Communicators often find there’s one obstacle that’s hardest to overcome.

Themselves.

We sometimes fall in love with the sound of our own voice, the words we choose, the cadence. And that can get in the way of the message and our communications judgment.

If you’re falling in love with what you’re saying, remember the words of that great philosopher, The Robot: “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!”

[Warning, warning: From the classic 1960s TV series, “Lost In Space.”]

Blogger Rob Parnell writes in a post called “Murder Your Darlings”:

As Elmore Leonard once said, “If I come across anything in my work that smacks of ‘good writing,’ I immediately strike it out.”

Finding the right words to communicate your message usually involves deleting, not adding. Think focus.

Two good examples come from new books about musicians – and the examples involve words, not notes.

In “Frank: The Voice,” author James Kaplan tells how in 1943, Frank Sinatra’s new publicist, George B. Evans, coined the moniker that helped define the great singer.

According to a New York Times review of Kaplan’s book, Evans didn’t like the wordy slogan Sinatra was known by at the time: “The Voice That Has Thrilled Millions.”

“Certain he could come up with something better, Evans closed his eyes and imagined what drove Sinatra’s fans in bobby socks into a frenzy and suddenly realized he didn’t have to add anything. “All he had to do was subtract. Frank was just … the Voice.”

Another example comes from a world of music far from Frank’s – the world of Rolling Stone Keith Richards and his highly acclaimed autobiography, “Life.”

Richards earned honor as co-writer of some of rock-‘n’-roll’s greatest and most legendary songs. James Fox, a journalist who collaborated with Richards on the autobiography, found the guitar slinger and tunesmith to be a talented editor, according to Janet Maslin of the New York Times.

Maslin quoted Fox:

“What I couldn’t guess was that he’d be such a very good natural editor,” Mr. Fox, reached by e-mail, says of Mr. Richards. “He cut, accordingly, for pace and rhythm — a real musical cut. As for calling the book “Life,” Mr. Richards did some editing there too. “My Life” was what the book was to be called. “I said ‘I tell you what, just cut off the ‘My,’ and you’ve got a title,” he says. He might just as appropriately have used another title he likes, “Keep It Dark.” But, he says, “I’m saving it for a song.”

Actually, it’s not surprising that Richards is a smart editor. Rock-‘n’-roll and the Stones are about directness, if nothing else. And in rock-‘n’-roll, directness communicates.

One way to sum this all up – in song, of course – comes from ol’ blue eyes himself.

This song isn’t about editing, but it kinda fits. Enjoy.

You might have heard, air travelers upset with new TSA body scanners were waging an “Internet campaign” for an “opt out” protest that would cause havoc at airports during the busy Thanksgiving weekend.

When I said “might” have heard, I meant – “you couldn’t avoid this story.” As CNN’s “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz said on his show this week, “Every hour that I turn on cable news, I see this story, even if nothing new has happened in the past 24 or 48 hours…Does it deserve to be on television every hour, and then repeatedly lead the network evening news and the network morning shows?”

Bruce Plante, Tulsa World

Why the insatiable media appetite for this story?

Columnist David Carr in The New York Times this week offered a list of reasons that media couldn’t resist this story: timing, execution, mystery, mistrust of government, relevance, nothing and everything, displacement, race and class, good visuals and gender. His column deserves a read as a reminder of what makes media tick sometimes.

Speaking on “Reliable Sources,” GQ columnist Ana Marie Cox put her finger more simply on the cause – it’s us. Answering Kurtz’s rhetorical question about whether Matt Drudge of the influential www.drudgereport.com had become “America’s assignment editor,” Cox said that in essence Drudge was giving us what we wanted:

Drudge is less America’s assignment editor than he is America’s id…He can plug into those exact fears and insecurities that people have, and then that’s what gets the (Internet) traffic, that’s what then gets these guys working on it.”

After all the media build up, why did this hyped Internet protest simply fizzle? Author Malcolm Gladwell, in a piece published before the airport campaign was announced called “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” explained what he sees as limitations of Internet organizing.

Gladwell wrote that social media wouldn’t have been enough for Martin Luther King in his battle against segregation in the South.

The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

Gladwell makes a lot of good points. Is that why the protest failed, despite media and viewers gorging on the story? What do you think?

[On a side note of local musical interest, GQ columnist Cox, quoted above, recently wrote about a great Milwaukee band, Sat. Nite Duets. She linked to Milwaukee music blogger extraordinaire Ryan Matteson’s post on the band.]

I remember the surprise I felt the first time a newspaper reporter told me that I should simply email him a quote for a story he was working on – no need to talk. Up until that time, it was de rigueur for reporters to get their quotes from interviews, which can sometimes result in misquotes, misunderstandings and lost messages.

Today, quotes and interviews by email are more common the ever. The benefits to the interviewee? Harder to be misquoted (not impossible – more on that later) and easier to control your message. The downsides? Less of a chance to engage in conversation and generate understanding, which sometimes can help you get your message across.

Why not just insist on doing all interviews by email? Because most reporters feel they should decide. Feel free to suggest email if that what works best, but try to avoid requiring it, especially on a regular basis.

Giving reporters a blanket email-only ultimatum will backfire, as that puts reporters in the positions of stenographers, something they don’t like. Read here about how such a policy didn’t work recently for the mayor of Trenton – it wasn’t a happy reporter that wrote this column.

Don’t expect email interviews to solve all your problems. Remember that email quote I gave to the reporter I mentioned at the beginning of this blog?  When I saw it in print the next day, I was amazed to see that I was misquoted. Not enough to make a difference, but somehow, my quote in the paper wasn’t exactly what I emailed in.

Technology isn’t going to take out the variability that comes from adding humans to any process. Which is a powerful reminder that your job as a communicator will always be to know your message and work hard to get it across.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg believes symbols often defeat facts. Nunberg says it’s human nature.

His explanation comes in a recent interiview about why apparent federal boondoggles, even when barely affecting budget deficits, get all the attention. And why the real drivers behind budget deficits get ignored.

Nunberg said that Walter Lippmann observed that “symbols assemble emotions after they’ve been detached from ideas.”

“A phrase like ‘trim the fat’ has a symbolic resonance that some more accurate and precise description might not, just because people don’t really want to know,” Nunberg said.

Hear or read the interview from NPR’s “On The Media” to understand why “just the facts, ma’am,” ain’t necessarily enough.

Get nervous about talking to a reporter, especially if it’s for radio or TV? Thinking: “Will I sound stupid?” “What if I say a lot of ‘um’s” and ‘uh’s’?” “What if I stumble through my answers?”

Never fear. Thankfully, you likely will be rescued by the magic of editing.

I was reminded of this phenomenon by this great NPR piece about radio editing that re-aired on “On The Media.” The story referred to such editing as “radio magic.”

Reporters – print, TV and radio – will often, and usually unconsciously, help clean up your actual remarks. Why? Not necessarily because they want to help you. Mainly, because crisp, articulate interviews make for more compelling reading, listening or watching – and shorten the length of pieces.

This won’t be the case if you’re the president of the United States (think of the wide coverage in all media of verbal gaffs by presidents, such as George W. Bush) or if you were  just charged with a crime. Assume under such circumstances, every poorly chosen word, every pause, every um, will be parsed and reported.

But for the average interviewee – a small business person or the director of a non-profit – other motivations are in play to make you sound halfway intelligent.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should be careless when talking to reporters. As you hopefully learned growing up, you can’t assume that someone else will clean up your messes for you. But still, it might be of some comfort to know that the system conspires to avoid making you sound like a total idiot.

A print reporter will often either paraphrase a poorly worded answer or pull together the best parts to make a partial quote, a quote with ellipses or sometimes even a new quote.

On TV, assuming you’re not live, a reporter will let you give your answer again (unless it’s a “60 Minutes”-style interview) to avoid a jumbled sound bite that serves no one.

And on radio, it’s even easier to edit, as there’s no corresponding video to worry about. The On The Media piece is worth listening to online, especially if you’re an NPR listener. It might surprise you to hear how it’s done, and how often.

Just how do the reporters and interviewees always sound so good? Radio magic to the rescue.

President Obama appeared to be watching his words carefully when spoke at a news conference the day after the Democrats’ major mid-term loss last week. Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn’t tell me, but I’m guessing his boss’ goal was in part to not say something too memorable about the loss. In his prepared remarks, Obama made statements that seemed calculated to be boring, such as: “I can tell you that some election nights are more fun than others.” Not exactly great quotes.

Despite the administration’s apparent goal to speak in boring tones about the electoral rout, the media wanted something different, something colorful coming out of the president’s own mouth. They wanted Obama to characterize for the world what the whole country saw happen on Election Day – a huge trouncing of Democrats.

While mostly tossing off careful characterizations during remarks and Q&A, Obama eventually slipped up. Deep into a long answer to a question about his leadership style, the president appeared to ad lib a word that the media grabbed onto: “And that’s something that — now, I’m not recommending for every future President that they take a shellacking like they — like I did last night” (emphasis added).

The president dropped the “S Bomb”– the word “shellacking” – and the rest is history. Immediately after the news conference, the first sentence out of television reporter Andrea Mitchell’s mouth was about how the president called the defeat a “shellacking.” Story after story since the news conference reported the president’s description. The word “shellacking” has appeared in 20,000 – 25,000 articles about the election, according to a Google search. NPR even ran a piece trying to track down the word’s etymology as a synonym for a big defeat.

“Shellacking” is a nice, colorful word, but probably not one that Obama and his team planned to use. Within a desert of careful language, “shellacking” stood out. The off-message message made news. Which is how media works.

To honor our diminishing attention spans, I’m keeping this blog short. (If you want to know more about our less, read this good factual piece on why TV ads are getting shorter and this very funny one about long emails.)

You may now move on.

Want to create buzz? Then make an exciting product that people want to talk about – and try to get them to talk about it.

That idea, from a recent Northwestern University study the Wall Street Journal wrote about, goes against a Madison Avenue tenet that advertisers can even sell snow to Eskimos.

As PR professionals, we’re sometimes asked to sell whatever, even the virtually unsellable. Such success is less likely than ever today. In this age of social media, authenticity reigns. Sociologist Brian Uzzi, the author of the study, noted that younger consumers are more connected than ever via social media, and have become expert at turning out traditional ads. That’s one reason PR is becoming more important than ever.

The Wall Street Journal story on Uzzi’s study, which looked at pre-release movie buzz, said:

He found virtually no relationship between levels of pre-release buzz and the ad budget of the movie or the presence of highly paid actors, even if millions of dollars were spent. The data suggest that pre-release buzz is mostly unpredictable, driven by intangible factors like the originality of the premise, the title of the film, or even a throwaway line in the trailer.

The study suggests this lesson on buzz: In this age of transparency, spend the time up front to make sure your product is actually buzz worthy; work like hell to encourage consumers to start spreading the news about it; and hope for a little serendipity.

In a nod to the rapidly changing media environment, AP management notified staff last week that it was retiring the storied tagline “Associated Press Writer” that has followed bylines for more than 80 years.

An AP staff memo says that the news service was switching to a new, “platform-neutral” tagline: “Associated Press.” The memo notes that: “These days, the byline on an AP story may rightfully belong to a text reporter, a photographer, a videographer or a radio reporter. For instance, photographer Aijaz Rahi bylined our coverage of a recent plane crash in India. Videographer Rich Matthews had his byline on Gulf oil spill stories. Some of our staffers have extensive multimedia skills and work with several platforms every day.”

This is yet another reminder that consumers are increasingly getting their information from sources other than traditional print reporting. Most PR professionals are adjusting accordingly – or they should be.

A recent article described the purchase of major PR firm as showing the “growing appreciation for P.R. on Madison Avenue.”

In an era of skepticism about one-way advertising, getting messages out via PR makes sense. Only through PR and its new cousin, social media, can businesses and non-profits reach their audiences in a credible, genuine and interactive way.