TJ Walker teaches how to dominate media interviews by preparing three core messages and multiple sound bites for each. He recommends speaking with emotion, absolutes, and humor to create quotable lines that reporters can't resist, though he warns it takes hundreds or thousands of interviews to master.
Questions this video answers
Three focused messages (with a handful of sound bites for each).
Hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of interviews.
Chapters
How do you get to be a sound bite king or queen? How do you get to be that person who can just rattle off sound bite after sound bite? Be on message and it always is stuff that makes you look good and doesn't come back to haunt you. Part of it is practice, part of it is you have to make a decision when you go into an interview. As you've heard in earlier episodes, I typically stress that you go into a media interview with three focused messages, a handful of sound bites for each one. But there are exceptions. Sometimes you may be called to be a part of an industry related story and you really might not have any messages that you care that strongly about. You simply want to be in the story. You want lots of quotes where you sound intelligent and like an industry thought leader and and you want to squeeze out your competitors and you make it so the reporter doesn't want or need to call your competitors to get more quotes. That is often the situation I'm in. If a reporter calls me doing a general story on public speaking tips or how should people deal with fear of public speaking? I might not care that much, but I want a lot of real estate in the story. I want to be able to squeeze out my competitors. And look, I love a lot of my competitors and they're wonderful, but this is competition. I want to showcase my own sound bite creation and speaking abilities and this is a great chance for me to practice what I preach. So I do recommend sort of more of a freestyle form of interviews. You're taking your foot off the brake. I'm listening to questions. It's a more reactive mode. And my goal is a reporter asks me a question, I completely overwhelm them with interesting insights filled with lots and lots of quotable gems. Part of it is just putting a switch on my brain, clicking it, where I'm trying to speak in emotional terms, trying to position things in absolutes, constantly asking things in rhetorical questions. I'm trying to sprinkle cliches throughout. I'm trying to inject humor. After a while, you'll find certain sound bite elements are just easier for you than others. I have certain ones that are easy. For me, being emotional is just a lot easier. I can tell the reporter how I feel about something. Absolutes are really easy, so I'm consciously thinking in real time and delivering all of my thoughts packaged in sound bites. This isn't something it's not wildly difficult. It's not brain surgery. It's not something that requires a high iq, but it's not something you can do in your first interview, or your first 10, or necessarily your first hundred, because if you're not completely comfortable, it's too difficult to think during the middle of an interview. Something that is more of an advanced practice once you've done hundreds or in some cases, thousands of interviews. So it is an option if you want to be seen as a true sound bite king and queen, and someone that the reporter has to talk to on your issue. You want to up your game and get to the point where you've given the reporter so many fantastic, interesting insights and sound bites, it's almost like they've got a big wheelbarrow. It's so full of great sound bites, they can't pick it up and move it to the next interview. They've got to just take what they have from you and include only you in the story. That's the goal. There.
