The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

Lori Feldman of St. Louis, Mo.  writes:

“My client is a home and garden show that’s produced in four cities—Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Portland—from late February through early March.

“We’re launching a social media plan for this company that has done nothing but traditional advertising for the last 50 years!  Last year was the first time they even attempted to collect email addresses from attendees, so we have a list of 20,000 we can use.

“As you can imagine, ad costs significantly increase each year with significantly declining ROI.  So the challenge was to find alternative media to combat the ineffectiveness of old media.  They also face these hurdles: Home starts and real estate are way down.  Young people have not supported these live shows (but this could be due to a lack of an online presence).  All marketing is local—you’re not going to jump on a plane to attend.

“Because time is short, I’d like to get as many suggestions from your readers as possible to consider every option to increase traffic.  The pre-show promotions site is http://www.ImproveYourHomeAndGarden.com. We’ll be press releasing, tweeting, and social networking between now and show day.  I can do a shopping spree contest winner.  Thoughts?”

Posted In: Advertising, Business Promotion, Press Releases/News Releases, Special Events, Twitter
posted On: 2/17/2009: 4:53 am: By Joan
Comments: 11 Comments

Here’s how a locally owned independent hardware store in Dallas, Texas piggybacked off President Bush leaving office and generated a ton of national publicity when the Associated Press picked up the story.

Elliott’s Hardware in Dallas invited former President George W. Bush to spend his retirement working as a part-time greeter at its Maple Avenue store. It mailed an invitation to Bush and also bought a full-page ad on Page 7B of Thursday’s Dallas Morning News.

“Our greeters are a legendary part of our customer service,” said Kyle Walters, Elliott’s Hardware president & CEO. “And we are offering the position to Mr. Bush in all sincerity. We think it would be a great fit for him as he settles back into life in Dallas.”

Job perks include:

–A flexible part-time schedule (to allow travel to Crawford)

–An opportunity to keep up on his people skills

–A seven-mile commute between the store and his new home

–Ample parking (including space for his security detail)

–Employee discount (for any projects Mrs. Bush may have on the
“Honey-Do” list)

–The chance to wear a company name tag with a big red W on it.

Elliott’s said it would be willing to let Bush try out the position for a day to see how he likes it before committing.

The complete greeter letter was posted at numerous blogs and websites including The Huffington Post. Bush, who hasn’t yet moved into his new home in Dallas, intends to focus on construction of his presidential library and think tank at the nearby Southern Methodist University.

Note to Elliott’s: This story is clever enough that you could have gotten the same amount of publicity without the full-page ad.

Posted In: Advertising, Blogs, Business Promotion, Celebrity tie-ins, Newspaper Publicity, The Local Angle
posted On: 2/8/2009: 6:42 pm: By Joan
Comments: 1 Comment

Kendra Hinzmann of Oshkosh, Wisconsin writes:

“I am the director for a fine art exhibit space within an upscale retirement community. This new venture was mostly set in place as life enrichment for the residents, but I really wanted to include the community as well.

“I got on board with the local Gallery Walks (over 40 local businesses) that occur monthly. That proved to be a good move and attendance had been building with the last shows at 80 and 100 (including public) respectively. I was thrilled to have booked an internationally known artist for November. He is very prestigious in the art world and thought the community would be as ecstatic as we were to have him. He generously donated his time for a great presentation and an art piece for a silent auction that would benefit our non-profit.

“I feel like I used all the correct avenues—tying it to another community event that pertained to the show’s holiday theme, printed press releases, inviting pillars of the community, Chamber of Commerce advertising that went out to 1,600 recipients, and on and on. I was shocked at our lowest turnout yet!

“Do your readers have any ideas to salvage and re-promote this show (without the artist present) that ends Jan. 15?”

Posted In: Advertising, Press Releases/News Releases, Publicity for Niche Markets, Special Events
posted On: 12/16/2008: 2:42 pm: By Joan
Comments: 5 Comments

If you’re an expert in copy writing, Internet marketing, info products or blogging, and you can write well, one of your goals for 2009 should be to submit a guest blog for Copyblogger, the wildly popular blog that teaches its massive following how to generate traffic, gain subscribers, attract links and sell something.

I’ve been wanting to submit a guest post for months, but never got around to it because I hadn’t figured out whom to contact. This week, Sonia Simone, an associate editor for Copyblogger, gave me the nudge I needed by writing What Makes a Great Copyblogger Guest Post?

Briefly, your information must be useful, relevant and well-written.

Publicity Hounds include writers and authors, advertising executives, publicists, bloggers, editors and proofreaders, Internet marketers, publishers, journalists and others who have expert advice that’s a perfect fit with Copyblogger’s audience.

Why write for Copyblogger? Because it has more than  40,000 subscribers and over 100,000 unique monthly site visitors, and you can get a backlink to your website or blog. Its “About Us” section says:

The Guardian named Copyblogger one of the world’s 50 most powerful blogs.

• Advertising Age ranks Copyblogger as a top 5 blog about marketing.
• Technorati says Copyblogger is one of the most popular blogs in the world, and a top 20 favorite among readers.
• The editors of Performancing honored Copyblogger founder and editor Brian Clark by naming him the most influential blogger of 2007, and he came in at number 30 among the 50 most influential bloggers compiled by top blogger Leo Babauta.

Visit the Copyblogger site, read the most popular posts in the right-hand column, and then figure out if you have a topic that’s a good fit. They welcome guest bloggers and would love to hear from you—me too, I hope.

Posted In: Advertising, Authors & Publishers, Blogs, Information Products, Publicity on the Internet, Social media marketing, Writing Articles
posted On: 12/11/2008: 10:01 am: By Joan
Comments: 4 Comments

With a glut of houses on the market and few buyers, here’s an almost guaranteed way for you to get free publicity for a house you’re trying to unload—and maybe even a quick sale.

This is just one of several great publicity ideas for real estate agents, too.

An old superstition says that burying a St. Joseph statue upside down near your house will result in a sale. I first heard about this back in the mid-90s when my husband and I had trouble selling our house on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border. I had already moved back to Wisconsin to take a job as editor of The Business Journal in Milwaukee, and he was stuck on the East Coast until we sold the house. 

Just as we were getting desperate, a co-worker told me about the St. Joseph trick. Willing to try anything, I bought a statue and shipped it back to Pennsylvania. While we waited for results, I wrote a column about it for The Business Journal. While searching through some old files this week, I found the column, as well as the follow-up column describing feedback from readers.

No other column I have ever written in my 22 years as a newspaper editor and reporter resulted in as many responses as these two did. In fact, Google ”St. Joseph statues” and you’ll even find website after website of St. Joseph statues, including one site that sells the St. Joseph Statue Home Sale Kit shown in the photo above.  

So what does this have to do with getting publicity for your house sale? Or for your real estate office? The old cliche “desperate times call for desperate measures” was never more relevant than it is right now, after a tumultous few months of foreclosures. 

If you’re a real estate agent or a seller, and you’re willing to discuss your experiences with the St. Joseph statue, local, regional and national media might pounce on the story. It’s quirky. It’s fun. And it brings a little levity to an otherwise grim housing market.

Here’s the first column I wrote in 1995:

House sellers call on St. Joseph     

I’m beginning to think I’m the last house-seller on earth to finally succumb to the superstition of the St. Joseph statue.

When I complained to a friend a few months ago that my house in Pennsylvania still hadn’t sold, she gave me advice that apparently everyone else has heard.  That is, bury a St. Joseph statue upside down in your backyard and the house will be sold.

Yeah, sure.

Then I heard it again from a co-worker who admitted he cheated by burying a picture of St. Joseph upside down just when he was feeling desperate.  But he sold his house anyway.

I’m not superstitious. Besides, I reasoned, the interest rates and our asking price were so low that surely somebody would bite.

That brings us to July 1995—some 13 months after we listed our four-bedroom Colonial that sits in the shadows of the Pocono Mountains near New Jersey.

We’ve dropped the price five times.  We’re offering a bonus, on top of the commission, to the real estate agent who brings us an offer we accept.  And we’re doing our best to survive the commuter marriage we’ve struggled through since October last year when we moved back to Wisconsin to join The Business Journal.

So there I was about a week ago on one of the hottest days of the year, fighting a traffic jam during my lunch hour on the way to Janzer’s store on Capitol Drive to buy a statue.

“Do you sell St. Joseph statues?”  I asked the woman behind the counter.

“We do,” she said.

She led me down an aisle to a display case, carefully removed a tan, 5-inch statue, and turned it upside down to check the inventory number.

Then she went to a nearby storage cupboard and took a small cardboard box from among dozens of other boxes stacked there.

“Do you sell many of these?”  I asked as she rang up my $3.98 purchase.

“We do,” she said.

“Do you know what they are used for?”  I asked.

“We do,” she replied, the corners of her mouth breaking into the tiniest of grins.

“Well, do they work?”  I asked.

“Based on what our customers tell us, they do,” she said.

Not another word was exchanged.  I raced back to the office.  Within hours, St. Joseph was on a UPS truck, headed for Pennsylvania.

Now, here’s the dilemma.

My husband is standing by, ready to bury this thing.  But we’re getting conflicting reports from all quarters on the proper protocol.  Those offering advice are almost passionate about explaining the exact way it should be done.

Frankly, we’re confused.

Should my husband start digging in the front yard or backyard? Should he bury the statue upside down, right-side up, or on its side?  Head pointed away from the house or doesn’t it matter?

If we accept an offer, what do we do?  Unearth St. Joseph and bring him back to Wisconsin for good luck?  Don’t touch him, somebody warned, or the whole deal will fall through.

So now what?

I’ll bet lots of you have your own stories to tell.  Surely real estate agents know about this stuff.  My own agent here in Wisconsin swears by the powers of the statue, but she isn’t sure about the burial etiquette.

As for the clerk at Janzer’s, I suspect she knows plenty.  But at the time, I was too embarrassed to ask.

Here’s the column I wrote a few weeks later:

Faith moves mountains, homes

Centuries from now, when archaeologists sift through the ruins of southeastern Wisconsin, can’t you just picture them scratching their heads as they begin unearthing hundreds—maybe even thousands—of St. Josephs statues?

I now they’re out there, because you told me so.

They’re buried inside shoeboxes, empty mayonnaise jars, plastic bags and pieces of aluminum foil.

They’re concealed beneath garden plots, flower beds, shrubbery and patches of crabgrass in front yards, backyards and every plot of land inbetween.

If there’s a desperate house-seller like me, chances are good there’s a St. Joseph statue buried nearby.

Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you earlier to report on the results of my little survey from several weeks ago.  But I’ve been busy taking your calls and reading the yellowed newspaper clippings you sent about how this whole thing got started.

I’ve also been on the phone with my husband, who’s still living in Pennsylvania, making sure he follows the directions you gave me so we can finally unload our house after more than a year.

The protocol, I’m told, goes something like this.  Bury the St. Joseph statue upside down in your backyard and then wait for the offers to start rolling in.  Some of you follow that ritual with a seven-day novena to St. Joseph, the patron saint of households, families and laborers.  Others spend a few bucks on a newspaper ad that says something like, “St. Joseph, we pray to you,” thus also making him the patron saint of newspaper classifieds.

After the house sells, unearth the statue, take it with you to your new home and display it prominently as a way to thank the fellow who made it all possible.

Is that easy, or what?  Best of all, you told me, it works.

Marion Nelson of Milwaukee sent me an old newspaper clipping about a New Jersey woman whose husband was laid off from his job at a stone quarry near the turn of the century. The women owned a small St. Joseph statue, tied a long piece of string around its neck and hung it from her roof in the middle of winter, with the vow that she wouldn’t remove it until her husband was called back to work.

The statue got quite a beating from those wicked East Coast winds.  A few months later…well, I’m sure you can guess how it all ended.  In fact, the statue worked so well that the woman started burying it everywhere and reaped the benefits of one miracle after another.

Someone else told me the practice started when a group of nuns from way back couldn’t afford a plot of land on which they wanted to build a convent.  So they buried a St. Joseph statue there and—voila!—a convent was erected.

The most incredible story I heard—some might say right out of the Twilight Zone—came from Marie Cutraro, who was desperate to sell her home near North 48th Street and West Villard Avenue in Milwaukee about four years ago.  It was a frigid March day when she wanted to bury her statue, but the ground was still frozen.

So her husband piled charcoal on the ground, started a fire and kept dousing it with gasoline to keep it going until the ground finally thawed.  Then he dug a hole and dropped St. Joseph inside.

A few days later, the couple left on vacation.  While they were away, they got a call from their real estate agent.

“She told me to break out the champagne because we got an offer in our price range,” Mrs. Cutraro said.

Here’s the kicker.  The buyers made the offer on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph.  I can just see all you good Catholics nodding in unison and saying “I told you so.”

As for me, I’m still waiting.  My husband buried our statue in a shoebox a few weeks ago in our backyard.  The next morning, he found it laying on top of the ground, with little chips in the base, and the shoebox ripped to shreds.  We figured the neighborhood raccoons dug it up, hoping there was food inside.

St. Joseph since has been returned to his cardboard coffin where he rests, safe and sound, one foot under.

I visit Pennsylvania every few weekends.  And we always discuss whether to lower the price of our house once again.  But from now on, I’m not taking any chances.

On my next visit, I’ll have another statue in tow, and an extra long piece of string.

The rest of the story

We buried the second statue. After only a few weeks, we got not one, but THREE offers within 24 hours. We accepted an offer at a ridiculously low price and, 14 months after we listed it, took a huge loss on the house. 

The world is filled with so many stories similar to mine that in 2003, Stephen  Binz wrote the book St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent. It includes lots of those stories.

But not everything works out for the best.

One home seller who wasn’t seeing any results moved his statue from the frontyard to the backyard to the side of the house. Eventually, he threw it in the trash.

A few days later, he opened the newspaper and saw the headline “Local Dump Has Been Sold.”

Posted In: Advertising, Authors & Publishers, Business Promotion, Newspaper Publicity, Publicity for Niche Markets, TV Publicity
posted On: 12/8/2008: 3:59 pm: By Joan
Comments: 3 Comments