2005 May

May sweeps month not a good time to pitch TV news

5/12/2005 By Joan

If you’re pitching your local TV stations and not having much luck this month, it might be because we’re in the middle of May sweeps. Newsrooms everywhere are broadcasting their big investigative stories designed to boost the all important Nielsen ratings.

Unless your pitch is time-sensitive, hold off pitching for another few weeks. Use this time to start thinking of ideas you can pitch through the summer. If you get stuck, don’t despair. TV reporter Shawn Duperon helped me cook up 229 story ideas that can be spread over 12 months. We explained them during two teleseminars we recorded:

“116 WOW! Story Ideas from January through June”

“103 Sizzling Story Ideas from July Through December”

Filed Under: TV Publicity

Please, no boring press conferences

5/12/2005 By Joan

Why do I call them boring news conferences?

Because during my 22 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, I can’t remember attending one news conference that wasn’t a waste of time. Once, when I worked as an editor, I remember getting a call from a PR guy who screamed at me over the phone because no one from my newspaper or any other media outlet attended his news conference. And his boss was livid.

I can keep a lot of you from making the same mistake he did. Forget the news conference. Instead, offer reporters something far more interesting.

During last week’s teleseminar titled “Supercharge Your Press Releases by Injecting Them with Magic and Wonder,” sponsored by Bulldog Reporter’s PR University, three other guest panelists joined me in critiquing pitch letters and news releases submitted by people who paid to be on the line. One news release was about a farm program that gives high school students hands-on experience in agriculture and environmental projects.

The original pitch was a news release alerting the media to a farms program field day in which high school students and teachers learn about the interrelationships between science, agriculture and natural resource conservation through hands-on experiences. The day kicked off with a news conference in the morning, followed by a lesson on how to build owl boxes. Students would then break up into teams and build the boxes using saws, drills and hammers.

My advice was to scrap the ho-hum news release and the news conference and, instead, issue this invitation to each reporter:

“Hi Nancy:

“While the rest of us are awakening, our friend the owl is preparing to leave its perch in a tree and retreat to its wooden box for a good day’s sleep.

“We want to make sure there are enough owl boxes to go around. So this Thursday, students and teachers at Central High School will build wooden owl boxes as part of a day-long project that teaches conservation. Because you’re the nature reporter at the Gazette, we thought you might want to join us. We’ll even be able to give you written instructions that you can share with your readers. Because we’ll be doing this project in an old barn, we suggest you wear jeans and a sweatshirt. We hope you can join us.”

What would make the pitch even more enticing would be to place each reporter on a different team, then judge which team built the best owl box.

If I had received that kind of pitch when I worked as a reporter, I’d be headed for the barn even before I could RSVP! Pass up a chance to crawl out of my pantyhose and into jeans and a sweatshirt for several hours? No way. It would be a heck of a lot more fun than covering a news conference and standing around watching everybody else have a good time.

The next time you’re tempted to cop out with a news conference, instead, create an interesting event–preferably one in which you can get reporters involved. A teleseminar I hosted called “Creative Alternatives to Boring Press Conferences” gives you dozens of ideas for events and publicity stunts you can stage that will attract the media like a magnet.

Filed Under: Pitching the Media

How an author/therapist piggybacked onto runaway bride

5/12/2005 By Joan

As I was writing last week’s tip about how to piggyback off the runaway bride story, my friend Barbara Bartlein was doing just that.

Barbara, a professional speaker and author of the book “Why Did I Marry You Anyway? –12.5 Strategies for a Happy Marriage,” saw all the attention the Runaway Bride was getting and fired off a press release. A relationship expert, Barb says 20 percent of engaged couples, or almost a half million people, end up breaking their engagement each year. Even worse, most couples end up discussing their wedding more than their marriage. You can read he release here.

The release resulted in 12 radio interviews last week and Barb continues to schedule more throughout the U.S. and Canada. On a show in Toronto, Barb gave her advice on the runaway bride story (have a smaller wedding) and talked about what marriage is REALLY about. She even responded to listeners who called in.

One caller took her to task for her comment that “Marriage isn’t about love. It’s about trust and commitment.”

“But love makes the world go ’round!” the caller chided.

“Love might very well make the world go ’round,” Barb replied. “But marriage isn’t about love. It’s about snore strips and flannel nightgowns.”

Isn’t that a memorable sound bite? As someone who has been known to wear snore strips AND flannel nightgowns, though not necessarily at the same time, well maybe once or twice, I immediately felt a connection.

How memorable are your sound bites? And how quickly do you jump on a breaking news event to promote your expertise? When Barbara sent out her simple, but timely, releases, she got booked on some very big radio programs, too.

Alex Carroll, a veteran of more than 1,264 radio talk show interviews, will spill the beans on what you need to do if you want to get onto the really big radio shows. He’ll be my guest during a teleseminar at 4 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, May 26. It’s called “Get Booked on Big Radio Shows in the Top 20 Markets.” If you can’t attend the teleseminar, you can order the CD.

Filed Under: Authors & Publishers, Press Releases/News Releases, Publicity on the Internet, Radio Publicity

PR pros still far behind with blogging

5/6/2005 By Joan

When I attended the Media Relations 2005 conference in San Francisco April 10-12, one the things that surprised me most was that the PR profession doesn’t take blogging as seriously as it should. There was only one panel devoted to blogging and RSS feeds. And I sat at a table with PR people who told me their bosses already have told them “abolsutely no blogs.”

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

When blogger and publicity expert BL Ochman discovered that the Public Relations Society of America failed to include a program on blogging at this month’s 2004 International Conference, she was aghast.

The tagline for the PRSA convention Oct. 23-26 in New York City is “architects of change, advocates of understanding.” So, she reasoned, why would the 20,000-member group ignore the PR profession’s newest and most powerful communications tool?

“Individual chapters have done blogging seminars, most notably a teleseminar which was attended by 300 people,” BL said. “But that is NOT the same as the international conference including blogging. With 4 million people blogging, this is a very fossilized attitude on their part.”

Other bloggers and journalists picked up on the controversy, which soon was all over the Internet. BL refused to give up and issued an outright challenge to PRSA to add a blogging program. Buoyed by support from fellow bloggers who joined the campaign, BL’s persistence finally paid off. Days before the conference opened, when one of PRSA’s other programs was cancelled, it added a segment on blogging–one week after BL first started writing about it.

“As bloggers write about an issue, it starts to get into Google very quickly,” BL said. “Within a few hours, my posts about PRSA’s conference had started to rise up in PRSA’s own listings in Google. If you go to Google and type in ‘PRSA 2004 conference,’ you’ll get linked to the blogs where I wrote about this.”

PRSA says it received more than 400 proposals from people who wanted to present at the conference, but none on the topic of blogging. The final program was created based on topic relevance and what members said they wanted or needed.

Even though PRSA certainly should have had a session on blogging initially, the group was wise to finally add one before the pressure became even more embarrassing.

BL says there are more things you must know about bloggers and why blogging is a valuable PR tool for your business. She shared dozens of tips last year during the telephone seminar “Blogging 101: How to Use Weblogs for Publicity.” Read more about what we discussed, or order the CD or cassette tape.

Filed Under: Publicity on the Internet

Build relationships with reporters

5/4/2005 By Joan

Get to know reporters who you want to cover you, and start building relationships.

But how do you start building relationships with someone you don’t know, particularly a reporter who is pitched dozens of times a day?

Take a tip from Jeffrey O’Brien, senior editor at Wired magazine.

“We love to talk about our work,” he said. “On a very rare occasion, I get an email that says, ‘I read that cover story you did and it really touched me.’ If you have the time, email me and tell me what you think about something I wrote. I’ll come back and say do you, ‘What do you do?’ ”

He offered the advice at the Media Relations 2005 conference in San Francisco last month when he was part of a media panel that discussed ways to build relationships with reporters.

Panelist Raul Ramirez, news director of KQED radio, a National Public Radio station in Northern California, said that when you offer feedback to journalists, it doesn’t always have to be positive.

“Sometimes it can be thoughtful criticism, something in hindsight that demonstrates something we’re trying to do and where we’ve fallen short of our goals,” Ramirez said.

You can read more of their tips on how to build relationships in the May/June 2005 issue of The Publicity Hound subscription newsletter. Click here to order.

Filed Under: Magazine Publicity, Newspaper Publicity, Pitching the Media