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

How entrepreneurs decide how to post on LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter. http://ow.ly/8MvYM

4 easy tactics for becoming a must-follow account on Twitter.  http://ow.ly/8MHte

5 Ways Writers Can Break Out of the Tired Old Social Media Box.  http://ow.ly/8Mxlx

How to keep your face out of LinkedIn ads. http://ow.ly/8Mw6j

Don’t create your next info-product until you watch this cool video that explains a smart 5-step system. http://ow.ly/8Onwp

13 Ways To Get More Traffic & Publicity From Slideshare. http://ow.ly/8OA68

Top 30 PR Do’s and Don’ts. http://ow.ly/8OzE4

18-point checklist for proofreaders. http://ow.ly/8PTc9

Press Release Tip: Always include a strong call to action & explain EXACTLY what you want people to do (click, call, write…)

The Inside Scoop on Using Twitter Lists for Profit and Sanity http://ow.ly/8Rgbr

Cary Goldwasser and Diane Kline

Diane Kline of St. Louis, MO, writes:

“I am the co-author of QuirkOut! Crazy Things Women do to Stay Sane.  It’s a blog and weekly column, for women 20 through death, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper on Sundays—sort of a Martha Stewart meets Tina Fey.

“We all have QuirkOut! moments. We just named them. They are quirky behaviors that help women of all ages get through our busy lives – such as taking three purses on an overnight trip or keeping shoes in the oven when we run out of closet space.

“We’re trying to increase the number of Likes on our Facebook page at Facebook.com/quirkout and encourage women to submit their QuirkOut! moments to use on our blog. We occasionally feature some of these items in our Post-Dispatch column.

“We’re hoping your Publicity Hounds can offer some helpful tips on how we can reach women by using both traditional and social media.”

Another case of a celebrity behaving badly, and another opportunity for Publicity Hounds in a variety occupations to generate some PR by tying into this story.

This time, it’s Alec Baldwin who was kicked off an American Airlines plane on Tuesday for refusing to stop playing Zynga’s Words With Friends on his phone.  The plane was parked at the gate and the seat belt light was still on.

When Baldwin was asked to turn off his phone, things got ugly. He stood up, took his phone into the plane’s lavatory, slammed the door and started yelling at the crew.

Here are 7 ways you could piggyback onto that story:

1. Why are airline regulations so strict? This is a perfect time for flight instructors, pilots, and owners of aviation schools to explain why you can’t use a Kindle, cell phones, laptops or other electronic devices at certain times either in the air or on the ground.
     
2. What makes this game so addictive? “Words With Friends” has 12.6 million active monthly users, according to tracking service AppData. If you’re an addict, let the media know. Where do you play it? When do you play it? How good are you? And what’s the big attraction?
     
3. Is this game a teaching tool for kids?  The game is intended for children 9 and older. Teachers, librarians, tutors and others who teach kids: Explain the benefits of this game for teaching children how to spell and read.
     
4. What are the best ways to control your temper when you’re ready to explode?  And if you do lose control, what’s the best way to apologize? Anger management experts, what a great opportunity for offering tips on how to behave nicely with others on a cramped airplane, and then say you’re sorry. Baldwin apologized to fellow passengers, but not to the airline.
     
5. What are the worst behaviors exhibited by airline passengers? Baldwin is just one of hundreds of boors who make life difficult for airline crews and passengers. What are the Top 10 worst behaviors on airplanes? Frequent fliers, start making a list. And then explain how—or if—you get involved. Offer it as a guest blog post to bloggers who write about etiquette, electronics, human behavior or the airlines industry. Or pitch it to your local newspaper.
     
6. How did American Airlines handle this from a PR standpoint? The airlines wrote about it on its Facebook page, but didin’t mention Baldwin by name.
     
7. What does this kind of publicity mean for a product like Words With Friends? Bloggers have already written about the perfect timing because Zynga is about to go public. Experts in marketing, branding, investmentsw and the stock market should weigh in.

What other ways can you think of to piggyback PR onto this story? Have you ever generated great publicity for yourself or your PR client because you tied your story to Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” a celebrity’s drug or alcohol rehab, or any other less-than-flattering celebrity story? Tell us what you did, and the results. And then share this post on the social media sites.

I write more tips like this one in my free weekly ezine, “The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week.” You can join the fun and learn new publicity techniques every week by typing your name and email address into the box to the right, beneath my photo.

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.
    
How to improve your Facebook marketing for the holidays
http://ow.ly/7DjbU 
     
    
50 tools that can help you write
http://ow.ly/7BtSv
     
    
The care and feeding of the press: Super tips from the Internet Press Guild
http://ow.ly/7BtCU
     
    
Publicity Tip: Contact a media outlet that already covered you & suggest a “follow up story” to the original one
     
    
6 tips for making your press release Twitter-friendly
http://ow.ly/7AqL8
     
    
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. ~William Arthur Ward
     
     
10 words that can help or hurt your click-through rate on Twitter.
http://ow.ly/7xNfu RT @DanZarrella [Testing is powerful]
    
    
Social bookmarking tips to pull traffic to your blog or website
http://ow.ly/7BzRk

      
 ”I love Thanksgiving turkey. It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.” ~Arnold Schwarzenegger
     
    
6 ways to help people find your press releases
 http://ow.ly/7FkmY 

Do you already follow me, but you’d like to read tweets about certain PR, publicity and social media topics? Which ones?

Barbara Roy

This week’s Help this Hound question is from Barbara Roy, a communications specialist  in Oakland City, IN:

“I  need ideas on how to promote an upcoming charity car raffle in 2012 through the Mad Mac Foundation, a group that sponsors educational programs for at-risk youth.

“Proceeds from the raffle will be used to get teenagers, who illegally race their cars on street, into the classroom where they can learn how to build tuner cars from the ground up. The training will help them transfer their skills, which they’ve been using illegally, into career paths that might include auto engineering and design, auto repair, and creating video games that involve cars.  The curriculum includes science, technology, engineering and math.

“Two cars will be given away during the July raffle.

“The winter months will be spent on materials prep and strategy. But beginning in January, we’ll focus more on going after sponsors and businesses to carry the raffle tickets.  I could really use recommendations on how to gain mass awareness for this nationwide event. 

“We will have branding, messaging and content on the website by January, as well as a Facebook event page.  Can your Hounds offer their best ideas?”

If you have ideas, please comment.

If you’re on Twitter, Twitter has assigned you a “reputation score.”

It has a system in place to gauge who you follow and who the people you follow follow.  It uses that information to suggest the “Who to Follow” avatars in the right-hand column of your profile.

So far, your score is still a secret.  So why am I mentioning it?

Because I’m betting that Twitter will make it public very soon—simply because so many other sites are starting to score and grade us. At a tech conference last year, Twitter’s CEO said he’d like to see the Twitter scores visible to everyone.
     
    

Who Else Brands, Scores & Grades You

• If you’re on Klout.com, you have a score, from 0 to 100, largely determined by how often you tweet. You’re also “branded” with a one- or two-word description like networker, celebrity, thought leader or curator. Klout calls these its classes. 
    
• Influencer Exchange, the new subscription-based software program that has a 14-day free trial I’ve been promoting, assigns a score to influencers in any one of thousands of niches, depending on who’s discussing them in traditional media or social media, and how important those people are.  You can read more about Influencer Exchange here.
    
• On Quora, the question and answer site, users “vote up” or “vote down” your answers.
    
• On Yelp, readers grade restaurants, stores, nightclubs and even the local furnace repair guys with reviews of from one to five stars. 
      
• Facebook doesn’t assign you a score, but how often you interact with your friends, and those who have Liked your pages, determines how often the information you share shows up in their news feeds.
    
• On Google, our websites are ranked, depending on a variety of factors such as how many other influential websites link to us, and how much content we provide.  
      

How Your Score Might be Used

I can’t help but envision all of us eventually having our online scores seered onto the flesh on our hips with a hot branding iron.

The score could eventually determine if we’re the top candidate for a job, or we get a lucrative consulting contract, or a reporter from the New York Times calls us for an interview because we have a higher score than the other dozen or so people the reporter researched.

Do you know about other sites that score, grade or brand users?  How do you think these sites will be used? And how much weight will people put on a reputation score? Are these “grading” systems missing more important things like a blog, the number of comments at a blog, and how often the blogger responds?
      
    
Tools That Can Help You:

Twitter for Beginners: A Step-by-Step, Can’t-Fail System for Experts and Influencers (and Those Who Want to Be) 

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.

One of the biggest myths of press releases is that they must contain news.

That was true two decades ago when we wrote press releases primarily for journalists and we had to worry about insulting them with trivia about our business.

But now that we post them online, mostly to pull traffic to our websites, we’re free to write about whatever we wish.

Here, then, are 13 press release topics when your pockets are empty and there’s absolutely nothing newsworthy to write about. They’re excerpted from my free email course on 89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases. (PR people, take the course to sharpen your press release skills. And then use the tips below when you’re scrounging for ideas to publicize your clients.)

Publicity Hounds who have a subscription to Expertclick, The Yearbook of Experts, which lets you post up to 52 press releases a year, will find these tips particularly helpful.

1.  Take a Stand on a Controversial Topic

Controversial topics can include everything from the old standbys such as abortion and gun control to local issues like proposed zoning laws.

When you’re done with the press release, generate extra publicity by writing a letter to the editor of your local or national newspaper. How to Use Newspaper & Magazine Editorial Pages shows you all the ways you can rally support for your cause or issue by using editorial pages, from writing letters to asking for a meeting with the newspaper editorial board.

2.  Write About Your Blog 

If you’ve started blogging for business, write a press release about it so people who want information on your topic can find it. Or devote the release to some of the things you mentioned in a specific post.

This blog, for example, helps people solve problems writing press releases, and I encourage people to submit questions to me. It also teaches people how to use social media sites to self-promote. I could write two press releases, or more, just telling reades about ways they can use this blog. You can, too.

Visit other bloggers who blog on the same topic, or a similar topic, and post comments at their blogs. By linking back to your blog from your comments, you will improve the page ranking of your own blog.

3. Lead Readers to Free Articles at Your Website

If you have free articles that solve people’s problems, or entertain them, say so.

Are your articles arranged by category? Are they updated monthly? Do you let the media, ezine publishers, newsletter editors and bloggers reprint them? Do you feature articles from other industry experts?

4. Tell People Where to Find You on Social Media Sites

Smart Publicity Hounds use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora profiles to position themselves as the go-to sources in their industries.

Do you post your photos and videos to Flickr? Do you have a YouTube channel chock full of helpful how-to videos? (Here’s mine.)

5.  Create Your Own Holiday

Create your own day, week or month of the year, or your own holiday, at Chases Calendar of Events. The listing is free. You can then use that holiday as a springboard to even more publicity.

The topic doesn’t have to be serious. In fact, the more fun, the better. I love Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day.

6. Make a Prediction

Predict something that ties into your area of expertise—or not.

Predict when gasoline prices, the stock market or interest rates will rise and fall. For fun, predict who will win the Super Bowl or when the first snowfall will occur in your area. Predict the winner of local or national elections.

7. Issue a Proclamation

Congratulate the local high school football team for winning a state title, or a local business for celebrating its 10th anniversary.

8. Write Tips That Tie into an Upcoming Holiday

Professional orgnizers can write about how to stay organized during the Christmas holidays. A child safety expert can offer tips on how to keep kids safe during fireworks season on the Fourth of July.

9.  Identify A Trend You’re Seeing in Your Business or Industry

You don’t even have to think very hard to identify a trend you’re seeing. How has your customers’ behavior changed the way you do business? What’s happening with your orders? Is your nonprofit serving more people in a particular age group or income level?

If you want to cheat, Google “Top trends in the (fill in the blank) industry” and write about one of those.

10.  Comment on Breaking News

This one’s easy. The news can tie into your business or industry—or not. If you’re an expert who welcomes interview requests for radio talk shows, say so in the release. See 6 ways to tie your pitch to breaking news for PR and publicity.

11. What Event Are You Attending?

Most people don’t think it’s a big deal if they attend a trade show or industry conference. But why not turn this into a publicity opportunity?

Write a press release telling people that you’d welcome meeting them. Encourage them to ask you questions about problems they’re facing.

12. Take a Poll or Survey

Sites like Survey Monkey make simple polling a breeze.  You can also take a poll on Facebook. Don’t forget to write a follow-up press release that reports on the results of the poll.

13. Explain How to Solve a Problem

Press releases offering tips and advice are often the very best for pulling traffic to your website. That’s becauase you can dazzle readers with your expertise, help them solve their problem, and then link to a website where they can find more information about a product or service you sell that can help them even more.

What topics do you write about when the idea well is dry?

Tools to Help You:    

How to be a Kick-butt Publicity Hound

Keywords: The Magic Magnets That Pull Journalists & Consumes to Your Press Releases

The New Rules of Press Releases: How to Write them for Consumers, Not Only for Journalists

The Big Press Release Samples Ebook: Press Releases for Every Occasion and Industry

Dr. Karen Hoving of Aurora, Colo., writes:

“I have a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and specialize in two areas: Bipolar Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Here’s what I’m doing right now to market myself:

• A Facebook page.
    
• A website.  
    
• Two blogs: The Couch Trip for general psychology and “Shrinking” Chronic Illness.
    
• A monthly newsletter (with only 11 subscribers–sigh).
    
• A Twitter account.
    
• A LinkedIn profile (but am not terribly active)

“I share different information on each site. 

“Here’s my question: Do shrinks get patients via social media marketing? I am doing a lot and watching all of the videos you and others send. But often, people are trying to sell something onlne. I am trying to sell ME—my services and education, and my time. 

“Can this be marketed on sites like Facebook and Twitter? If so, how? Marketing for therapists is different than marketing for someone selling widgets.”

“If social media won’t work for me—and I’m willing to be patient—I don’t want to waste a lot of time.”

Why is it that some people have so much trouble generating interest in their Facebook pages? Yet other people, like Mari Smith, one of the world’s foremost experts on Facebook, seem to have a big pot of glue that they slather onto their pages and capture whoever happens to stop by?

Mari’s glue is in the form of interesting videos, status updates that tip off fans to other people’s how-to articles about Facebook and Internet marketing, and compelling polls and surveys.

She promotes other people’s webinars, teleseminars and products that she thinks her fans will find valuable. And she sparks lively discussions that make readers stick like glue to the page and, often, participate.

Mari does something else that keeps those fans coming back for more—and this is the page’s real value.

Almost every day, she answers people’s questions about Facebook and a variety of other topics. Sometimes the same questions keep popping up. And she keeps giving the answers.

She travels the world, speaking at conferences and working with corporate clients. When she’s away, she recruits someone else to answer questions for her.

Need to contact Facebook about a knotty problem? Mari leads readers her directory of more than 120 forms for contacting Facebook.

Confused about the best webinar service to use for your own webinars? Or other products and services? She shares her recommendations for vendors, and explains why.

And what about those unlucky souls who appeal to her when they try to log onto their Facebook pages, but the pages seem to have vanished into thin air? She has linked, many times, to the blog post I wrote on 5 things to do if your Facebook fan page disappears.

Befuddled by all those Facebook apps and how to use them?  Mari is standing by, ready to help.

Is it any wonder she has amassed more than 43,000 fans?

That’s why I’ve invited her to be my guest guest on a webinar at 4 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow, June 29, on The Best Ways to Attract Facebook Fans, Provide Sterling Content and Keep Them Coming Back for More (Just Like the Celebrities Do).

If the time is inconvenient for you, register anyway, because you’ll get the link to the video replay within 48 hours.

She will discuss a wide variety of topics, including the value of a Welcome page, when to use Facebook ads, how to use email to generate Likes, tagging, autographing and more.

I’ve asked her to address the topic of Facebook contests and the rules that govern what you can and cannot do.

Join us! Register here, and bring your questions.