How Sound Bites Can Transform Your Public Speaking Skills

What's a sound bite? A sound bite is when you say something interesting enough so that a TV reporter, a radio editor, or newspaper reporter says, aha, that's what I want in the story, they take a bite out of all the sounds you made in that conversation, how can you control it? You shouldn't have to guess, you shouldn't have to wonder. If you do enough planning and preparation in advance, you can control what quotes will be used. How do you do that? First of all, take your message points, write them down, then figure out a sound bite for each one. Sound bites come, amazingly, from a very consistent pattern of categories. They come from analogies, bold action words, emotions, examples, attacks and absolutes, humor, pop culture references, rhetorical questions, and opposition quotes. Put it all together and it forms a little acronym called a Beach Pro. So what you want to do is if you want to figure out how you can get your quotes in, look at this, a Beach Pro model. Do you have an analogy to flesh out that message point? Can you say it in bold action words? Can you give a specific example? Can you be emotional about it? What are reporters looking for? They're looking for something that makes the story more interesting, more understandable. Emotions do that, examples do that, cliches do that. Reporters can't write cliches, but they can quote you using them. Reporters can't talk about specific emotions because they're supposed to be detached, no emotion. But they love quoting you and others talking about emotions. So emotion is great. Attacks. War is the greatest story. If you're a journalist, and if you are one company attacking another company and you say that to a reporter, anything attacking, it's going to be used. If you attack yourself, it's going to be used. So don't be surprised. Now, the beauty of knowing these sound by elements is it also gives you control to not be quoted. Because ideally, if you want to, you should be able to talk to a reporter for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, and not be quoted if you don't want to be. So as long as you're not using these soundbite elements, if you're not making references to pop culture, if you're not asking rhetorical questions, if you're not using cliches, then there's an excellent chance you won't be quoted. The idea is not that you turn into a quote machine. The idea is that you learn how to have total control all the time. So don't just go into an interview with three or four message points playing. That's good. But you have to have it wrapped up in analogies, bold action words, emotions, examples, hacks, absolutes, humor, cliches, pop cultural references, rhetorical questions and opposition quotes. For more help, go to TJ Walker media@tjwalker.com.