Beppe Bigazzi, 77, is an Italian Chef who claims he was joking recently on Itaian national television when he said he enjoyed eating cat stew. He’s not joking on TV anymore; he was fired from his on-air position. Apparently you can joke about war, murder or other atrocities as long as yo don’t favor a type of meat that also lives inside a home.

Ray “stop driving it” Lahood stuck his fit in his mouth earlier this week. To his credit, he corrected himself within 5 minutes. However, the damage was done. “Stop driving it” is just too juicy a sound bite for reporters covering Toyota’s woes to ignore. The sound bite is an absolute, emotional, attacking, and action oriented–it was destined to be quoted form DC to Tokyo. Lesson for Lahood: there are some things worse than being an overly scripted politician.

US Senator Arlen Specter got into a talk radio fight with Rep Michele Bachmann this week. Apparently both were talking over each other. Finally, Specter said, “I’ll treat you like a lady, now act like one.” Ouch! That’s one way to make the sound bite of the day. Specter grabs attention because his comment was so emotional, attacking, heated and to some, sexist. Both politicians are tough and are no slouches at talking over their opponents, so I don’t think anyone really feels sorry for Bachmann. Specter is all across the map ideologically, so you won’t have the usual hysteria that might occur if a prominent liberal were to make such a comment. Still, it was an interesting clash and a great way of capturing the current level of political frustration coming out of the capital these days.

The following is from the Daily Beast. If you are looking for an example of someone who can consistently frame every single thought into a perfect sound bite, then look no further that Mike Huckabee. 

Mike Huckabee is saying what a lot of people are thinking about the danger of Obama tangling with the Clintons. “If he’s floating that balloon it better fly, because I think that to float the idea, and then to pull it away, I just think it would be disastrous for him from a public relations standpoint,” the former Arkansas governor told The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins. “It would be twice having rung the doorbell and not taken her to the dance.” The Obama camp is playing with fire, he suggests. “Surely they did know that she was married, and that her husband is named Bill, and that he used to be President. It wasn’t like they woke up and said, ‘Oh my, you know, I forgot all about him.’ You don’t open the door when you’re pretty sure there’s fire on the other side of it that’s going to come in and scorch the room.” Hot stuff.

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Huckabee consistently speaks in concrete, visual terms. He uses humor and emotion. His communication skills alone almost garnered him the GOP nomination in 2008–and this was when he had no money, no name ID and no national platform. Come 2112, Huckabee will have have all of those things, plus superior communications skills. He’s my pick for the early GOP front-runner for 2112.

Sometimes a reporter will call under deadline and your goal is to get as many quotes in the article, while at the same time, eating up the clock to make it unnecessary and undesirable for the reporter to call your competitors for a quote. Below is a link to a story where I was interviewed for a story by Forbes.

http://www.forbes.com/leadership/2008/04/21/ceo-corporate-image-lead-manage-cx_mk_0421tv.html

In this particular case, the reporter told me that he was posting the story in just a few hours. I therefore deduced that he didn’t have lots of time to call every media trainer around. I didn’t have a message I cared about getting into the story, but I wanted to get lots of real estate in the story–and make sure my competitors didn’t. So in this case, I broke the normal procedure by taking the call and doing the interview immediately. I went into full sound bite mode in an attempt to overwhelm the reporter with great choices for column filler.

Below are my actual quotes that made it into the story along with an analysis of the sound bite elements that made them quotable for the reporter:

“It’s not like when Lee Iacocca (#1 pop culture reference) could buy (#2 action oriented) an ad on three networks (#3 specific example) and hit (#4 action-oriented) the whole world (#5 absolute) in 1979 when everyone (#6 absolute) would see it,” Walker said, adding that this is the one task a CEO can’t simply assign.

“A CEO can delegate (#7 action-oriented) sales, accounting (#7 action-oriented), marketing (#8 action-oriented), but the one thing (#9 absolute) that the CEO cannot delegate is speaking (#10 action-oriented) on behalf of a whole organization (#11 absolute) to the entire world (#12 absolute).”
 

One dozen sound bite elements–in under 5 minutes. That’s how you don’t end up on the cutting room floor.