Question: “How will this experiment expand our knowledge of the universe?”

Answer: “So, what we are going to study is…..”

It was so pervasive that a few science and engineering media training participants began every single answer with the word “so.”  They were unaware they were doing it until we played back the interviews for our critiques. One confounded scientist, for whom the critique was a revelation, asked, “Why am I doing that all the time?” At the time I couldn’t answer his question, but now I think I know the answer.  Scientists, by inclination and training prefer to build to a conclusion.  But they know that laymen want a conclusion first, followed by the supporting data.

In fact, during media training sessions I drive home that message using the slogan, “Key Point Up Front.”  In other words, we are asking people to do something counterintuitive: to start with what would normally be the end of an answer.  Normally, when our scientist is building his argument with peers, he lays out his evidence and when he is going to to deliver his conclusion uses flags the fact with the word “so.” Actually, “so,” used this way is layman speak for “ergo,” which in its original Latin meant “because of,” but was adopted as a synonym for “therefore” in 14th century English.  Now when urged to begin with the conclusion, many scientists and engineers instinctively start with “so,” even though they haven’t presented the facts leading up to the conclusion. At a recent gathering I attended, there were a lot of scientists on panels and laymen in the audience and almost every scientist present began many answers with the word, “So….”

Why is this relevant to the business community?  Well, lately I’ve noticed the answer-starting “so” creeping into media interviews with businessmen.  Perhaps they picked up the habit listening to Nobel prize-winning scientists using the word.  Perhaps there is a “so” virus out there.  Whatever the reason, I am hearing more and more “so” answers from more sectors of the economy.

Whether you have talking about dark energy or monetary policy or business opportunities in third world countries, starting answer with “so,” is distracting and annoying.  First of all, the “so” is totally misplaced and somewhat baffling to the listener, since the basis of the conclusion hasn’t been given.  Second, it becomes a cliche like “y’know” and can lead to such overuse that it becomes a distraction — just like “y’know.”

As I pointed out earlier, a lot of perpetrators of “so” responses were totally unaware they were committing the offense.  So (sorry, couldn’t resist) how do you know you’ve fallen into the trap and what do you do to get out of it?

I know of only two ways of catching yourself deploying the inappropriate “so.” Ask colleagues to listen for it — a less than reliable solution — or record yourself in conversations and practice interviews and play back the tapes listening for “sos.” If you are a so-er what is the remedy? Incorporate the sense of the question in your answer.  If you are rephrasing the elements of the question, it’s virtually impossible to begin an answer with “so.” Back to the example I used earlier:

Question: “How will this experiment expand our knowledge of the universe?”

Answer: “This experiment will expand our knowledge of the universe by studying…..”

What about my mandate for getting your key point up front?  Restating the sense of the question doesn’t push the key point all that far back in your answer, AND, importantly, it makes your answer totally self-contained — something the media love.  If they can use your answer without their question, they are a giant leap toward a good soundbite or pull quote.

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.

Toyota Motors is a company that heavily promotes its engineering innovation, production quality and service reliability.  In a haymaker blow to Toyota’s reputation, the company suspended production and sales of eight of its most popular models — including America’s (previously) best-selling car, the Camry.  And now Toyota is recalling millions of already-sold cars worldwide to fix a potentially life-threatening problem: unintended acceleration.

(Disclosure: I have a personal stake in this story: I own a second-generation Toyota Prius.)

This week Toyota began shipping parts to dealers across the country to correct an accelerator problem that could lead to cases of disastrous unintended acceleration.  The Toyota problem is so serious the automaker stopped production and sales on eight of its top-selling models — including the Camry, the best-selling car in the U.S.  The scope of the problem is staggering: I’ve seen stories on the web sites of European, Japanese, South African, Canadian and Israeli newspapers.  Toyotas sold in China have also been implicated.

I always judge a company’s handling of a crisis by what I call the Tylenol Standard.  Back in 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were the best-selling over-the-counter pain reliever in the United States.  Then, seven people in the Chicago area died; they had all been taking the drug.  J & J jumped into action with an approach that is taught in business schools to this day.  The company suspended all production of Tylenol immediately.  It recalled the 31 million bottles of Tylenol then on store shelves, destroying all the medication that was returned.  It launched a rigorous inspection of all its manufacturing facilities. And, Johnson & Johnson made top officials readily available to the media where their story was: “We don’t know how this happened.  We will find out and correct it.  Meanwhile, do not use any of our products that you have at home; return them immediately, and report any adverse effects from our medication that you have already taken.”

The company’s response was fast, comforting and took a page from the Harry Truman adage: “The buck stops here.”

As it turned out, the buck did not stop at Johnson & Johnson.  The Tylenol deaths were murders, not the result of accidental contamination.  Someone had tampered with some Extra-Strength Tylenol boxes in drug stores around Chicago. The killer opened the packaging and the bottles, inserted potassium cyanide into the capsules and then resealed everything and put the product back on the shelves.  Police and FBI theorized the killer had a specific target in mind but killed others in order to make his intended victim look like a random casualty in a series of accidental poisonings-by-contamination.  (The case remains unsolved to this day, possibly because the intended victim never took the contaminated drug.)

Within a year, Extra-Strength Tylenol had regained its position as the country’s top-selling pain killer.   Unfortunately, the Toyota brass must have cut class in business school the day they taught the 1982 Tylenol lesson.

Toyota was late to the table with an admission that there was, indeed, a problem and slow with information to the media (and through the media to the millions of Toyota owners worldwide).  This sowed the seeds of confusion and resulted in a serious erosion of trust in the company.

Toyota’s worldwide president, Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder,  made no statements to the media and no apologies to customers until a crew from NHK, the Japanese TV network cornered him at the World Economic Summit in Davos the last week of January.  This reclusive behavior despite the fact that the issue has gained massive media attention since last August when an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer and three family members burned to death after crashing a runaway Lexus they had borrowed from a dealer in San Diego.  The company’s U.S. president, Jim Lentz, was also noticeably absent from the media until February 1, when it was time to announce the fix.  Then he began a media blitz explaining the problem and the repair, a belated attempt to restore Toyota’s battered image.

But wait, there’s more, as the infomercials say.  If you look at the list of cars being recalled for the accelerator fix (below) you’ll notice that the Lexus in which Highway Patrol officer  Mark Saylor died — a 2009 ES — is not on it.  That’s because those cars — and many other Toyota-made cars, including my Prius — were subject to an earlier recall, back in November, 2009.  In that recall, the Lexus accelerator pedals were shortened so they could not be trapped under the floor mat — the ostensible cause of Officer Saylor’s accident. (For the Prius, I was just told to remove the mat — which I had already done.  It still sits in my trunk awaiting the promised “permanent fix.”

But at the same time as the mat matter was being handled, Toyota was aware that for six years both the company and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been looking into multiple cases of unintended acceleration and that the mats were unlikely culprits in all of them.  In its autumn response, Toyota tried to sweep the more basic accelerator problem under the floor mat problem.  In fact, in November, Toyota put out a press release misrepresenting the NHTSA’s conclusions about the floor mats and had to issue another press release correcting the first one.  But neither press release acknowledged that unintended acceleration might have been caused by anything other than misplaced or mismatched floor mats.

So there were two problems and initially Toyota tried to conflate the simpler problem (the mats) with the more serious problem (the accelerator mechanism).  The mat recall affected 3.8 million vehicles and despite the fact that NHTSA told Toyota that mat removal was at best an interim solution, no long-term solutions has been reached for many of those recalled cars.  The faulty accelerator affects 4.6 million vehicles, some of which were previously involved in the mat recall (with the attendant danger that owners who addressed the mat problem will now think the entire problem solved.)

Here is a list of the cars in the current Toyota recall.

• 2009-2010 RAV4

• 2009-2010 Corolla

• 2009-2010 Matrix

• 2005-2010 Avalon

• 2007-2010 Camry

• 2010 Highlander

• 2007-2010 Tundra

• 2008-2010 Sequoia

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.

From the public relations point of view, I think not.

On November 30, Nancy Armour, a reporter for the Associated Press, called to ask me how I thought Woods was handling the incident. It was early on in the chronology of the story; the incident was just a bizarre early-morning single-car accident that may or may not have been caused by an argument over what might or might not have been an extra-marital liaison. At this point only one rather disreputable tabloid had made a single salacious allegation against Woods. Woods had crashed his car, been to the hospital and returned home. He declined to talk with the police or the media, and he issued the first of his series of web site comments (this was the one where there was neither domestic abuse nor extra-marital dalliances).

I told Ms. Armour I thought Woods was handling his PR badly. My comments were shaped by my current job as a media trainer and crisis communications consultant and by my previous experience as executive producer of Good Morning America  and Entertainment Tonight. Woods, I told the AP, would be wise to get out in front of the story, even if he gave only one interview to one reporter. Clamming up opens the floodgates of rumor and speculation. Once the current is running through, it’s nearly  impossible to close those floodgates.

Ms. Armour’s story contrasted Woods’ approach with the way David Letterman handled his scandal. Confronted with an equally salacious scandal wrapped in an extortion attempt, Letterman went on the air and told his audience the story.  “By revealing that himself, Letterman followed the No. 1 rule in crisis communications: Take control of the story,” Ms. Armour wrote.

My point here is not to rehash the growing scandal but to look at it as a teachable moment for any business. Evasion and/or cover-up are almost always worse than the initial problem. And they never work. The more one evades, the deeper the media digs.

Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS sports, was quoted in another AP story as saying, “At some point, he’ll play golf and he’ll move on. And at some point this will become more embarrassing to the media than to Tiger.”

Now it is true that Tiger Woods owes you and me and the rest of the public absolutely nothing more than the best golf game he can deliver and he appears to be the best player of the game since 12th century Scottish shepherds used sticks to knock stones into rabbit holes on the location that today is the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

But Woods owes much more to his sponsors, whose largesse has supplied the bulk of his estimated billion dollar fortune. He owes them what they paid for which is unsurpassed talent wrapped in a clean, wholesome image. At the moment, the talent remains, but the image is showing lots of tarnish. Woods owes them the behavior that goes with the image they’re paying for. If these sponsors wanted a “bad boy” the sports, music and movie business offer no end of rogues they could hire.

That said, as of this writing — three of Woods’ sponsors, Nike, Gatorade and Gillette, say they will stand by him. Another sponsor, AT&T, had yet to be heard from; but it remains to be seen just what “standing by” means in this instance. A company can continue to pay Woods and use him far more restrictively than in the past. They can trot him out for corporate events and special appearances and simply not run his TV commercials and magazine ads. Certainly, Nike, which sells a lot of shoes and athletic gear to women, has got to be thinking seriously about how it can use Woods in a way that won’t alienate potential female customers.

And, we will never know about the deals that don’t come his way because a corporation that might have ponied up another fortune for a Tiger Woods endorsement decides not to approach him in the aftermath of the scandal.

Bottom line: you can’t protect your brand behind a wall of silence.

***Update: As the scandal has developed, Woods’ sponsors have moderated their “stand by our man” posture.  Click HERE for the story from the Boston Herald.