Craft Sound Bites
Your words are now clear—but are they memorable? Will people share them with others?
Great quotes get picked up and repeated—whether at the water cooler, in blog posts, or on social networking sites. Brilliant ones end up on the front pages of newspapers. So embed well-crafted sound bites into every talk.
Steve Jobs made this an art form. He relied on rhetorical devices to drive his messages home and get pickup from audiences and press alike. Here are a few that he used to great effect:
Rhythmic repetition: Repeated phrase at beginning, middle, or end of a sentence.
In 2010, Jobs had to deliver an emergency press conference about the performance of the antenna in the iPhone 4. If users held the phone a certain way, it dropped calls. As social media scientist Dan Zarrella, at HubSpot, points out, Jobs repeated the phrase “We want to make all our users happy” several times during his talk. Midway through, Jobs flashed a slide showing that the antenna issue affected only a fraction of users. Soon, a message appeared at the bottom: “We care about every user.” A few slides later: “We love our users.” Then “We love our users” appeared again on the next slide. And the next. And the next. “We love our users, we love them,” Jobs concluded. “We do this [provide a free phone case that will solve the problem] because we love our users.” That “love” was the message the press took away from his piece of “crisis communication.”
Concrete comparison: Simile or metaphor.
In his iPhone keynote speech at MacWorld 2007, Jobs likened Apple’s switch to Intel processors to a “huge heart transplant.”
Slogan: A concise statement that’s easy to remember.
At the iPhone launch, Jobs said “reinvent the phone” several times—and the slogan was all over the press release Apple sent out before his keynote. “Reinvent the phone” ended up in PCWorld’s headlines the next day.
As Jobs did, take time to create repeatable sound bites. But don’t deliver them with a lot of fanfare. Make them appear spontaneous, so people will want to repeat them.