Round Table Discussions
The Round Table Discussions is where the real business is done at Kickstart Forum.
Once all presenters have given their presentations, we'll move down to the floor area and you will sit at the table corresponding with the order your presented in. The journalists will break up into groups of between six and eight on each table. You will spend ten minutes with one table and then after 10 minutes, you will get up and move onto the next table.
This is your best opportunity to engage with the journalists. You will shake hands and sit down with every journalist at the event and you'll get the opportunity to hear how your messages are being received and to answer questions.
If you've done a great job of your presentation, the journalists will probably take charge of the discussion and your time will primarily be spent answering questions. Best advice for answering questions, is try to keep your answers relatively brief and you will find the ten minutes goes very quickly. If there is an area you, or the journalist wants to go into more depth on, there is free-time available to do one-on-ones and you should feel free to suggest that you continue the conversation later.
If a journalist is dominating the discussion, it's a particularly good idea to suggest that you discuss the issue one-on-one at a later date. The other journalists will thank you for it.
In some cases, you may come to a table that happens to be made up of journalists who may not be familiar with the topic your talking about, and in this case it is good to have some prepared discussion points ready to use. Go into more depth on one of the issues you've talked about - it's also a great idea to have some case studies or examples that you can discuss to highlight what you were talking about.
If you've made an announcement, feel free to hand out any press releases or press kits at the table. Some presenters also use this as an opportunity to leave the journalists with a small gift.
Take the opportunity to listen to what the journalists are asking in terms of refining your future media campaigns. This is the best market research you can do, in terms of the acceptance of your messaging. Also feel free, to actually ask the journalists their opinions, you might be surprised at how they view the topic and be able to respond to that with future messaging.
Finally, have a process in place to follow-up. One of the biggest annoyances for journalists, is that too many presenters fail to follow up with information they have promised to pass on in the future.