We’re buying a house. The good news is that most houses are listed online. Multiple photos of the house and great descriptions can be found on the realty website and Google will help you scope out the area with Google Maps and Street View. All of these items provide context to our starting point- the street number address and price.
We gather greater context when we visit the place. The adjacent house is two feet from this house. The yard is beautiful. The neighborhood has a great “feel.” All of this is context that helps us make a decision. Making decisions on the street number address and price alone is uninformed and out of context.
Your job as a PAO is to give your audiences as much context as you can. We talked about bias, remove bias, inaccuracy and misinformation by adding context. A few examples of how you can help give context:
Hold the press briefing as close to the crisis site or action as possible. Holding a press briefing at your headquarters is only convenient for you and your boss. Physically being at or near the action gives context that your audiences won’t get anywhere else.
Get out of the conference room. Our audiences often travel to see us, sometimes they fly around the world to meet us in person. When they arrive, we could shuttle them into a conference room and show them a map of what they would be seeing. Instead, give them real context, shove the map in their hands and get them out to see what you do in real life. Sometimes its uncomfortable and dirty; this is context too.
When you talk publicly about operations and successes, provide context. Get the J2 to give an unclassified backgrounder on the threat. Tell your audiences what these operations mean in the context of greater global security. Teach people how this singular operation fits into context of everything you do.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Whose words? When you provide context you provide some of the thousand. Without context, your audiences fill in the blanks, potentially with uninformed bias or misinformation.
Your audiences aren’t looking to buy a house from you, but you do need them to buy your story. It’s easy to stop with the street address and the price by giving bare bones statements and media query non-answers: that’s minimum disclosure. Use all the tools in your toolkit to add truthful context and sell your house.
Photo by Lance Cpl. Tegra Shepherd
