The 16 members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are researchers, scientists, and healthcare professionals. I doubt any of them has ever crafted a communications plan or formulated key messages. I would guess few if any have gone through much media training. Their skills lie in other areas.

So where were the PR professionals who should have helped prevent the stumbling, bumbling results of the Task Force’s recommendations on mammograms?

The Preventive Services Task Force is part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Its website lists a press contact as well as an Office of Communications and Knowledge Transfer. Knowledge was transferred all right, but it was cold, calloused and confusing. Shouldn’t someone have helped these people plan their strategy before going public?

Granted the task force should have known better and asked for help. Its members were naive and stupid about the impact their recommendation would have. From their perspective, they’d done a yeoman’s job, spending weeks and months focusing on facts and figures to come up with a surprising result.

Unfortunately, they forgot about the human faces behind those facts and figures.

New (social) media may give us more channels for communicating but they also give us more ways to bore our audiences. Take video, for example.

Many companies, especially large ones, have used it for a long time to talk internally to employees around the world, as well as telling their stories externally on national or local TV.

Now with the advent of easy, inexpensive cameras and YouTube, any organization can take advantage of the power of visual communication by putting their execs on video, posting it on their website, and emailing it to anybody who might be interested.

It’s a good strategy—if the execs are any good on camera. Unfortunately, most aren’t. So audiences can’t get to the stop button fast enough.

Four ways you know your so-called “talent” is boring everyone in sight:

1) The Teleprompter Stare (aka “deer in the headlights” eyes)

(This can happen with or without a Teleprompter.) Reading a prompter is a skill that looks easy but  isn’t. It takes instruction and practice to get good. Most don’t take the time. Much better to just “talk” to the camera.

2) The Endless Drone (a monotone voice with no inflection)

3) The Mannequin Delivery (stiff, no energy, no gestures, no smiling or any other facial expressions)

Equally as bad, are the hunched over posture while sitting at a desk or table, and/or leaning back too far.

4) Non-Conversational Gobbledygook (Too many words and sentences that are too long)

TV/Video is the medium least forgiving of anything that’s boring. If you’re using video and your execs don’t know how to deliver, you’re simply wasting your time.

Chris Casacchia’s column in the Phoenix Business Journal on Friday, September 4 showed a striking contrast between a communicator who doesn’t know how to write a press release quote and one who does.

Alliance Bank of Arizona had great news about reaching a critical goal: $1 billion in total assets! The president and CEO, obviously excited by his bank’s achievement, was quoted from the press release sent to Casacchia: “Reaching the $1 billion dollar milestone in total assets, driven by our exceptionally strong deposit growth, continues to illustrate the value of having a strong capital position.”

Can’t you just see him spouting that gem while toasting his company’s success!

In another segment of the column, Jacob Gold was quoted in a press release about his book “Financial Intelligence: Getting Back to Basics after an Economic Meltdown.”

“You would think that with the abundance of readily available financial information, people would know which path to take with their money,” he said. “In reality, the exact opposite is the case.”

No, it’s not perfect, but at least it’s conceivable that those words actually came out of someone’s mouth.

So who cares? Both got the publicity they were asking for. Even the lousy quote from the bank got ink.

The problem is, many reporters will go out of their way to NOT use a quote like that. And even when it’s used by a journalist who doesn’t take the time to call to get something better, it bores readers. They either don’t understand it, or it they do, they’re so turned off, they stop reading.

At least I did.

A print reporter comes to your office to do an interview for a story she’s writing. When she walks in, she pulls out her handy Flip video camera and asks if it’s okay for her to record the conversation. “Sure,” you say.

The next day, you go to the publication’s web site to see if your story is posted yet. Not only did the reporter write about what you said, but she also posted the entire video of your interview.

This has happened recently to a couple of my clients. The good news is they got more visibility and publicity. The bad news is they did the interviews as if they weren’t being taped so they didn’t come across as well as they could have.

What’s the difference? The first is how they sat. On my clients’ videos, they were hunched over a conference table with what looked like sloppy posture. One was wringing his hands during part of the interview.

When you’re on video, you want to sit with good posture, leaning about 15 degrees forward and using the front 2/3 of the chair. That way you look engaged and in control. And yes, use gestures, but don’t play with your pencil or wring your hands.

Second, they rambled with unfocused, lengthy answers. If it were just a print interview (or even an edited TV interview), the reporter could boil it down for her story, just using a quote or two. But on video, it was there for everyone to see and hear.

Third, they lacked energy and enthusiasm. They seemed bored with what they were saying. It might not have come across that way in person, but because TV absorbs energy, we have to be a little more animated than we are during a normal conversation (especially one done at the end of a long, tiring day).

Today, everybody is a journalist, TV reporter, and photographer. And, you always have to be “on.”

A twist in the story of the infamous Twitter lawsuit, which went viral on Twitter Tuesday, shows why even if reporters have a sense of humor, trying to be funny doesn’t always come out in print the way you expected.

It also shows that getting PR help and media training after a gaffe is like buying a burglar alarm after your house is robbed.

Horizon, a real-estate management company in Chicago, filed a $50,000 lawsuit against Amanda Bonnen after she sent what they claimed was a “malicious and defamatory” tweet: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s OK.”

While responding to questions about the suit, one of the owners of Horizon, Jeffrey Michael, gave the Chicago Sun Times what seemed like one of the most outrageously honest quotes in recent history: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of organization.”

As word spread across the internet, Michael realized his mistake. He—and a PR firm he apparently brought in to help rescue him—sent out a statement apologizing for his “tongue and cheek comments” regarding his company’s approach to litigation. And of course he added the old “out of context” excuse.

He went on to explain that Horizon’s lawsuit came in response to a class action lawsuit Bonnen has filed against his company. At the end of the statement—which should have been at the beginning—he said his company takes allegations of mold very seriously.

Even if Michael was being flip, he obviously doesn’t understand how reporters work and how irresistible his quote would be. If his company was going to sue someone over a tweet, shouldn’t he have been prepared with his statement before the media called rather than after?

It’s a horrible story—a couple in Florida who adopts special needs children is killed in a home invasion/robbery.

In the face of such a crisis and the national coverage it’s drawn, I’ve been impressed with the actions of the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department and especially Sheriff David Morgan.

I’ve seen five interviews on the Today Show as well as videos on other web sites. Morgan has been cool, calm, extremely credible, well-spoken and savvy (besides his rugged good looks!). He knows when not to answer questions but does it in a way that doesn’t seem evasive.

He also knows how to play for the cameras, though for me at least, not in an obnoxious way. At one news conference he hugged a sobbing daughter of one of the victims saying he’d kept a promise to her to catch the murderers.

This guy is good and I’m not sure why. He can’t have had much experience with national media. He’s been sheriff for less than a year. Interestingly, during his campaign he told a newspaper that the county of 300,000 people “isn’t Mayberry anymore”.

How sad those words proved true so quickly.

You probably heard that a parking garage collapsed in Atlanta this week. Soon afterward, a spokeswoman for Hardin Construction, the company that built the structure, emailed a statement that included these two sentences:

“To put this in perspective there are 1,415 spaces in this deck,” said Barkley Russell. “One section was involved, and it is estimated that approximately 35 spaces were affected.”

Luckily, no one was hurt in the collapse, but at the time Russell released this statement, police planned to make another sweep of the property. What if someone had been found dead? The statement from Hardin would have looked very cold-hearted.

Even without death or injury, trying to minimize a crisis insults the people who have been or could have been affected—like those whose cars were crushed in the collapse, or families who worried about someone they thought could be injured.

Minimizing what happened may make the company feel better about the situation, but it’s likely to come back and bite you.

A linebacker from the University of Texas, Sergio Kindle, crashed his car into an apartment building in Austin. His attorney, Brian Roark, admitted Kindle lost control while sending or receiving a text message.

“It was probably something he should not have been doing,” Roark said.

Gee, ya think so? Hope Roark is better in the court room than he is with the media.

We’ve all heard the old saw “practice makes perfect.” What it really should say is “the right kind of practice makes perfect (or at least pretty good).”

When talking about presentations or media interviews, the right kind of practice means saying the words out loud, not just in your head. If you’re getting ready for a media interview, pose yourself possible questions from the reporter, then answer them out loud.

The idea is not to memorize what you’re going to say, but hearing yourself say the words out loud helps you critique them and ultimately “own” them. Ideally, you could even tape yourself on a audio recorder or camera.

It’s the same with presentations. Some people talk into a mirror. That doesn’t work for me—it’s too distracting (Hmmm…my eyebrow sure looks weird when I talk). But at least stand up and deliver your presentation out loud, ideally with the slides you’ll be using, if any.

Again the idea isn’t to memorize your speech. It’s to let yourself actually hear how the words will sound when strung together so you can make adjustments if necessary.

Next to “We never let facts get in the way of a good story,” my favorite saying about the news business is “Never get into an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” It’s been attributed to Mark Twain, though I can’t confirm it.

No matter who said it first, we know the adage has been around for a long time and has been proven true time and again. So why did a hospital in northern New Jersey think it could escape the fate of so many others?

The Hackensack University Medical Center was upset that a newspaper called The Record was going to write an unflattering story about some of the hospital’s board members. So — you guessed it — an administrator called and threatened to cancel all advertising on the newspaper’s website and in print.

The story ran anyway.

Then the hospital went a step further and said the newspaper couldn’t be sold in its gift shops or anywhere on campus. And, you guessed it again, The Record wrote a story about the hospital’s reaction.

The incident ended as you might expect. The hospital apologized.

And to make the Hackensack University Medical Center look even worse, the story was written up in the New York Times. This is what’s called learning a lesson the hard way.