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Selling yourself with sound
bites
If you want a big-time, hotshot
career, you have to know how to talk to the press.
You might think, "Who cares? No one ever calls
me." But one day, in your climb to the top, the press will
call. Maybe your name will be in a press release. Maybe your company's
PR director will field a question only you can answer. And if you
are useless on the phone the first time, you will not get a second
try.
That's because a reporter just wants to get the story
written and is calling on you to help. If you do not give good quotes,
if you do not give intelligent, on-topic input, the reporter will
decide you are a waste of time and will avoid you.
If you are very helpful, the reporter will call you
again for related topics. If you're really good, other reporters
will see your name in print, and they will call, too.
Now that I'm a member of the press, I realize all
the stupid things I did when I was a member of the public, trying
to get my company in the news. Here are things I wish I had known:
Talk in sound bites. The Los Angeles Times
is not going to run a four-paragraph quotation from you. The newspaper
will run one or two sentences if you're lucky, so say something
short and snappy. Intelligent and informative with a hint of cleverness
is most likely to get you quoted. Funny is good. Then a reporter
with a dry, boring topic can sound witty just by quoting you.
Be fast. If you get a message from a reporter,
call back immediately, since the story probably needs to be written
that day. But even if there's no tight deadline, the reporter has
called many people who might call back before you and make you redundant.
Also, if you call back quickly, your are likely to be called again.
Spell your name and reiterate your title. You
may be misquoted, and you will have little recourse because frankly,
that's how the press works. But you can control whether your name
looks right in print. And make sure your company name is spelled
correctly, too, so that your boss doesn't think you care more about
your career than your company.
Be newsworthy. You want the press to be your
PR machine, but the press wants you to have a story. So if you want
to plug something while you're on the phone, make it sound like
news. Every time I talk to my dad's friend Sarah, she has another
idea about how I could write about her in my column. She has told
me about her company, her ads and her products. But when it comes
to Sarah, the only thing that's newsworthy is how annoying she is.
In contrast to Sarah, I worked for a guy who built
his career on talking to the press. I didn't know this about him
until we were at the airport, ready to get on the plane, and someone
from The Wall Street Journal called him with questions about our
government sales.
He talked to her while everyone else boarded. He talked
to her while we heard the last calls for standby passengers. After
the plane took off, he told me, in his impeccable sound-bite form,
"It's cheaper to buy a new plane ticket than to buy space for
yourself in The Wall Street Journal."
-- Posted: Oct. 21, 2002
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