Whether it’s selling product or communicating on an issue of crucial importance, top-flight announcers the world over attribute the so-called secrets of their success to some very commonsense and learnable skills and behaviours:

Great public speakers work a crowd, but gifted announcers work one listener, building a long-term relationship with a composite listener or representative member of their audience.

Successful presenters aren’t fakes: they sound like real people. They reveal enough of their personality and depth to enable their listener to like, enjoy and respect them.

• They don’t have ‘microphone-y’ voices. Instead they have full, rich voices ringing with life and tonal variety. They sound on-air just like they sound off-air.
  
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• They give themselves permission to express a broad range of emotions. Both in what they say and how they say it, their voices reflect the ‘emotional fingerprint’ of their content.
  
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• They let their natural energy flow, refusing to cap it as some trouble-shooters would an oil well. They come alive when they are relating to their listener.
  
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• They constantly focus on their listener, linking their content to their listener’s experiences and communicating directly with the ‘you’ of their listener.
  
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• They communicate in shared space, allowing their listener to participate, interact and feel very much part of what is happening on the radio.
  
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• They know that their listener is emotional and intuitive first and rational and logical second, and they speak directly to their listener’s heart.
  

Not much to ask, is it?

An interesting aspect of the above characteristics is that many people, most of the time, exhibit all of the above qualities in social, group and family situations, but when they get behind a microphone, they become a ghost of their real selves, hiding behind a clumsily constructed public persona.

Excuse the exaggeration, but why is it that normally intelligent people become completely different behind a microphone?

There are many reasons why budding broadcasters engage in do-it-yourself image building, hiding their personalities behind unbelievably thin and makeshift radio ‘announcer’ personae. One reason is immaturity: the uncertainties of youth. Interestingly, some young people driven by a burning desire to be radio stars have deep-rooted inferiority complexes and see radio as an esteem-building opportunity to act out idealised self-images, amateur though they may be.

Others get sucked in by the radio ‘culture’ and bow to demands that they forsake their true personality for some bizarre prototype that represents “what a radio personality should be”.

Yet others arrive at the flawed assumption that, somehow, radio presenters have to sound different than real people. They go on to become aloof, disembodied and sometimes artificially buoyant on-air ‘voices’ that are good for some commercial reads but can’t cut the mustard in major market personality radio.

There are many subtle pressures exerted on radio announcers to be other than themselves and to conform to the outdated traditions of some sections of the industry. The end result of this acculturation is the radio ‘hack’, a prisoner of technique, an automaton who is a slick as a snake-oil salesman, but who has the personality of a zombie, or even worse, a career politician!!

Click here for tips and techniques on how to sound natural and real when reading copy and presenting patter