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

31 Aug 2016 · 2 min

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2:21

A short spoken-advice segment from TJ Walker (YouTube live stream) about testing and refining media messages. Walker recommends saying messages aloud (preferably on video), vetting them for reporter/audience interest and avoiding self-serving phrasing, seeking colleague or PR feedback, and using whether your messages and soundbites appeared in the final news story as the ultimate test of effectiveness.

Chapters

How do you test your media messages to make sure they're strong ones, they're good ones. For starters, say them out loud, preferably on video, but at least audio. Say your messages out loud, listen to it and ask yourself, does this sound good? Does this really say everything I want to say that I have to say? Does this get to the heart of the issue and is this something a reporter is going to find interesting? The biggest flaw most people have in their messages is they come up with things that are self serving, that are obviously not going to be interesting to the reporter. You always have to look at the context. What is the story about? The interest of the reporter, the interest of the readers, viewers, listeners. So for example, if you are a large oil company and you have a spill or a fire and people, people are still missing and there's ambulances and fire engines there, your message can't be safety is our number one concern. It's obviously not the number one concern. Your concern might be finding all the employees, making sure that the fire goes out. But you can't just generically say safety is our number one. If that were true, you would be sitting at home, not using any energy, not making any electricity. So that's just an example. You can't push something that's a perfectly fine message for your website or an introduction to visitors to your plant isn't necessarily a good message at that point. So that's a part of it. The next thing is send it around to a couple of colleagues. This is why it's nice. And I'm not a PR firm, but this is why it's nice to have an outside PR firm. They can often tell you this message is going to sound self serving or boring. Here's the ultimate test of your message though. Did you get it into the final story what messages were picked up by the reporter? Because at some point if you're not getting the message in, either it's a bad message or you didn't package it the right way with the sound bite. So always test after the interview not for whether or not you had stupid quotes, but whether you got the exact messages you wanted and the exact sound bites you wanted in the story. That's the ultimate test.