Conversation is easy

I’m a broken record about a few things when coaching clients: choose what to say before you start talking, repeat yourself, tell stories, use soundbites.

Why are soundbites so important? Because no one is giving you their full attention. When you deliver a soundbite - a short, simple, and compelling sentence - multiple times, your audience will remember it.

In 2018 or 2019 (who knows, everything before the pandemic is fuzzy), I attended an event on technology and sports marketing. There were three or four panels and speakers.

On one panel, a woman from Google Cloud, who was sponsoring the NCAA Basketball Tournament that year, said, at least three times: “We just wanted to delight people with data!”

I don’t remember this woman’s name. I don’t remember anything about the event, including what year it was held. But I remember that sentence. Why?

Because when I first heard it, I thought, ‘who finds data delightful?’ A great soundbite gives you pause. It causes you to think, to recalibrate your perspective.

When she said it the second and third time, she explained what Google Cloud was doing at and around games to delight people with data.

I remember this soundbite for two reasons:

First, it was a great soundbite. Short, simple language, interesting, alliterative!

Second, and more important for my purposes today, she said THE EXACT SAME WORDS EVERY TIME.

If she had said, “We just wanted to delight people with data” and then “We know people think data can be fun” and then “It’s fun to show people that data can be engaging”, I would not have remembered.

If you want your soundbite to stick in our heads, you need to say it, exactly the same way, multiple times.

Some clients feel like PT Barnum when they repeat a soundbite. Some feel like a meat puppet. I sympathize. I really do.

And yet, I’m still going to tell all of you to repeat your soundbites, using the exact same words, multiple times. This is the only way a soundbite has a fighting chance of lodging in your audiences’ heads. Don’t we all want that?