If you’ve been following the public pronouncements of Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota Motor, you’ve probably heard him speaking Japanese before the English translation takes over. And you’ve doubtless heard him utter the word ano. A lot. In fact, Mr. Toyoda, says ano so much you might think it’s Japanese for a really common word like “the” or “it.”

In fact, ano means “there” — as in “that Prius over there.” But like many Japanese speakers, Mr. Toyoda uses ano not as a word, but as a filler, a meaningless sound meant to buy time in a sentence. You can tell ano is being used as a filler without knowing another word of Japanese; when the meaning is “there,” as in “that one over there,”  ano is short and choppy. When it’s buying time in a sentence, it’s pronounced anoooo. The longer the o sound, the more time the speaker is buying.

The American equivalents of anooooo are ummm and y’know. We hear them in interviews all the time. The other day on the NPR program “Marketplace,” I heard a business economist use y’know a distressing number of times. To me, y’know is a particularly offensive filler word. Generally, when someone throws in a y’know, I DO know, so they are inadvertently insulting me by asking me if I can follow their line of reasoning.  You know (sorry, couldn’t resist) that y’know is just a nervous time-buying expression when someone deploys it two and three times in a single answer.

Businessmen who are perfectly adept at delivering a report from just a handful of notes on index cards sometimes fall back on repeated y’knows when answering questions.  And y’know is contagious.  If an interviewer peppers his questions with y’knows, then an interview subject is far more likely to use the expressions — and, unhappily, visa versa.

Y’know is an awkward crutch that can undermine a business spokesperson’s authority, so the question for those of us who do presentations and answer media and public questions is how to we banish that particularly annoying English version of anooooo?

First, we have to realize we have the bad habit. During media training sessions, clients often learn they have developed the habit only when I play back a practice interview to critique their performance. The expression has become a reflex; almost like breathing, and speakers are unaware they’re saying y’know.

If you’re not in a media training session, how can you learn if you’re using y’know? The best way to find out is to record a conversation with another person, play it back and see if you have the habit.

If you do find yourself afflicted, I have found that preempting the filler often helps. For example, you can start a response with “You know, the most important thing to realize is….” By using the fully spelled out “you know,” you put yourself on mental notice not to use the filler conjunction y’know.  Using “you know,” that way also sets you up to incorporate the sense of the question in your answer — and repeating the sense of the question is a great time-buying device that often gives you that nanosecond you need to decide what your answer really is.   One you’re on course, you’re less likely to fall back on time-buying gimmicks like y’know.

Incorporating the sense of a question in an answer also makes your answer self-contained — which is especially valuable in media interviews. But the most important piece of advice I can give is to have an agenda ready to deploy in any sort of Q&A session — whether it’s with colleagues, the media or the public.  If you have an agenda, incorporate the sense of the question into your answer and from time to time begin a response with “You know,” you’re unlikely to find yourself resorting to y’know.  Or hmmmmm.  Or, if you happen to be doing an interview in Japanese, anoooooo.

Finally, before any interview, do a practice Q&A with a colleague, family member or friend.  You can even interview yourself in a pinch — although that’s a last resort because you know what questions you’re going to pose to yourself.  Record that session, play it back and critique yourself. If you practice, you’re unlikely to resort to fillers.  “If you, y’know, don’t practice, you’re, y’know, setting yourself up for……” You get the idea.

Originally, President Barrack Obama was going to give his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, January 26. But then someone in the White House realized that the address would preempt the season premier of “Lost” on ABC, so the SOU was moved to Wednesday,  January 27.  The focus of of the address was jobs. But exactly eight hours earlier, another Jobs presentation — this one by Apple, Inc.’s Steve Jobs — made big headlines and prompted the online magazine Slate to point out that with technology overtaking politics as an agent of social change, the president’s jobs speech might be overwhelmed by the Jobs (Steve) appearance.

The Jobs vs. Obama column was written before either man spoke. And it highlights a key point for me as a media trainer and consultant: Apple had generated nearly as much advance publicity for Jobs’ introduction of the new iPad by doing and saying nothing more than, “We’re going to be having an important announcement, we hope you’ll cover it” as the White House generated by selectively leaking elements of the State of the Union for the better part of a week.

It is counter-intuitive — and flies in the face of what I normally counsel clients — to generate publicity by shunning publicity. But in Apple’s case, it works. With iPad, it worked with amazing success.

A quick search in Google News immediately before Jobs introduced the iPad revealed hundreds of articles, hyping the new tablet computer and building expectations with a brio that would embarrass a Hollywood press agent. These pieces were, without exception, written by journalists and bloggers who not only had never gotten their hands on the gadget, but who could not be 100 percent sure it even existed. Articles predicted that the forthcoming Apple tablet was going to save print journalism from the fate of the dinosaurs, reinvent book and magazine reading, revolutionize electronic games, and dwarf the iPhone in lifestyle impact. I sampled about a dozen articles while waiting for the live blogging from Jobs’ announcement and 99 percent of them were rave previews of a totally unknown object. The one percenters tended to write comments along the lines of: “There is no market for tablet computers” (because previously tablets had failed); “The Apple tablet will be too expensive.” (The generally accepted price dredged from the swamp of ignorance was a thousand bucks.), and “Apple is due for a flop.” (These journalists would be well advised to steer clear of Las Vegas’ gaming tables.)

A search of the New York Times website yielded half a dozen articles in just the week leading up to the Jobs announcement — clearly all of them written without any input from Apple spokespersons or from the New York Times digital folks who were cooperating with Apple on creating content for the iPad. (Jobs presentation featured a view of a New York Times front page on the iPad with photo slide shows, moving video on some stories and fonts that could be enlarged with the flick of a finger.)

What lesson can we learn from the free buzz Apple was able to generate? Avoid the media and they’ll write stories about you anyway? No. That tactic works only for the likes of Steve Jobs and Apple, Inc. Why? Three reasons:

1.  Apple’s track record. Although the company has had false starts since Jobs returned to the helm in 1997 (Apple TV, Mac Mini), by and large the product line has been game-changing with iPod, iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPod Touch. So the media’s expectations are always great when Apple announces not a new product but the fact that it is GOING to announce a new product.

2.  Apple’s secrecy. The company’s passion for privacy and information control reminds me of nothing so much as North Korea. Case in point: the stonewalling that surrounded Jobs’ very serious illnesses which culminated in a liver transplant last year. Apple’s clandestine ways are an irresistible lure for media types who love to speculate.

3.  Steve Jobs’ charisma.  The media love celebrities and Jobs is one of the handful of business celebrities in the world today.

What works for Apple won’t work for the rest of us. We have to work to get in the media. We have to go out and seek attention; we can’t gain it by hiding under a rock. We have to drop hints, give out advance samples, supply facts and court journalists.  Remember, even the President leaked the substance of his State of the Union address before he made his speech.

Oh, and by the way, the iPad, despite a name which some observers feel begs comparison with a feminine hygiene products, appears to be that game-changer that the speculators thought could help (if not save) print journalism, alter the way we read books and revolutionize electronic gaming. The early media speculators missed two very important points: business capabilities and price. None of the advance stories I read noted the tablet would offer three $10 software programs that enable a business user to write documents and spreadsheets and to create and display Apple’s Keynote slide shows (think PowerPoint on steroids). This gives what otherwise would be a personal leisure device — a turbo-charged book reader and media player — appeal to the business buyer and widens the possible customer base. (As does the optional keyboard dock which will appeal to those who can’t imagine writing anything serious on a touch screen.) As to cost, the predictions of an $800 to $1,000 price tag were off by a significant margin. Base price for the iPad is $500 and the device can go up to $800, depending on flash drive storage capacity and connectivity options.

One final note: Jobs looked as thin as he had when he returned to the company after his liver transplant surgery, but he was energetic and his voice was vigorous. Is he okay? Don’t expect to get any accurate information about his condition from Apple; that’s just not the way they do business in Cupertino.

In my media training workshops I always encourage my clients to read newspapers and magazines with new eyes and listen to broadcast interviews with new ears. In addition to absorbing the facts of a narrative, I urge them to analyze how those facts are most effectively presented. In other words, how good soundbites work.

I do this all the time and recently I was reminded while watching Charlie Rose on PBS,  that investor Warren Buffett is not just a canny businessman, but he is good with the soundbites. Recently, Charlie Rose interviewed Warren Buffett for a full hour, discussing his acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the U.S. economy in general.

I don’t know if Buffett has what I call the “Harry Truman gift” — that is virtually every point he wants to make comes out like a polished verbal gem (“The buck stops here.” / “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” / “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job, it’s a depression when you lose yours.”)  Or perhaps the Sage of Omaha is more calculating; maybe he — like the late comedian Milton Berle — rehearses his ad-libs. Most of us fall into the Milton Berle, rather than the Harry Truman category; we are not genetically gifted with the ability to compose great soundbites on the fly. But there is nothing wrong with composing them in advance and deploying them in an interview.  For one thing they make your message points more effective. For another, good soundbites make you a “good interviewer,” and the media will come back again and again to solicit your views.

A November 18, 2009 New York Times story reported Goldman Sachs would support business and management education for 10,000 small businesses. The story said GS would be working with Buffett, the bank’s largest investor, on the program. Buffett told the Times he was not committing any of his own money to the program but rather would offer “advice from the 35,000-foot level.”  That works as a soundbite or a pull quote because it is such a compelling word picture.

Here are some more “Buffettisms”. They are all great word pictures:

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

“Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”

“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

“In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

“According the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’ ”

Quotes can be effective in creating soundbites. But who would have expected American’s most celebrated investor to be quoting a Hollywood sex goddess?  Here it is: “Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.’”  A paraphrase of a familiar quote — especially if it’s a funny one — works well, too: “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

Comparisons, real or implied,  make for good soundbites. Here are some of Buffett’s gems:

“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

“Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.”

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

As an investor, Buffett frequently flies in the face of conventional wisdom.  Here are some good quotes that challenge conventional wisdom:

“A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”

“The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.”

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.”

“If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.”

And, finally, I urge clients to leave comedy to the comedians, but by comedy I mean joke-telling. More often than not jokes don’t work but gentle humor can work — especially the self-deprecating kind. Here’s a perfect example by Buffett:  “I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.”