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Should you ever pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

You'Ve heard the advice. You've heard the cliche, never pick a fight with anybody who buys ink by the barrel. But is it true these days? By the way, that question comes from one of my professional colleagues, Jared Breaux. And in fact, all the questions today on this program are going to relate to media training, all put forth by his excellent brocast and it's linked in. I'm linking to that in the course notes. But if you go to bro communications b r a u d communications.com youm can get his excellent tips on media training. See the questions that he puts out on Twitter and answers on his broadcast on his YouTube channel. So be sure to check that out. So thanks to Jared for providing these questions today. Now let's deal with the first one. Should you pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel? What that means is don't fight with newspaper owners. And beyond that originally or someone who owns a TV network. Now, I would say like a lot of general axioms, there is truth to it for most people most of the time. However, there are huge exceptions. Let's look specifically at party politics. If you are Republican and you are a conservative running for office, attacking the so called mainstream media is often an excellent strategy for getting ahead. Now I'm producing this podcast in February of 2016, so it's too soon to tell who's going to win the press primaries, the nominations and the general elections for 2016. But certainly for the last 35 years, 40 years, certain Republican candidates have done an excellent job that have helped their candidacy by attacking members of the media and accusing them of a liberal bias. And that has worked well for them. I don't leave it up to others as to the merits of those arguments, but that does show there is a way of violating the axiom of never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Now what's interesting in these times is that essentially everybody buys ink by the barrel. When you have your own Twitter feed, your own blog, your own podcast, everybody from the largest corporation to the smallest individual working from home is a media company. And quite often a huge media company, a cable TV company for that matter, may be concerned about one disgruntled customer who is consistently attacking them, vilifying them, and complaining on Twitter or Facebook or on a blog. So that's what's a little bit different I still think that for most businesses and politicians, most of the time you don't gain anything by attacking reporters, by attacking media, by complaining about the questions. If you hear a question that you don't like, well, the easiest thing to do is is to rewrite the question in your own mind and then answer it on your own terms. This is not the same thing as dodging questions. It is absolutely not dodging questions, but it's reframing it in your own perspective. Far better than whining about politicians or, excuse me, about questions. When you see politicians constantly complaining about every single question the reporter asks at some point, most fair minded people I think are saying this guy is a big baby or this woman if it's a woman complaining, although I typically see it more from male politicians. So please keep that in mind when it comes to criticizing the media. Like a lot of rules, one size does not fit all Part of why you would and folks, I'm not a PR firm, so I'm not trolling for business here, but a part of why you would often hire a PR firm or a PR counselor is for advice trying to figure out when is it appropriate to attack the media, when is it appropriate to say that that isn't fair? Certainly the power relationship has changed now. If you're being interviewed by someone and you think they are going to wildly distort your comments, you can have a colleague, a friend, a family member record the whole interview and put that entire interview up on your own YouTube channel or on Facebook and link to it from Twitter so that if you feel the reporter is really going to twist your words beyond recognition and distort them in an intellectually dishonest way, you have protection now in a way that you certainly didn't throughout most of the history of mass media. So that is one huge asset you have. There'll be more in just a moment.

To hire TJ Walker as a keynote speaker or workshop leader for your next conference call. 212-764-4955.

More questions from Gerald Breaux and his excellent brocast. And by the way, you can find him on Twitter as well as I do daily. Next question is how do you talk to your spokespersons after they've screwed up in a media interview? Here's my advice to businesses, corporations, any organization that has a bad situation with a media interview. It's fine to talk to the spokesperson about a screw up, but let's figure out what the source of the screw up is. In most cases, the problems of quotes that you really didn't like coming out are a function of not having gone into the interview with not only three very clear specific messages, but also three or four, ideally a half a dozen great sound bites created for each message point. And to have rehearsed it once. And in my experience, the vast majority of people are not doing that. Even if they're professional spokespersons, sometimes they're not doing that because the whole organization, their whole ecosystem is geared towards, well, don't say this and the lawyers say don't say that and don't do this and don't do that. If you walk into an interview with a bunch of don'ts in your mind, it's very hard to actually succeed because you're going to be so fixated on what not to say, you're going to accidentally say something quotable. Now, one of the most famous examples in history, certainly in the last decade, was the spokesperson for bp, who happened to be the CEO of that company during the gold spill, Tony Hayward, who said, hey, I want my life back. If you looked at the entire answer to his question, it was fine. He had all the right message points. If you looked at the whole press conference where he said that, he came across fine, likable, articulate, friendly, knowledgeable, great messages. But when you pull that one quote out of the context of the whole interview, it was used again and again and again to make him look like a fool, uncaring, unsympathetic, and it was a disastrous interview in that case. I think it fits the description of your spokesperson has screwed up the problem there. And I was not on the team that worked with bp, is I believe that he did not rehearse on video because if he had, if he'd said something like that, it would be very easy to simply play the video back, stop it and say, hey, Tony, how do you feel? If that's the only quote that gets in all the headlines and all the stories? And it would have been pretty easy for him to say, well, gosh, if that's the only quote that's used, I'll look like an idiot. I'll probably look like a fool, I'll look uncaring, I'll look unsympathetic, therefore I best not say it. But obviously that didn't happen. So that's really my number one tip is to figure out how can you actually practice with your spokesperson on video, with messages and with sound bites. Now, if you've done all that and they're still getting bad quotes off message, you need to analyze the sound bites, the quotes that got in and figure out exactly what sound bite element was there and how do you make sure you don't say that in the future?

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

More questions coming from Gerald Breaux and the Brocast this next one what is your best tip for writing great quotes for news releases? The problem most press releases have when they put a quote in is always I am pleased to announce the selection of the new committee for Blah blah blah or the appointment of Joe Smithers as the head of our marketing research. It's not interesting, it's not in fact quotable. Just putting quotation marks around something is not a signal to reporters. What I have found when you're creating a press release is you need to come up with a quote that is exactly like the way quotes are used by real reporters in the real world. What I have found in analyzing sound bites and quotes in all media outlets for the last 30 years is that quotes come from one of 10 speech patterns. Once you understand what the speech patterns are, you take those speech patterns and you go back to your message and you package those speech patterns. You, you package that message with your speech patterns. They're analogies. They're bold action words. They're emotions, they're absolutes, they're attacks, they are cliches, pop culture references, rhetorical questions. There's 10 of them. And if you want more information, I'm going to give you information in a moment on how to get my free online course that has books and chapters on these 10 soundbite elements. But that's the biggest problem most people have is they they don't make the quotes in their press releases actually quotable. And there's a simple process. I hate to say this because it makes me sound in artful, but it's paint by number folks. You really can control exactly what gets quoted and a story from a Press release not 100% of the time because there are times when the reporter is going to throw the press release in the trash or you pique their interest and they want to call you and interview you. But for times when they do a story based on the press release, it's remarkably easy to get the quotes you want. But you have to follow a system. And folks, it's not my system. I've simply codified the system that reporters use in the real world. If you want more information at no cost on how to do this, here it is.

For a free, no obligation online public speaking or media training course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and start learning today.

The next question from the broadcast is as how long should a communications plan be? Now I'm going to get myself in some hot water here with the burgeoning crisis communications industry because there are gigantic teams of crisis communications experts out there. And hey, I call myself a communications crisis communications expert as well, but there are some who specialize in writing these gigantic 3 inch thick, 5 inch thick communication plans. And in my experience, for most people, most of the time, it's a great way for crisis communications consultants to rack up tens and tens and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of billable hours. Hey, not knocking that. And then it's an excuse to put something on the shelf to tell your insurance company you've done it. It gathers dust. And when a crisis does hit, it's too big to figure out where to even start and it is ignored. I think a crisis communications plan should really consist of one page. And on that page you figure out, okay, who's going to be on our team? The CEO, the head of communications and pr, your lawyer and outside PR consultant, or crisis communications consultant. And that's it, that's your team. You need to figure out a way of getting together, coming up with a three part message and sound bites as quickly as possible. And then as the crisis evolves, you've got to figure out how to change those messages. And you've got to figure out a way of doing a quick rehearsal with your spokesperson before they do updates with the media. And that really is it, folks. And you need some kind of list of who you're going to communicate with and your team has to know how do we post things on our own Facebook page and distribute email to our list and put things on our own blog? None of that should really take more than a page. Everything else for the most part is over complication. The problem, of course, with so many crisis communications plans is that once you get into the middle of a crisis, you have lawyers calling the shots. Now I do believe that certainly any big corporation, any organization, government organization, etc. Should have lawyers at the table. But you have to fight the impulse that many lawyers have, which is do nothing. Because you can't forget a lawyer's training is in the law A lawyer's job is to keep you out of prison. A lawyer's job is to keep you from being on the losing ends of judgments in courtrooms. The problem is that the response too often is don't say anything to the media. Then the reporters call, you have no comment. The quote is, no comment. You look guilty, you look like you're hiding. And the court of public opinion, everybody hates you. You've lost all your customers and you've gone bankrupt. But hey, the lawyer can say, I kept you out of jail, maybe. But that is only one part of the job of the CEO and of the institution. You've got to figure out how to not only deal with legal battles, but keep your reputation intact with the public. So that, in a nutshell, is the problem with so many crisis communication plans. The longer it is, the easier it is to ignore and the more likely it is for people to go into a default mode of being completely reactive, or even worse, clamming up and trying to be safe by saying no comment, which is often, in many, many situations, the most dangerous response of all. And final question from the should social media be a part of your crisis communications plan? Absolutely. Anything you're saying to reporters, to the media, you should be pushing it out in social media as well. Here's the problem, though. If you are caught in a huge scandal of epic proportion and you are in the media everywhere, if you have stupid statements or a poor spokesperson who's saying insensitive things, it's not going to matter what happens in social media, because social media is going to pick up those headlines from stupid things you said on NBC or in the New York Times. You want to look at a perfect example of this? I'm going back to the example of BP with their Gulf oil spill. Their social media presence, in my view, was excellent. Their messages, their media, how they use social media during the Gulf spill was excellent. The problem is when you have the CEO saying stupid things, it's America. Of course there'll be frivolous lawsuits. I want my life back. That dominates mainstream media in such a profound way that it's picked up by social media, so it drowns out all the other messages. But certainly if you have a great message and great sound bites, don't even think of it in terms of social media versus traditional media. Just think of it in terms of you've got messages in every avenue you can possibly use to push it out. You're going to do so. Again, thanks for all the questions today from Jared Breaux. Go to his website B R a u d communications.com and also subscribe to his Twitter feed and his YouTube channel as well. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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