Talking Points

In real life, few journalists read releases; even fewer get product literature. How then does a reporter or producer come to know about candidates for coverage and what works best at making coverage result? Something as simple as a talking-points presentation can make everybody's work easier.

Imagine you just invented the incandescent light bulb and (ignoring the anachronism) wanted broadcast news & major media to cover it. What can you send them to immediately get their attention, convince them that your news will be interesting and easy to cover, yet can still gets your messages across?

The answer is a very short document called "Talking Points"; it is, alas, a format with which few of today's PR familiar have any experience. This short briefing may help remedy that.

Here's what's good about a Talking Points document:

• It's quick to scan and understand
• It puts many key points in one place
• It lets you present multiple coverage angles
• It helps the reporter sound smarter
• It helps get key facts reported correctly
• It's easier to write than a release; it's easier to read, too
• It helps people with different beats see what does or doesn't fit their coverage needs

• That list of talking points, we should note, was itself a talking points document about talking points documents.

So what about that incandescent light bulb?

• New light source has no open flame
• New electric light outlasts any lantern or candle, even outlasts daylight
• New light bulb invention promises a preferred cure for darkness
• Electric light bulb works without gas or liquid fuel chambers, tanks or lines
• Incandescent "bottled" electric light entirely smoke-free
• Electric light bulbs each do the work of 10,000 candles

• That was almost too easy, right?

That's the point of talking points. The author doesn't have to wax poetic or sculpt prose; the reader doesn't have to drill through flummery to get to the nugget of the proposition.

When to use talking points

Talking points are the right choice for almost every first product pitch; ideally, include a product info sheet (like we proscribe for Cherry Picks) to keep the entire package tight and useful.

Talking points are a great choice for providing an interviewer or interview producer to help prepare for an interview. They're a great choice to provide a TV or radio reporter for an at-a-glance memory aid when they're live on the air. They're also a good choice when inviting press people to visit a trade show presence.

They're not your best choice in circumstances that require a lot of specifics and details plus photos, etc. Some combination of info sheet, product sheet and Web link may be better for that.

Note the absence of the term press release from that last list; it's almost never a good choice (for reasons we cover elsewhere).

We could go on and on, but that would be counterproductive; that's also to the point about talking points. If brevity is the soul of wit, droning is a role for the witless. In media relations, wit works better.

© 2007 Martin Winston, Newstips and TwandaCorp; all rights reserved; permission is hereby granted to reproduce this document in full, with the provision that this attribution and rights paragraph must always be included.