Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The seven-second stray can be deadly. It can damage your reputation and drown out everything else you’ve said.

... Years later, I developed a name to describe that phenomenon: “the seven-second stray.” I call it that because if a spokesperson is on message for 59 minutes 53 seconds of an hour-long interview but says something off message for just seven seconds, I can virtually guarantee that the reporter will select that seven-second answer to play over and over again.

The seven-second stray can be deadly. Not only is it often damaging to your reputation, but it drowns out everything else you’ve said, becoming the only quote the audience will remember from your interview....

When this book author went on the Fox News Channel, he encountered a biased anchor. He handled it so well, his book soared to #1 on Amazon's bestseller list.

I’ve seen a lot of biased, ill-informed, and journalistically lazy interviews through the years, and this one was one of the worst. But the author who was the target of the anchor’s ire stood up to her questions well—and, in part due to his deft handling of that interview, currently has Amazon’s top-selling book.

Writer Reza Aslan—a prolific author who holds a Ph.D. in the sociology of religion—appeared on the Fox News Channel to discuss his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Fox News anchor Lauren Green went into the interview clearly skeptical of the book—less for its content, about which she was clearly unfamiliar—but because Aslan is Muslim. And a Muslim writing about Jesus was just too much for her to take....

FishBowl DC has a post out today showing (in a huge surprise to absolutely no one) that even respected national reporters can't agree on what "off-the-record" means.

Toby Harden, the bureau chief of London's Sunday Times, opines that he could "use the information but not attribute it to anyone by name or affiliation or quote it directly." (To many people -- that would be known as "deep background" not off-the-record.)

Susan Page, the Washington Bureau Chief, USA Today, comes closer to the appropriate definition (in our view) saying to her: "...'off the record’ means you can’t use the information in a story and you can’t use the information in reporting...