Say it Better

Offer What the Media Needs to Cover Your Story

Want to become your kind of media’s favorite subject matter expert?

Read ten tips with links to real life examples to become catnip for that media to quote you. Thank you Nancy Schwartz for this pithy, spot-on top ten list. Although Nancy is writing for those who run non-profits the suggestions work just as well for any business, government agency, special activity group, club, professional association or soloist. As a former journalist I heartily agree with her approach.

I’d add these suggestions:

• Provide an online list of the kinds of timely and timeless stories where your expertise could be helpful.

• Make your contact information for the media very easy to find throughout your web site, blog, online social network or other kind of Internet presence.

• Make a guarantee as to how swiftly you will respond to someone working under deadline.

• Provide a captioned album of photographs, graphs, diagrams and other images from the activities and other background on your topic. (My addition to tip number two.)

• Provide a list of related organizations and other resources so you become the “go to” site for your category of media coverage.

Intrigued? Then read her excellent suggestions to “Make the Most of Media Queries” and “Make it Easy for Online Readers to Spread the Word.”

Don’t Start Your Speech With a Joke

Why? Your audience does not yet know you.

Give them time to grok you and to become enthralled with your message. As a former journalist who's given over 2,000 presentations I was impressed with the advice MIT professor Patrick Harry Winston gave at his annual presentation on "The Art of Speaking." Thanks to Cal Newport who took notes on his talk and my friend Ben Casnocha who followed up with his thoughts, you get some of the best advice I've ever heard on communicating to connect and be understood. What a great application of knowledge for a professor who teaches artificial intelligence.

Here are three of my favorites (from my research three is the magic number, the maximum that most people can retain, at one time, from a single talk or article):

1. Do provide an empowerment promise.
Explain why your audience will come away from the talk better than when they entered.

2. Describe the "almost" notions.
When explaining an idea, also describe other ideas that are close but not quite the same. This helps people understand the most vital points that define your central message.

3. One way to end a talk: with a joke.
They know you now. And if they leave happy they will assume the entire talk made them happy.

“A toddler is primitive, an emotion-driven

… instinctive creature that has yet to develop the thinking skills that define modern humans,” warns Dr. Harvey Karp. That’s why parents shouldn’t attempt to reason with them in the face of inevitable tantrums and worse. Toddlers haven’t developed an ability to think so parents are dealing with “a caveman in a crib concludes this pediatrics professor and author of the wildly popular book, The Happiest Baby on the Block.

What should you do? In Tara Parker-Pope’s article about Karp’s new book,The Happiest Toddler on the Block, we learn that calming a toddler, “involves bringing yourself, both mentally and physically, down to a child’s level when he or she is upset. The goal is not to give in to a child’s demands, but to communicate in a child’s own language of “toddler-ese.’”

I shared this news with a parent of a toddler, an entrepreneur I was coaching through his problems with a strong-willed business partner. He responded to Karp’s approach by saying, “Sounds like smart advice for handling my partner tomorrow.”

Maybe he can just play soothing sounds while they meet.(This is my version of dry humor for today.)