I've got good news. And I've got bad news. The good news is you have a much better sense of how to shape immediate message, you can deliver your media message. You can now answer questions and bridge back to your media message. That's great. That's wonderful.

But the bad news is, all we've really done is focus on what we want. We haven't focused on what reporters want. Reporters need quotes. They need sound bites, if it's TV or radio or any kind of video broadcast. They need text quotes, if it's any guy, newspaper or tech story. So reporter can talk to you for 10 minutes an hour, 10 hours, and pull just one sentence out of the entire conversation and put it in the story.

And that's completely fair. That's how the game is played. They can even pull two or three words out and put it in the story. Not only can you be quoted out of context, you will be quoted out of context out of the context of the entire conversation. You had with the report so we know it's coming. There can be no surprises.

Remember, it's not the reporter's job to make you look good. It's your job to make you look good. Now, what I have found in working with the media for more than 30 years and training thousands of people is that all soundbites, all quotes come from 10 categories of speech, I want to give you just the absolute simplest three ways of getting quoted. The first one is emotion. Anytime you can speak with emotion, it's more likely to be quoted. So if you're say you're outraged by something upset by something frustrated by something nervous about the stock market, anytime you mentioned emotion, you increase the odds of being quoted.

Now. Let's step back for a minute and think what are reporters doing when they're quoting us? They're trying to put a spotlight on some idea that's going to be interesting to their readers. Viewers listeners memorable, something that has a perspective that the reporter couldn't just write or state himself or herself. So that's what they're doing. So it's not just about the facts.

It's not necessarily the viewpoint of the reporter. But it's a way of putting a spotlight on something interesting. And it can't simply be a straightforward procession of facts. That's not what gets quoted. So your first tool in your tool belt is to use emotion. Anytime you can say how you feel about your message point, increase the odds of getting quoted.

Now your goal, at the end of this exercise is to have not only messages, not only techniques for answering questions, but to package each one of your messages with a soundbite. So the first tool you're going to have is emotion, simply state how you feel about Your message point and that makes it more quotable. The next tool you can use absolutes anytime you state never, always must have to. It increases the odds of being quoted reporters looking to bring clarity to the viewers, readers listeners, reporters can't state something with an absolute finality for fear of being biased or wrong. But reporters love to quote people like you experts, spokespeople, political leaders, business leaders, stating something with finality. So you want to get quoted, go back to your messages and figure out a way of stating something with absolute certainty.

Must have to always never. These are words that really excite the ears of reporters, they start writing it down, they start typing it And that will increase your odds of getting caught. And it's very easy to do. All you have to do is look at your message and then put an absolute absolute in front of it, and always muster never the third easiest way of getting quoted, what is it? put a question mark at the end. a rhetorical question, simply state here message with a question mark.

And that is going to get you quoted, reporters love it. It's a more interesting way of being quoted. So those three are very simple, easy, requires zero creativity requires zero literary flair. Anyone can do it. So in a moment, I'm going to ask you to go back to your message points, and try to package each one of your message points with one of those soundbite elements, emotion, absolute, and a rhetorical question. Now a couple of others are very, very easy but I want to caution you about That cliches are one.

Reporters love cliches. They're not supposed to write cliches, but they love quoting you using a cliche. Now, you have to be careful about this because a lot of us accidentally have cliches come out of our mouth. And whether it's on message or off message, it could very well be quoted. So you have to be careful not to have cliches coming out of your mouth randomly. Only use them if they're on your message.

Now, the other thing to be careful about attacks, reporters love attacks, they will quote you on attacks, but you have to be careful about attacks. If you say something like, Well, sure we were slow to react to the financial recession in 2008. But ever since we've done this thing, well, in this world, you can talk for 10 minutes about all the smart things you've done. In the last half a dozen years. The only quote might be we were slow to react to the recession. I just attacked myself.

So you can complain about the media loving controversy and loving negative but you know, it's coming. I've told you I've warned you, if you attack, you will be quoted. So if you say our competitors are doing it all wrong here at the TJ Walker Acme company we but the only thing that will be quoted is me saying our competitors do it all wrong, it's an attack. And because they use the word all it's an absolute, so be very, very careful with the tax make sure that if you want to be seen quoted attacking someone, then it's okay if you don't want to be seen in print or on the air attacking someone or something. Do not attack anything in an interview. So those are the basics of how to speak in sound bites.

If you want more information about this. There's a whole chapter in the One of the books below in the bonus section of this course on how to construct sound bites looking at all 10 of the sound bite elements. So your homework right now, come up with three sound bite elements for each one of your messages.