Shakespeare was no fool. He recognized the limitations of the venues for his plays and actors. He knew that most of his words would go literally and figuratively over the heads of his audience. He knew his audience had distractions. So he used a very simple technique: repetition. He had his actors tell us over and over again that it’s night.
It takes me about eight minutes to read the Act I of Hamlet out loud. In that short time, the actors mention directly that it is night 16 times (“Give you good night!) and indirectly 19 times (cold, sick at heart, quiet guard etc). At my rate of reading, the time of day is mentioned every 14 seconds. No matter how distracted you are, you are going to know the time of day.
This is a formula that worked well for Shakespeare and he repeated it often. He was also fond of using triptychs: “friends, Romans, countrymen” or “thus, I die, die, die.” Imagine yourself on that 10foothigh stage almost surrounded by three rows of audience members. Deliver one of the triptych’s words to the front, another to your left and the last to your right. As Shakespeare intended, and you are including everyone.
Simplicity, brevity, clarity and repetition. If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for you.
Because the ear is such an imperfect instrument there isn’t much point in exposing it to extremely complicated words and messages. The average university student has difficulty comprehending a sentence longer than 18 words. When speaking to reporters, keep it short and keep it simple.
We know that visual aids help a presentation, whether on paper or in the boardroom. Graphs, maps, charts and diagrams can increase retention by as much as 50%. But did you know that studies show the same is true for oral communication? The same senior executives who wouldn’t dream of going into the boardroom without visual aids think nothing of going into a media encounter without anecdotes, stories and examples — the verbal equivalent of visual aids.
The key is to tell a story and paint a word picture. Don’t be afraid to use trigger phrases such as “picture this . . . imagine the following . . . our vision is . . . what we see is . . . what I’d like you to see is . . . .” These phrases will trigger verbal, visual aids as you speak. Think visually and increase the power of your media sound bites, clips or actualities.
Knowledge
Any time you come into contact with the media, they will expect you to have basic factual information about your company or organization at your fingertips. The number of employees in the building at any given time, percentages of women and visible minorities, number of vehicles, annual sales, the number of annual fire drills — all of these provide a picture of the organization.
Make sure you have these basic facts ready today. Tomorrow may be too late.
Your familiarity with your organization and your capability in using this information to describe activities or support a course of action or belief can have a major impact on those listening and what they think of you and the organization.
Objective
This isn’t the same kind of objectivity some people say they want from journalists. There’s no such thing. No editor would send a journalist out to cover child abuse and instruct him to get both sides of the story. Few readers would want such “objectivity.” What you can hope for is fairness, balance, accuracy or completeness.
So, the kind of “objective” meant by the final “O” in SOCKO refers to the measurable, quantifiable, human, behavioural or tangible result that you want to achieve through your communication with reporters.
When you are dealing with reporters, those objectives need to be headlines, leads, quotes, pictures, cutlines, subheads, sidebars, callouts, brolls and clips. These are the elements that reporters use to convey a story:
| Headlines | The big print that announces the story and makes you read on. |
| Subhead | An important aspect to the story that may catch readers’ eyes. |
| Lead | The first sentence or paragraph of a story which gets to the point quickly. |
| Quote | Your words in print, in quotation marks. Pictures The visual element in print or television. |
| Cutlines | The caption for a picture in a newspaper — the words right under the picture. |
| Sidebar | A parenthetical storybackground or context. |
| Callout | A few words of a print story isolated and enlarged to add punch or graphic appeal to the printed page. |
| Broll | Descriptive video footage used to illustrate a TV news item, often used in editing quotes and other elements together. |
| Clips | Quotes from you, also known as actuality, sound ups or sound bites (parts of interviews). |
Quotes and clips are the elements over which you have the most influence because they are your words (or SOCKOs). Remember that the average length of a clip on a television or radio news in controversial situations is about 8 seconds. Public broadcasters and documentary producers may use longer clips; tabloid television and rock radio stations may use shorter clips.
As you frame your messages you must think in mediagenic terms and you must be brief. If you are not thinking in terms of quotes, headlines etc. your message will not be in a format that is useful to the reporter. The reporter is going to have to convert your message into a news format, and there’s no guarantee your message will survive intact. You must deliver your message in a format the audience can recognize and make use of. The less it is edited or modified, the better.
The more you can visualize your objectives in real, human, behavioural terms, the more you will achieve them. You want the reporter to use your clip and write the story from your perspective. You want the reporter’s audience at home to see the world the way you do and act in a certain way. You must define these behaviours very clearly to achieve your objective. Now is the time to write out exactly what you want the listeners, readers and viewers of your news story to do and visualize them doing it.
Now that we have defined a SOCKO and given it form — an iceberg — it’s time to give it some substance, to put some meat on its bones so that you can begin to see how the SOCKO system can work for you and your organization.
Think about your three most important issues. These are the issues you really want reporters and the world to know about you, your corporation, its policies, organization, hopes, goals and aspirations. They could also be the issues the world is dying to find out about you, whether you like it or not!
These topics or issues take the form of brief headings. Typical issues might be funding, compliance, investor confidence, ethics, health, safety and so on. This is a perfect opportunity for you to take stock of what is really important to you and your organization.
The format to follow is: ISSUESOCKODISCUSSION. The issues are designed to do no more than trigger stimulus response in your message delivery. They need to be general enough so that your SOCKO can address any number of specific questions concerning that issue.
It doesn’t matter if a question dealing with costs is phrased to ask if it is too expensive, or how you are going to pay for it, or even who will pay for it. Your cost ISSUE should contain a generic SOCKO that can respond to many of the questions that deal with cost. One good SOCKO happens to address many questions that might be asked. That doesn’t mean you only need one SOCKO — you