One advanced technique I use when dealing with the media is what I call front loading. What I mean by that is a reporter's called me, I know the topic, or they may be emailed the topic. And rather than starting off slow or saying what would you like to ask me, I dive right in, not just with my three core messages, but with lots and lots of sound bites for each one of those messages. I do this for television, interviews, radio, anything else. So what happens is, I want to overwhelm the reporter. I want the reporter to think oh my gosh, I've got so much great content here.
It would be a complete utter waste of time to call another public speaking expert or another media training expert. And what I'm trying to do is to sorry, if this sounds mean or hyper competitive, I'm trying to squeeze out my competitors from getting quoted in the story. And I want to get instead of one click Well, two or three or four or five or sometimes six. Also want to make the reporter's job easier. Reporters will call you up sometimes interview you for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, not because they really want to spend an hour with you. But because it takes that long for them to find something interesting and quotable to use.
If you put it all up front in the first 6090 seconds, 120 seconds and not make them work for it. You're making their life that much easier. Now, I've done this over the phone with text reporters, print reporters. I've done this with television reporters, and it works in either situation. I do want to warn you the first couple times I did this, the reporter said Okay, thanks. I gotta go.
And I thought oh, Was I too slick? Was I too glib? Did they feel I was being manipulative. And then I turn on the evening news and there's five of my friends. sound bites exactly as I prepare the evening news, or there was four of my sound bites in the text story exactly as I had prepared. So it wasn't that the reporter was annoyed or thought I was being too glib.
They actually appreciate it. They got what they needed, and they had to go. Now, I'm not telling a reporter that's it. You can ask me questions, I let them know. I'm happy to talk to you as long as you want. So it doesn't seem manipulative, because you're not just saying Take it or leave it.
But you are putting it out there. Most reporters, I find, appreciate this. You're showing that you respect to the reporters time enough to prepare to think and that you're good at packaging. The ideas now, this does not work. If your messages are not what is interesting to the reporter. You can't force feed soundbites if the messages are not of interest to the reporters, we talked about this in the messaging process.
And the whole section on sound bites, you can't force a sound bite on a reporter, if the message doesn't fit what they're interested in, but if you've done a good job of creating messages, and then you have sound bites, and then you put it on a silver platter for the reporter right at the beginning, you really develop a reputation for yourself as being not just a great expert, a smart person, because they're all over the place. But as someone who can package this information in ways that are useful to that reporter that journalists that media organization, and that's what will increase the velocity of more calls coming to you that builds on itself, and you get more and more media opportunities. So try front loading. If reporters annoyed as long as you're there, you're answering all their other questions. There's really no damage done.