Opening the can of canned comments
There’s been some blogging recently (see below) about a post on BC Beat, June 27 pointing up some canned comments from execs at YouTube The reporter Googled to see if other reporters had used what they felt was a canned comment. To their surprise, they found an almost identical quote from another YouTube executive earlier in the year, prompting the Broadcasting and Cable blogger to suggest:
Be it the World Cup or the war in Iraq, simply plug in your global event, and presto!—you’ve got a YouTube quote.
I talk a lot about preparing a key message for your interview, but there’s always a danger that a key message becomes a simple memorization. A key message should just be a concept or set of ideas which you re-work every time you use it. If it’s memorized, you end up repeating yourself in different interviews, or even worse, in the same interview!
If you simply repeat the same key message over and over, you could, on a media tour, end up with several media outlets in the same town quoting exactly the same quote… and you don’t want to pull a YouTube.
To read what others have been saying about the YouTube incident, check out these postings:
Mark Glaser at Media Shift
Scott Baradell at Media Orchard
Posted: July 13th, 2006 under Key Message, Media Tours.