening to a podcast, listen critically with these things in mind and decide whether you think the interviewer is doing a good job.
