Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

CNN.com recently ran a fascinating piece about the “GOP’s secret school,” in which candidates learn how to interact with the media. The school is a reaction to the high-profile crises the GOP has inflicted upon itself in recent years—from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment to Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch” ad—and party officials are determined not to repeat past mistakes.

According to the article:“Since the beginning of 2014, the RNC says it has graduated over 200 operatives and placed many of them as communications directors and press secretaries in Capitol Hill offices and federal campaigns nationwide…[Instructor] Rob Lockwood has also conducted media training boot camps with nearly 1,000 candidates, staff and local political figures in a dozen states.

”It appears that this GOP training class is doing everything right in its effort to improve external communications. There’s good advice here for everyone involved in politics, regardless of party or cause. In this post, I’ll highlight the excerpts that caught my attention most....

I often ask my clients a deceptively simple question: What is your big, shiny object? Until they can answer that clearly, they're not ready to present.

If you tell an audience everything, you’ve told them nothing. People can only take in so much information in any given amount of time, and loading them with too many new facts can prevent them from absorbing your most important one. That’s obvious, I know, but many speakers—even some of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know—try to put too much content into their presentations.

As a result, the main point they really want to shine through gets obscured by an overabundance of rhetorical clutter. So I often ask my clients a deceptively simple question: What is your big, shiny object?