TJ Walker explains why preparing 10-15 minutes of message points before media interviews beats winging it. Unprepared executives spend long calls getting poor quotes. Those who schedule, prep soundbites, and call back get concise, publishable results.
Chapters
Got no time. No time. I hear this all the time from executives who say, TJ I'd love to spend time rehearsing, preparing for my meeting interviews, but I've got clients and executives and bosses all pulling on me. There's no time. So what does this person do? The phone rings. It's a reporter. Oh, yeah, I'm happy to talk to you right now. An hour later, this person is still on the phone. You know, the person who had no time. They've spent an hour on the phone now. No time to prepare, no time to plan, no thought into it. So what's the result? Well, the result is predictable. Open up the next day, the newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, trade publication next week. No quotes or one quote. And it's something that doesn't even look good or sound good when you wing it. That's what you get. It's sort of like building a house but not waiting for a blueprint. You could do it, but why would you want to? Now, I'm sympathetic to people who say they've got a lot of demands on their time, but I want to save you time. So let's look at what a real media pro does. People who are really good at the media don't just take the phone and answer it, right? Then they say, what's your deadline? And I'll call you back. So when a reporter calls a real pro, like an Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School or a Norm Ornstein, these reporters know, okay, this reporter is going to get back to me or this expert will get back to me and boom, lots of great sound bites. The whole interview might take two minutes, but it's not going to take all day. Reporter's not going to have to pull and pull for an hour, hour. Let's really break it down and see what these people do, the so called busy people, the too busy to prepare people, what do they really do? They get on the phone, they just talk and yap and yap and yap for an hour and they get nothing. They wasted a whole hour. What does a media pro do? A media pro will say, I'm happy to talk to you, Mr. Reporter, Mrs. Reporter, but I can't. Now, what's your deadline? What's the topic? I'll call you back. They sit down, brainstorm on Message points for 10 minutes, narrow it down to 3, brainstorming sound bites for 5 minutes, narrow it down to the best ones, then they call back the reporter. They do the interview. The whole interview may take only five minutes. So far, they've only spent 20 minutes. The next day they go to the newspaper, takes 30 seconds, and they pull out the exact sound bites they planned in advance. It made the final story. So the person who's so busy to prepare spent 60 minutes. The person who really went about it in a thoughtful, mechanical way and prepared. That person only spent 20 minutes and got much better results. So you tell me, who's really saving time?
