Want to attend a half-day publicity and social media  workshop in San Francisco at a reduced rate?

Host me either on Thursday, March 8, or Friday, March 9. I need a room big enough to hold about 30 people for a public workshop. It doesn’t have to be a hotel. Corporate conference rooms or university classrooms work just fine.

I’ll be speaking on Saturday, March 10, at the Independent Book Publishers Association’s annual Publishing University on Saturday, March 10,  at the Sheraton Fisherman’s Wharf Hotel. I’ll be on these panels:

Advanced Techniques for Creating Websites/Blogs That SELL at 9 a.m.

Using Facebook and Twitter to Jump-start Sales at 1:45 p.m.

Getting Attention: Promoting Your Titles to Bloggers and Online Communities at 3:15 p.m.
Register here for that event.

I love piggybacking my own public workshops onto others where I’m speaking in the same town. So if you’re in or near the Bay Area, and you’d like to partner with me, email me or call 262-284-7451 and let’s talk!

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

10 content marketing tips for 2012. http://ow.ly/8mLqd

Top 3 Video Marketing Lessons from Nielsen. http://ow.ly/8mLRO

Bloggers: Want (recurring) donations from your readers? Just ask! http://ow.ly/8ohOz

Daily newspapers going the way of the milkman. http://ow.ly/8ox57

Authors: 10 Cool & Creative Ideas for Bookmarks. http://ow.ly/8pyWH

Blogggers & Columnists: Submit your best stuff for the 2012 Column Contest. http://ow.ly/8oy5O

How to Destroy Your Online Reputation in 3 Days or Less http://ow.ly/8obvQ

How to learn which content you’re sharing on Facebook is hitting your fans’ hot buttons. http://ow.ly/8ohbA

5 incredibly fun ideas to build your fan base & engage them on Facebook & Twitter. http://ow.ly/8mNYQ

16 things to check when you edit. http://ow.ly/8mNBH

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Top 10 creative writing blogs. http://ow.ly/8gzJb

Top 5 New Year’s Resolutions for improving your presence on LinkedIn. http://ow.ly/8gBr9

10-point checklist for growing your blog in 2012. http://ow.ly/8gBY9

10 reasons why you might not be attracting the right (or any) Twitter followers. http://ow.ly/8i6tI

Authors, do you make these 3 disastrous book-writing mistakes? http://ow.ly/8i8gM

New to speaking? 5 great venues where you can book gigs and learn the ropes. http://ow.ly/8ikNR

How bloggers can use book reviews to connect with expert authors & tips on how to write reviews. http://ow.ly/8ikbh

3 big benefits to reading your articles aloud before publishing, from Ann Wylie. http://ow.ly/8jvrx

Get credit for your PR brilliance. Bulldog’s Media Relations Awards deadline is 1/16. http://ow.ly/8kuYP

Hospitals: Want Boomer business? Focus on content marketing & social media. http://ow.ly/8kw7n

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Prevent the “lago effect” from dooming your CEO who tries to “help” during a crisis. http://paper.li/clayedwardspr/pr-pros-paper

How Restaurants Are Using Social Media to Their Advantage. http://tinyurl.com/8xbuyuo

How to Use Great Testimonials, Once You Get Them. http://ow.ly/8b2LS

Get Blog Results for Business | Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad | Writing On The Web. http://tinyurl.com/7dzodzr

Top 50 Women Entrepreneur Experts to Follow on Twitter. http://ow.ly/8dj2U

Nice year-end gift for your clients. Free ebook with 2 dozen publicity/social media tips. http://ow.ly/8dj8Z

5 clever uses of LinkedIn’s brand new “group polls” feature. http://ow.ly/8dkJL

5-part strategy for cashing in on content and social media marketing in 2012. http://ow.ly/8dTU6

Freelancers: Pick up some extra cash in 2012. Pitch articles to these paying markets. http://ow.ly/8dUTu

Authors: Compare major print-on-demand companies. http://ow.ly/8dV2u

This week’s Help This Hound question is from Anne Roos of South Lake Tahoe, CA:

“I’m an author and I’ve received 40 free books from the publicist I used last year, 20 copies each of  ”The Musician’s Guide to Brides: How to Make Money Playing Weddings” and “The Brides Guide to Musicians: Live Wedding Music Made Easy and Affordable.”

“They were copies supplied without cost from the publisher to be sent out for review. Since I didn’t pay for them, I want to do a giveaway.

“What’s the most effective way to do a contest/giveaway? Where do I post it to get it noticed? Should it be a quiz with a question of the day? Should it be some kind of silly trivia? I just don’t know how to attract people to a little contest.

 ”Even when I had a big grand prize giveaway that I tried out about a year ago, it garnered very little interest. I’d love ideas from your Hounds on how to really attract attention with this.”

Ideas are welcome below. If you have your own dilemma involving publicity or social media, email it to me.

“The Musician’s Guide to Brides: How to Make Money Playing Weddings” and “The Bride’s Guide to Musicians: Live Wedding Music Made Easy and Affordable”

.

Karin Rex of Lansdale, Pa., asks this week’s ”Help This Hound” question:

My book, Microsoft Office 2010 Demystified, was just published a few weeks ago. But the publisher is doing NO publicity for the book. The Demystified series is one of their best book series with over 100 titles!

Obviously, I’ll need to toot my own horn, but how?

The primary audience for this book is professors/teachers who teach courses that involve Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or Access. The book covers all five applications and includes quizzes at the end of every chapter and a final exam at the end of the book. The obvious secondary audience is, well, anybody else who uses Office. Here are a few snippets from a recent Computerworld article:

“Office 2010 is the most successful consumer version we have ever shipped, and the product is also performing extremely well in the business segment,” said Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer.

“Office 2010 is the fastest-selling consumer version of Office in history, with license sales over 50% ahead of Office 2007 for the equivalent period following launch,” said Bill Koefoed, the general manager for investor relations at Microsoft.

With numbers like that, you KNOW a lot of people are gonna need a book like mine! So, can your Hounds throw me a bone and offer their best tips on how I can spread the word?

This guest post was written by author Marcia Yudkin, whose books include, Publicity Tactics and 6 Steps to Free Publicity as well as the new Kindle ebook, The Sound Bite Workbook. She lives in Goshen, MA. Visit http://www.yudkin.com for more information on her work.

*  *  *

Snagging an interview makes it possible for you to get quoted by the media. To boost your chances of actually getting air time or column inches from what you say during the interview, however, spend time beforehand creating a set of sound bites. These delicious word morsels are fun to hear or read and irresistible for the media to pass along.

Here are six sources of ideas for sound bites.
    

1. Triples.

You may have noticed that a lot of jokes start off with a priest, a minister and a rabbi. That’s because our minds like triples. That’s why although Winston Churchill said in a famous speech, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” many people remembered his point afterwards as just “blood, sweat and tears.” Make a list of keywords for your subject matter and look for catchy combinations of threes. For example, if you’re a personal trainer, you could tell a reporter that you “help out-of-shape people get fit without pain, tedium or humiliation.”
     
    
2. Tweaked clichés.

Everyone loves an unexpected version of a familiar saying. Look up your keywords at www.westegg.com/cliche or www.clichesite.com and then start twisting what you find. For instance, if you’re a credit union commenting on recent developments in the world of banking, you could play on a common motto with “Money doesn’t grow on trees, but it does grow faster in credit unions without those greedy big-bank fees.”
     
    

3. Contrast, conflict or paradox.

A statement combining opposites commands attention. An ad for my local hospital used this principle effectively in its headline: “Nationally Ranked. Locally Loved.”

Likewise, my local paper ran a story about two guys who once made a feature film that flopped and created a documentary about their failure. The promotional line for their documentary contained interesting tension: “They don’t teach failure in film school.”
     
    
4. Clever mnemonic.

If you studied music as a kid, you may recall the formula naming the lines of the treble clef: “Every Good Boy Does Fine” (E-G-B-D-F). Create a sound bite for yourself by making the initials of a key phrase used in your business stand for something interesting. Someone who trains virtual assistants – VAs – to make a healthy income could say, “My graduates know that ‘VA’ actually stands for ‘very affluent.”
     
    
5. Details.

Review your case studies, client advice, bio and blog for details that can take on iconic significance. Have you noticed how often the number “99%” has been repeated in the U.S. political arena in the last few months? For you, the key detail might be your percentage of repeat customers, your documented accuracy rate, your carbon-neutral score – or something other than a number, like “The only thing left after the tornado destroyed our office was a teddy bear we used to keep in the waiting room to comfort our young patients.”
     
    
6. Bare-bones story.

If you can boil down a dramatic transformation into just one or two sentences, that can become a powerful sound bite. “She used to wait forever for elevators rather than take the stairs. Now she uses the stairs to train out of season for her mountain climbs all over the world.” “When it came to women, he used to be the king of the locker-room brag. Now he helps couples in marital trouble restore fidelity and mutual respect.”

After you’ve settled on the rough idea for a sound bite, fiddle with the wording so you make it as tight and pointed as you can. Often you can heighten the impact of an already good idea with a pleasing rhythm, rhyme or alliteration (as with the repeated f’s in “They don’t teach failure in film school”. And did you notice the emotion in my sound bite examples? That’s one more element that contributes to their quotability.

*  *  *

The Publicity Hound says: Marcia Yudkin writes fabulous guest blog posts. But she doesn’t blog. And she says you don’t have to, either. Read why here.

Poor authors place their hopes, dreams, sweat, blood and money only into their books.

If the book fails, the author fails.

Rich authors use the book as a calling card to upsell readers to a wide variety of other products and services like: coaching programs, board games, wall calendars, membership programs, and more. That’s one of the key differences between rich authors and poor authors.

Learn the other six at a free 75-minute telephone seminar hosted by Steve Harrison of Radio-TV Interview Report, at 2 and 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Oct. 13. Even though the call is free, I promote it as a compensated affiliate because I’ve seen hundreds of authors miss this important distinction and tie up their life’s savings in cardboard boxes of books they can’t sell.

Register for the call, “How to Achieve A Lot More Success As An Author By Discovering The Seven Things Rich Authors Know That Poor Authors Don’t.”

It used to be easy to find the movers and shakers who were the most influential people within their topic areas. But not anymore, thanks to social media.

PR and marketing pros who need to find the heavy-hitter  journalists, talk show hosts, bloggers, authors, experts and Facebook users who are discussing a particular topic right now, can slog their way through a variety of tools.

They can use Klout, which measures online influence, but only for those who are on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Klout’s generic score ignores how often that person is quoted or discussed in traditional media.

Google Alerts can tell you instantly which bloggers are discussing certain topics. But the alerts don’t measure the blogger’s influence.

A new tool from Appinions, a New York company, tracks traditional and social media to round out a true picture of influence. It’s a subscription-based service that matches influencers to specific topics, based on opinions it finds from news reports, blogs, tweets, TV transcripts and social networks.
     
    
Give Your Clients an Edge

Within seconds, PR and marketing people can identify the most influential people who can move the needles of influence. Then, they can lead their clients to those experts to comment on a blog post, write a letter to the editor, pitch a story, offer background information for a journalist’s article, or offer commentary for an author’s forthcoming book—long before the client’s competitors are even aware that there’s a hot topic being discussed.

Watch this short video to see how it works.

Larry Levy, CEO of Appinions, will give you a free demonstration, perfect for PR and marketing pros, during a webinar I’m hosting from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Oct. 13. Register today because we have room for only 50 people.

Levy will explain the three key elements that the service measures to determine influence:

• Are trusted writers and publications covering the influencer’s opinions?
      
• Is the influencer’s opinion being shared, retweeted, quoted, requoted and linked?
    
• When did a certain topic or issue first emerge, and who introduced it?

The ideal company for this service is a PR or marketing agency that has multiple clients and does at least $5 million a year in revenue.