Your Turn to Brainstorm Your Messages

Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and really get down to work.

I’ve given you the criteria you’ve picked your own topic.

Now it’s up to you to brainstorm on message points.

Couple of tips.

If you have a message point and it has the word and however therefore but or a comma guess what.

You haven’t truly isolated one message.

You’re putting together two or three message points.

Make sense in real life with conversations.

Horrible thing to do when you’re planning media messages because reporters can isolate just one idea and not use what’s after the butt hour before the however so you can’t plan that what you have to plan in isolation.

Every idea in isolation because we know in advance reporters can use any one of our ideas.

So when you’re writing these down on paper on a computer screen it is more than about 10 words.

Chances are you’ve already messed up your synthesizing multiple ideas together not going to help you at this stage.

Ultimately you have to do that you have to do that in every other conversation you have in your career.

But you can’t do that yet with the media.

So you’ve got to isolate one idea at a time.

No ands no connectivity no commons.

One simple sentence.

And of course as we’ve discussed no such thing as a sub point.

Now for those of you working in larger organizations corporations government entities here is what typically happens.

You’ve got an interview coming up later today tomorrow.

Later this week people get together.

They want to be helpful.

They want to prepare.

They want to plan.

So someone will say well if a reporter asks this What do we say.

And someone else will try to be helpful.

Oh we’ll say such and such.

And they’ll talk for five minutes and nobody’s writing it down.

There’s five paragraphs worth of content and then someone said well what if this is asked and someone else will give a smart intelligent rational answer complete are her wasting time it simply doesn’t do anything to help prepare package refine your message to get you to the point where you’re in good shape for that interview it’s just kind of a way for people to waste time.

It sounds smart feels smart doesn’t do anything.

So my recommendation is it’s perfectly fine to toss out a question but then someone in the room preferably you has the discipline to say wait a minute let’s write this one idea down stop talking a minute.

You may have to do something that seems rude.

Let’s write it down and then let’s add another idea and another idea because here’s the issue.

Someone can give a three paragraph answer talk for three minutes and it sounds great.

But any one sentence within that three minute answer can be horrible to be disastrous.

What if that’s the only message that gets into the final story.

So you have to have the discipline of really isolating one idea at a time and looking at it on paper or a computer screen.

So let’s do that now.