The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

Patti Chavet of Frisco, Texas writes:

“I’m a sales consultant and I want to brand myself as an expert in active adult lifestyle living in Texas.

“My target market is Baby Boomers, age 55 and older, who want to downsize to a maintenance-free home so they’re free explore personal hobbies, interests, public service, education, travel, etc., all in the company of others who share the same lifestyle.

“I work for Del Webb, whose communities traditionally have targeted retirees looking to downsize. I’m new to marketing, and I’d like ideas and advice on how to use traditional and social media to become the go-to person in Texas who can help Baby Boomers move from big houses to easy-to-manage single-family homes in Del Webb communities.

“Where should I begin? I’ve been in this niche market for more than 20 years, so I’m already an expert. My challenge is to now spread the word throughout Texas. I’d love to hear suggestions from your Publicity Hounds.” 

Posted In: Advertising, Business Promotion, Publicity for Niche Markets, Social media marketing
posted On: 3/2/2010: 11:12 am: By Joan
Comments: 4 Comments

Jenni Bowring-McDonough of St. Paul, MN, writes:

“My husband, Tim McDonough, is a graphic artist who is now producing book trailers at Standard Book Videos.

“Because I work in publishing, I introduced him to our president who hired Tim to design several trailers (book videos) for us. That’s terrific, but Tim needs more exposure to attract more clients. He advertised in the event catalog for a regional publishers conference and he will be running an ad in ForeWord Magazine’s national online newsletter later this month. 

“We have reached out to other local publishers to introduce Tim’s business. He’s on Twitter, and we will be building a Facebook page soon. We have also reached out to other contacts via the local Book Publishers Association, but thus far, to no avail.

“I even pitched Tim’s story of reinventing himself after 20 years in broadcast news to several weeklies and dailies, but no one bit on the idea.  We have also begun branching out into web videos and hope to expand into promotional/sales web videos for small businesses. Thanks for any and all advice!”

Posted In: Advertising, Authors & Publishers, Facebook, Twitter, Video
posted On: 2/9/2010: 12:46 pm: By Joan
Comments: 8 Comments

If your organization publishes a membership directory, allow members to include URLs for social media sites like Facebook Fan pages, Twitter profiles, YouTube channels and LinkedIn profiles, not just URLs for their websites.

That would be a nice value-added feature for chambers of commerce, convention and visitors bureaus, health care associations, school groups, etc. and it would distinguish your group’s benefits from those of your competitors.

I just received a copy of the 2010 Business Directory for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. While glancing through the members’ section, I noticed that all the companies, even mine, have only the URLs for their websites.

Can’t afford to let every member include social media URLs because of high printing costs? Then charge a small additional fee. 

Does your organization include these URLs in its membership directories? If not, why not? What other information do you include that members find valuable?

Posted In: Advertising, Business Promotion, Facebook, LinkedIn, Nonprofits, Social media marketing, Twitter, YouTube
posted On: 1/23/2010: 9:36 am: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

If you’re trying to get onto local radio stations, but you don’t have money to spend on advertising, offer the station free recorded 30-second  spots filled with valuable how-to information their listeners will enjoy.

Tie it into a month of the year that’s related to your topic, and you just might generate some valuable free exposure for next to nothing.

This is more difficult to do today than it would have been 10 years ago because radio stations, like their brethren in the print media, are seeing ad revenues plummet. But I know some local radio stations still do trade-outs with local vendors, so that might be an alternative to asking them to just hand over free air time.

I was reminded of this tip when Beverly Belury, who has been through my mentor program, wrote this week asking what I thought about an idea that her husband, leadership consultant John Hersey, was considering:

“Motivational speaker Earl Nightingale’s wife lives in our little town and having met her last week reminded John of a dream he had. He loves Earl’s inspiration thoughts that were frequently on radio stations.  They were quick spots that the station used as filler. 

“John would like to do something along the same lines.  John has developed oodles of thoughtful quotes and inspirational thoughts on self leadership over the last 12 or so years and we are thinking about giving them to radio stations to use as they want. 

“We would send out a dozen or so professionally done audio spots a month. First, is there a challenge in what we want to do. Would you recommend 30-, 45- or 60-second spots or even longer? Do you think this is a worthwhile project?”

Her question jogged my memory. I remembered a teleseminar I had conducted several years ago with Dan Collins, media relalations director at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. It was called How to Make Hospital PR an Easy Pill to Swallow.

During the call, Dan explained how he ad gotten thousands of dollars in free publicity for his hospital by doing something similar to what Beverly had asked me about. His strategy was successful, and there’s no reason why it can’t work for you, too, depending on the product, service, cause or issue you’re trying to promote, and the type of station you’re targeting.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript that explains what Dan did an how he did it:

Dan Collins: I contacted WLIF, which is a leading light station here in Baltimore and I contacted the news director and I said, “Hey, where you aware about this being National Nutrition Week?” I called this particular news director because I happen to know that fitness was a pet thing for her.  In fact, she was seeing a personal trainer that I had recommended and that I’ve worked with here at Mercy and have done some media for. I knew that it was something near and dear to her heart and I said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. If you think this is interesting, we can provide you with a dietitian who could come in and give you a series of tips, throughout the whole course of the month, about how to stay fit and what to eat and what not to eat. What would you think about that?” 

She said, “Well, that would be great,” because that way she could run a spot every day.  The person could come in and tape them all at once, do it in one shot.  “If it would be easier, do you want us to write it or do you want to write it?” she asked. ”Oh no, we’ll write it,” I said. 

Obviously, we’ll write the piece, that way we can control the script.  And so we did, and the dietitian recorded the various tips and made sure to plug Mercy in each spot and “if you’d like to find out more, call Mercy Medical Center at 1-800-MD-MERCY. 

They ran these every day for the whole month and it didn’t cost us anything.  If we had booked this as commercial time, it would have cost thousands of dollars, but because it was something that was near and dear to the news director’s heart, I was able to convince them that this would be a fun thing to do. It would be one less thing each day that they would have to worry about filling. So we looked at it from the station’s viewpoint and really got some nice publicity.

Joan: You had one spot aired each day?

Dan: Yes.

Joan: For a month?

Dan: Yes.

Joan:  Hospitals probably don’t even have to do that just during National Nutrition Week.  You can probably find all different kinds of days, weeks and months of the year to tie into.

Dan:  Oh, absolutely. I’ve got the schedule hanging up on my wall. I’m looking at it now.  We’re in August, which is Cataract Awareness Month. It’s also Medical Alert Awareness Month and Spinal Muscular Atrophy Awareness Month.  You’ve always got to look ahead and see what’s coming up.  Radio is an underutilized medium. 

The whole world of radio may change, but with this new sort of cable—you hear about cable radio, satellite radio—I don’t know how that’s going to ultimately change everything, but in the land of free radio, many stations have news directors and public service programming that they have to fill. 

Health is always a story, and as we’ve noted, doctors are hard to get a hold of.  You can call up a station and say: “Hey, it’s Healthy Lung Month and I have a pulmonary specialist who can talk to you about it. Did you know, for example, there’s enough nicotine in a single cigar to kill you three times over? And talk about things like that.” Then they’re going to say, “Well, you know, it’s great.”

Joan:  There are two really good resources out there for finding these special days, weeks and months of the year that you can tie your hospital experts into or your hospital into.  The first and probably the most popular is called the Chase’s Calendar of Events, and it’s about as big as a small phone book. You can find it at Chases.com.

There’s another book that was written by John Kremer called Celebrate Today.  I think you can even search by the month and come up with all kinds of interesting days, weeks and months of the year to tie your press releases and story ideas into.

Dan:  Absolutely.

As for John Hersey, he needs to remember that business topics generally aren’t a big draw for local radio stations. But because he’s a motivational speaker, he might offer inspirational messages for mass audiences, instead. Good luck, John! Be sure to let me know if you’re successful.  

Posted In: Advertising, Authors & Publishers, Radio Publicity
posted On: 12/7/2009: 10:02 am: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Piggybacking onto hot celebrity gossip ranks right up there as one of the best ways to generate free publicity for your product, service, cause or issue.

But hurry. This story may be old news by the end of the week.

Here are the Top 10 ways to create free publicity for yourself by participating in the Tiger Woods conversation online and offline:

1. If you’re an expert in a topic that ties into this drama, pitch influential bloggers who are writing about the story. Explain your area of expertise and offer commentary.
       
2. Post comments at high-traffic blogs like Huffington Post that are discussing the story. Ditto at blogs written by journalists, like sports columnist Jason Whitlock whose post on Tiger’s Real Crime? Not Playing the Media’s Game attracted more than 500 comments in about two hours this morning. Weave into your comment information about your expertise. If appropriate, lead people back to your website where they can find tips, advice or a quiz that ties into the topic.
        
3. If you’re a divorce attorney who can talk about prenups, an ad agency executive who’s an expert on branding or celebrity endorsements, a crisis counselor or PR pro who can discuss PR 101, and even a minister who can offer tips on how to forgive, write a letter to the editor of local, regional and national publications where the stories are appearing.
         
4. Call your local TV stations and offer yourself as the local angle to this international story. Offer a list of short tips.
         
5. Create a short two-minute video offering advice on what others can learn from Tiger’s mess and upload it to YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. Tag it with keywords that people are using to search for information on the story.
         
6. Subscribe to free media leads services like HARO and PitchRate, or paid services like ProfNet and PRLeads, so you know about the types of sources journalists are seeking for their stories.
           
7. Offer to write a guest blog post about it, with tips and advice. BloggerLinkUp helps guest bloggers and bloggers who need guest posts find each other. 
       

8. Pitch clever angles to this story to drive-time radio show hosts. Example: A cell phone expert can pitch a story on “Got a dirty little secret? 5 ways to cover your tracks on your cell phone.”         

9. Write your own blog post that ties into Tiger Woods, include lots of outbound links, and then bookmark it at sites like Digg and Delicious. The “Top 10 Tips…” headline works well. I got the idea for this post while reading Tip #3 in Bryan Eisenbertg’s blog post on Top 3 Problems of Social Media.
           
10.  Do all of the above, and link to them from Twitter and Facebook.

If you’ve piggybacked off the Tiger Woods is story to generate free publicity for yourself or clients, or you’d like to add to this list, join the conversation.    

Posted In: Advertising, Blogs, Celebrity tie-ins, Crisis Communications, Facebook, Newspaper Publicity, PR Consultants/Publicists, Pitching the Media, Social media marketing, TV Publicity, Twitter, Video, YouTube
posted On: 12/3/2009: 1:27 pm: By Joan
Comments: 3 Comments