When I departed Long Island for Las Vegas a few days ago I noticed that the TSA was profiling blue hair. Oh I understand everyone is on edge with recent breeches, put this was the definitive example of perhaps spending too much time on the wrong person.

The older women in question seemed to be wearing a pretty complex shoe. I would assume it was orthopedic in nature. After running them through the scan twice, they took the elderly women aside to continue their search and interrogation. I moved on and went to my gate. About 15 minutes later the same women shuffled to my gate. That was a twenty minute search overall of someone that has probably made nothing more complex in her life than an apple pie.

Let me state for the record that the TSA can scan my bags, make me walk through an X-ray machine, and even force me to show up a few minutes earlier if it means I’m going to be just a little bit safer in the air.

Most people though see little rhyme or reason behind TSA methods. I decided to scan and frisk the TSA online to see if they should be taken off a flight.

The TSA would be wise to spend a couple dollars (we know the airlines have it thanks to those checked baggage fees) towards a short-term PR campaign to turn a negative situation into, at the very least, a neutral one. There message is bland, boring and longwinded. Although it appears they mean well from a public relations/social media standpoint -

Here Are My Top Four PIO Things the TSA Should Do Immediately:

1. Stop sending canned messages on Twitter. Customize. Personalize. Incentivize.
2. Create video’s that inspire us, not ones that put us to sleep: http://www.youtube.com/user/TSAHQpublicaffairs
3. Put faces to go with the names on your blog (tsa.gov/blog). I want to know exactly who is communicating the messages you put out there. Ditto Twitter.
4. Clean up your Web site. Way too many links and tabs. One word. Simplify.

What would you add to this list? Would love to hear your thoughts!

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When I speak to the media at an incident scene I have learned to push home my key points by being overly repetitive to a reporter’s questions. I learned this technique several years ago at Connections Day, a conference run every year by the Fair Media Council on Long Island, from a utility company public affairs executive I was having lunch with.

He told me that a spokesperson can reasonably expect an on scene broadcast media interview to last around seven minutes.  An interview with a newspaper reporter back at the office lasts a little longer, about thirteen minutes, since that medium allows for deeper analysis and probing. 

The seven-minute broadcast interview is typically truncated to a seven-second sound bite of the spokesperson’s main position within the report.  The thirteen-minute print interview?  A spokesperson is lucky if one attributed quote is more than thirteen words.  The rest of the media story is typically filled with “texture” to round out the subject:  an opposing point of view, “person-at-the-scene” reactions, related data and facts, etc. 

So in summary, his theory was:  five minutes down to seven seconds; ten minutes down to thirteen words.  If you accept the averages, than you must also accept the value of repeating your key points during those interviews. 

Repetition provides the best chance of inserting your key point-of-view, or report of the facts into these media stories.  Languishing on less-essential information reduces the chance of your key information being reported.

Here is a great YouTube video about a BBC satirists take on how a TV news report is framed out. A quick caution though. Even though it was broadcast on the BBC, it still contains a pretty potent cuss word.

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