Читать книгу The Bonner Business Series – Media Relations - Allan Bonner - Страница 19

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 need many. But it does mean that you get multiple use out of the SOCKOs you have. Many large organizations rely heavily on a “question and answer” format but I prefer SOCKOs. There are an endless number of ways to phrase questions and thus an endless set of answers to prepare. I’d rather make multiple use SOCKOs than start a Q & A project that, by definition, never ends.

A great SOCKO just may be the answer to 50 questions you might be asked. But, a Q & A sheet has only one answer per question. With SOCKOs, you use versions of them over and over again. I say versions because you don’t want to sound scripted.

Qs & As are like a “round” in music. The most famous round is probably “row, row, row your boat.” Each person says the same thing, at the same time in the round, with the same notes, over and over again. It both sounds and is repetitive. A Bach “fugue,” however, has several variations. The composer has some choice of when to come in, on what note and with what sequence of notes. It still has structure, but a fugue generates and sustains more interest than a round.

The kind of repetition you want is the kind Shakespeare used—emphatic, clear and powerful repetition, not redundant repetition.

Once you’ve identified your ISSUE, you should decide which is the most important 10% of the information about which you want to tell the world. This is your SOCKO.

After that you can add four or five supporting discussion points that you can use to expand your answer when you respond to follow up questions. This way you make sure you have enough material to present and defend your case, no matter how rigorous the interrogation. It might help if you also think of your SOCKOs as the raw material of news.