Posted: 2009 April 01, Wednesday 17:39
Noteworthy and Quoteworthy
Single mom Elizabeth Bohl, on declining to pay uber-high prices online for concert tickets: “I’m not going to spend a couple of months worth of groceries to get two tickets to the Jonas Brothers.”
Diane Disney Miller, 75, sole surviving child of Walt Disney: “My kids have literally encountered people who didn’t know that my father was a person. They think he’s just some kind of corporate logo.”
And a couple of quotes from hourly workers in the distressed auto industry:
A veteran GM worker on the mandate for his employer to come up with a reorganization plan in 60 days and for Chrysler to form a joint venture with Fiat in 30 days: “What we’ve worked for, for 25 years, can get gone in 25 days.”
A Chrysler assembly line worker on prospects for the contract his union signed two years ago: “They want to go in and carve it like a turkey.”
Foot in Mouth Quotes & Soundbites
(Still in the auto world)
“Global warming is a crock of *&$%.” Bob Lutz, (Outgoing) General Motors Vice Chairman.
“General Motors is dedicated to the removal of cars and trucks from the environmental equation, period. And, believe it or not, so am I!.” Bob Lutz (Outgoing) General Motors Vice Chairman responding to public reaction to his crock quote.
The Fundamentals III.
Crafting Your Agenda -- Part One: Message Points
By George Merlis
In his March 25 prime time news conference, President Obama was asked why it took several days before he expressed outrage about the notorious AIG bonuses. He answered, “I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”
Knowing what you’re talking about goes a long way in media mastery. If you recall our first Fundamentals posting, I listed the Five Commandments of Interviews. The first commandment was, “Thou Shalt Be Prepared.” Being prepared involves two elements: having an agenda for an interview and knowing what’s going on in your world. The first gives you control, the second insures you keep that control and that you won’t be surprised by any questions a reporter throws at you.
Let’s deal with knowing what’s going on first. Whatever industry, art, agency or area of endeavor you are in, there is one always reliable source for finding out the latest: Google news (http://newsgoogle.com)
Go to that URL and use the search box to type in relevant key words or phrases. Google’s search engine culls the output of tens of thousands media sites every day, ranking most recent stories first.
If you are likely to be interviewed with any frequency, you may want to subscribe to Google news and sign up for e-mailed alerts. Here is the page where you manage your alerts:
And below, I’ve filled in the alert terms to reflect my new job as an investment banker. If you were an automobile executive, a climate scientist, a college admissions officer or the executive director of a charity, your alert terms would reflect areas an interviewer might address.
Now about that second part of preparation: your agenda. If you go into an interview or news conference without an agenda, in other words not knowing what your are talking about before you speak, you totally surrender control of the session to the reporter or reporters.
An agenda is made up of two elements: agenda points and verbal devices that make the agenda points come alive; I call them grabbers. Today, I’m going to deal only with the agenda points. Next time I’ll tell you about grabbers.
Clients always ask how many agenda points they should have for an interview or news conference. My recommendation is no more than four or five. If you have seven, nine or eleven agenda points, you’re going to waste a lot of mental energy trying to remember them all and you’re setting yourself up for frustration because you’re unlikely to get all of them in. One of your agenda points should always be a URL where the reporter -- or his readers or listeners -- can go for further information. (More often than not a reporter will ask you for a URL, but why wait for him to do it? Why depend on him to remember to do it? Better to make your URL an agenda point -- something you WILL deploy sometime during your interview.)
In my critique of President Obama’s life prime-time March 25 news conference (posted March 27), I identified four points in his agenda. These were points he returned to time after time or points he solicited. In the latter instance, he clearly wanted to talk about the drug cartel wars in Mexico, so he called on a Univision reporter, confident she would ask about the violence. In the former instance, he used several questions to stress that he feels his budget is a part of the economic recovery program. In fact, he managed to transition back to his budget after being asked about peace in the Middle East. This was his most awkward transition in the news conference because he ended his answer so far afield from the original question, but I’ll have more to say on transitioning -- or BRIDGING, as I call it -- in a future Fundamentals post.
Now a president has a much easier time involving us in his agenda because presidential actions have an impact on everyone. The agendas of nonpresidential interview subjects rarely create waves that might float or swamp all boats. Therefore, when you create an agenda, you have to tune in to radio station WSIC. That stands for Why Should I Care. Somewhere in building your agenda, your have to answer that question -- why should the reader/viewer/listener care? What’s in it for him? How can he benefit by using your information or be harmed by ignoring it? If you are a public health official recommending flu vaccinations, the WSIC question is easily answered: pay attention to what I’m saying or you may get sick. It’s tougher to answer the WSIC question if you are dealing with something that does not impact on the audience’s wealth, health or happiness.
Once you build your four or five point agenda, you need to make it come alive, to make it quoteworthy. To do that, we use grabbers and next week, I’ll go into detail on grabbers. But here is an example of a grabber from President Obama’s March 24 news conference, dealing with the patience he says is needed for his economic fixes to work: “This is a big ocean liner -- it's not a speedboat -- it doesn't turn around immediately.”
Next week: Crafting Your Agenda -- Part Two. How to write grabbers.
