I interview tons of people. One of my greatest frustrations is when I ask for an interview, and I get the response, “We’re not allowed to talk to the press.”

Why?

I’m offering up a golden opportunity for free a press, and they’re blowing it with a communications strategy that’s probably in conflict with their marketing effort. When I request to interview you, it’s a chance for you to tell your story. In return for giving me your time, I will do the heavy lifting of producing and publishing that story. All I’m asking is for you to tell your story in your own words. As we are all publishers through any medium we want, and we all have video cameras on our cell phones, it’s a huge costly error not to let your employees talk to bloggers and the media.

I’m not the cause for this policy.

The cause for the policy is lack of communications within the company to the entire staff, and possibly one PR rep was burned once by a so-called “blogger” that took a rep’s words out of context. The only want to put an end to this is to shut it down. It’s unfortunate since your staff is connected to so many people. To have them talking to others, blogging, and engaging in social media is such a grand opportunity. You’re spending money on marketing anyway, why not spend it where it can be most cost beneficial for you, your people.

This is how you’re currently spending money on the three major marketing channels:

1. Traditional marketing: You pay for both the creation of your media and access to your audience. This can be had through media placement or live events where you pay a sponsorship to have a booth to get access to a certain audience.

2. Telemarketing: You pay for the phone numbers database and endless hours of your talk guy. Besides, your telemarketing call center subscription / solution with cost you to become the market leader as well.

3. Social media marketing: You pay for the cost of producing the media and building your audience. Content gets distributed through the audience you gather or via the audience that the piece of content gathers.

4. Public relations: You pay a media specialist to create or manage your content for you and then get it distributed through editorial outlets. This can take the form of connecting with the press or speaking engagements.

Train your staff to talk about what they love

When I was producing and hosting a podcast for Sprint about mobile communications, Sprint sent me a slew of communications professionals to be my subjects. They were awful solely because they didn’t talk about what they were doing. They were simply repeating some over-rehearsed marketing copy that doesn’t make good fodder for an interview. In an effort to improve the quality of the show, I asked Sprint to send me geeks, so we could have a conversation. That changed the show tremendously. Because now I was talking with someone who was really excited about the work they were doing. They were sharing that passion with me and that was coming through in our conversation. That’s what people want to hear, read, and watch.

If you don’t have the right culture within your organization and people don’t like their jobs, then you have a much bigger problem.

The best advertising for your company is employees talking about how awesome your company is. Better than that is customers telling you how awesome you are.

Not allowing employees to speak to bloggers is costing you money

If your company has a policy that only allows the communications staff to talk, then you are ignoring your best form of advertising, earned media. As a result, you’ll have to spend more money on paid advertising just to achieve the same level of marketing success. With a small investment in training your staff how to be professional when asked for an interview, you’re giving your business a great opportunity to be visible. By not training and making your employees available, you are essentially shutting down that opportunity. And that’s costing you money because you’ll have to spend a lot more somewhere else.

What is most shocking about the “don’t talk to press” policy that many companies have is they enforce it upon the people who are the most public facing. I run into this with people who are speaking publicly at events or who are manning booths at trade shows. Oddly, Amazon.com is the worst offender of this. If you’re giving a demo of a product, why wouldn’t you want someone to shoot a video of it and post it online for you for free?

What should they be trained on?

Nobody likes to read manuals. But we do understand basic concepts like be professional, talk about what you know, and don’t divulge company secrets. Those basic understandings are pretty much the key to any training. Next is to get people out there, engaging in social media, and welcoming to interviews. Don’t you want to be part of the great media ecosphere that is the Internet?