TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is if you've been with me through this journey so far, you now know how to look your best on camera, how to come across comfortable, confident, relaxed, authoritative. That's good news. And you know how to shape a message. You know how to go from a complex issue where there's 10, 20, 50 things you could say and you boiled it down to, to a great, clear, understandable, three part message, something you can say in 30 seconds or less. And you now have the ability to communicate that message. And you have the ability to answer questions in an interview where the reporter is happy, but also you're happy because you've bridged back to your message points again and again and again. That's great, that's wonderful, that's fantastic. The bad news is you can do that all day long and never get quoted, never get the sound bites you want on your messages. All we've really talked about so far is what we want, what we like, what we need. We haven't really talked about what reporters need. Reporters need quotes. If it's any kind of a text story, a newspaper, online publication, they need actual text with quotation marks around it from us to put in the story. If it's a television broadcast, a radio show, they need sound bites, bites out of our sound, where people hear us, see us and we're identified by position and title. That's what reporters need. So where does this come from? There's this common perception, well, tj, reporters are just going to use what they think is really their own opinion. So they're just going to use whatever they want. There's nothing we can do wrong. Biggest mistake out there. In my experience, sound bites are the most confusing aspect of dealing with the media of any of these issues we're talking about here today. It's the most misunderstood part of media relations because most media training will tell you look comfortable, have a message, narrow it down to top three points, stick to your message, and then it kind of ends right there. They just kind of leave you hanging when it comes to how do you actually package your messages? With interesting, quotable sound bites. So what we're going to talk about in this section is I'm going to outline for you and give you specific concrete examples of the ten sound bite elements. In my experience in working with clients all over the globe, doesn't matter if I'm in Thailand, if I'm in New Delhi, Dubai, South America, you name it, the food can be different, the language can be different, the culture can be different, the media can be different in some ways. But the actual sentence structure of what gets quoted remarkably consistent everywhere in the world doesn't matter to the language, doesn't matter whether it's prestigious media or low level tabloid. It doesn't matter if it's with sports, pop culture, or business and economics. All that can change. The actual sentence structure of what gets quoted is remarkably consistent. Now, the only thing I found that's a little bit different, certain cultures, where there are kings or authoritarian regimes, the reporters may give much longer quotes and pull directly from press releases from any big business or corporation. But beyond that, these basic principles apply. And that's what we're going to learn right now. But before we dive right into the specifics, let's step back for a minute and ask ourselves, what's a reporter actually trying to do when they quote us? They're trying to make the story more interesting to their readers, viewers, listeners than them just saying it all for themselves. They're trying to make the story more understandable than them just saying it themselves or summarizing it. They're trying to give a little bit of flavor to this topic in a way that makes it more memorable, more interesting, more digestible. That's what they're trying to do. There's all kinds of biases in the world. There's biases in the media, left wing bias, right wing bias, corporate bias. But the number one bias I find in media, everywhere in the world, a bias in favor of something interesting enough to get their story on the homepage of the website, on the evening news broadcast. That's the number one bias most reporters have. And if you can package great sound bites into your messages, then you make the reporter's life a lot easier. You make your life easier.