Here’s a fun exercise. Grab your morning paper and see how many pre-manufactured sound bites you can spot.

The modern media is, it seems, obsessed by the sound bite or how you can encapsulate your message in something that is memorable and impactful. It’s the elevator pitch for your story and any media trainer will focus on developing sound bites as a key technique.

Bitten back
Beware though of sound bite overkill. When does your sound bite simply become a cliché? Google ‘perfect storm’ in the news coverage for instance and you’ll see what I mean. In the last few days, perfect storm has been used by companies to describe anything from climate change, the economy, hay fever, the manufacturing of green cars, and even a company talking about a ‘perfect storm of propane’.

If you’ve heard that sound bite you’re planning to use more than a few times in the media think about injecting some originality and come up with your own ‘perfect storm’.