The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

If you’re a guest expert, or a PR person who represents an expert, and you’re looking for radio talk shows and podcasts that need guests, don’t pitch only the big shows.

Many of them are difficult to book, and you might be far better off trying to get onto shows that reach niched audiences.

Check out RadioGuestList.com.  You can use this site several ways.
       
      

How to be on a show

Experts, authors and PR firms searching for the right shows can sign up here. Whenever a talk show is looking for guests, RadioGuestList will notify you.
  
     
How to find guests for your show

If you’re a radio show booker, podcaster, talk radio host or TV producer who needs guests, submit your talk show booking opportunities here. RadioGuesetList will email its list of guest experts, authors and PR firms so that experts who are a good fit for your show can email you directly.
     
    
How to see which shows are available 

On the homepage, you can see a list of categories on the right side. I clicked on a few of them and saw lots of opportunities for authors, musicians, small business people and Internet marketers to appear as guests. If you have an area of expertise, you’ll find something here that’s a good fit.

The site is maintained by Scott Fox, an author and Internet marketer. Check out his 10 tips on how to use social networking to market your product or service. You can also follow RadioGuestList on Twitter.

Never done a radio interview before? George McKenzie, a former radio talk show host, offered tips galore when I interviewed him about how to get onto drive-time radio shows and ace the interview so that the host invites you back.

Have you used RadioGuestList.com? Share your success stories here.

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, Business Promotion, How to Interview, Media Leads, PR Consultants/Publicists, Pitching the Media, Publicity Resources, Radio Publicity, Social media marketing, TV Publicity
posted On: 2/11/2010: 9:29 am: By Joan
Comments: 9 Comments

If you’re trying to get onto radio talk shows to promote your book, product, service, cause or issue—and you’re on a tight budget—a series of inexpensive ebooks will help you locate the contact information for shows in specific niches. 

Talk radio advocate Francine Silverman has based the ebooks on her book, Talk Radio Wants You: An Intimate Guide to 700 Shows and How to Get Invited (McFarland & Co.  2009).

The ebooks include the show theme and guest criteria, which is usually missing from radio websites, in addition to title of show, name of host, email, phone (optional), website, best method of contact, and where the show is aired. You’ll also find information on Internet radio shows.

“Naturally, there are more shows in the book in every category, but as more questionnaires are returned, the number of shows in the ebooks are likely to surpass the book’s,” Silverman says.  “The business ebook, for example, has 53 shows, compared to the book’s 49.”

Even though some of these shows are small, Publicity Hounds can use these gigs as practice sessions. Appearing on TV and radio talk shows in smaller markets lets you make your mistakes, and learn from them, in front of much smaller audiences. Then, and only then, will you be ready to hit the big-time talk shows in the top markets. 

The ebooks include information for these niches:

Business
53 shows, ($20). Covers workplace issues, innovation, entrepreneurship, business strategies, careers, finance, small business, sales, home-based businesses, investments, insurance, money management and real estate. 

Entertainment
30 shows ($12). Covers art, fashion, movies, music and comedy.

Politics
25 shows ($12). Covers conservative, liberal and Libertarian politics; current events; the Constitution; and pop culture.

Self-Help
27 shows ($12). Covers overs personal and professional goals, growth and empowerment, emotional freedom techniques, motivation, creativity, living one’s calling, making for a better world, transforming your life, and self-realization.

Health
20 shows ($12). Covers healthy living and lifestyles, fitness, health as a business advantage, natural healing, alternative medicine, medical travel, issues, education and treatment, and overcoming adversities.

New Age
35 shows ($15). Covers astrology, metaphysics, Tarot, Angels, psychic development, paranormal, parapsychology, holistic health, healing, mysticism, occult, mediums and more.

Customers will receive five free updates when Silverman gets information on five new shows in that niche.

To buy the book, pay by PayPal to franalive@optonline.net. Or send a check payable to Francine Silverman to P.O. Box 1333, Riverdale, New York, NY 10471.  She’ll email you your book when she receives your check.
  
I asked Francine for three sample listings, and here’s what she gave me.

Bob Hardcastle’s Money Talk

Name of Host: Bob Hardcastle

Theme: Financial

Where Aired: KFNS 590, St. Louis, Missouri

Guest Profile: Banking & Finance, Investment, Real estate, Commodities professionals

Email: delta@moneytalk.org

Website: http://www.moneytalk.org

Phone: 636-532-0484

Best Method of Contact: Phone
        
       
The Art Rocks! 

Talk Show Name of Host: Philly Joe Swendoza & Co-Host Alexandra Rosa (Executive Producer)

Where Aired: WS Radio

Theme: “Where art, fashion and Lifestyles collide”

Guest Profile: Someone in our related genre, rock stars, celebrities, people who want to showcase their product or service on our show as it takes the form of an Infomercial. 

Email: alexandra@artrocks247.com

Website: http://www.artrocks247.com and http://www.wsradio.com/artrocks

Phone: 619-890-254

Best Method of Contact: Email
   
   
Mission Unstoppable Radio

Name of Host: Unstoppable Frankie Picasso

Theme: Inspiring stories to help folks be Unstoppable

Where Aired: Blog Talk Radio

Guest Profile: Authors (preferred) who have been unstopppable in their lives, attaining their goals, overcoming tragedy or who help others, i.e., business, crime, music, religion, spouse abuse; all categories are open.

Email: coachpicasso@rogers.com

Website: http://www.instituteforquantumliving.com and http://www.unstoppableplanet.com

Phone: 519-267-2493

Best Method of Contact: Send books to 839 Avenue Rd, Cambridge, Ontario, N1R 5S4 Intiial contact. Email is best.

Posted In: How to Interview, Pitching the Media, Publicity Resources, Radio Publicity
posted On: 12/1/2009: 8:44 am: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Occasionally, I’ll get a call from somebody who thinks it might be “fun and interesting” to be in the world of PR, or a publicist. But they don’t want to go back to college and spend more than $50,000 on a degree in PR or communications.

So they ask me what the best way is to break into the business. I suggest they follow the same people I follow:

—BL Ochman and her whatsnext blog

—David Meerman Scott

—Book marketing guru John Kremer and his excellent blog and weekly ezine

—Anything published at the Bulldog Reporter site, particularly its Journalists Speak Out interview series. 

I’m adding Gaetan Giannini Jr.’s new book, “Marketing Public Relations: A Marketer’s Approach to Public Relations and Social Media” (Prentice Hall, $93.33) to my list. Several years ago, Giannini, business department chair at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pa., seached for a public relations textbook tailored to marketing students, instead of communications or journalism students.  When he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he decided to write one.

He has had an extensive marketing background, having worked for several years in sales and marketing for industrial instrumentation companies before landing at Cedar Crest . In addition to writing a public relations book from a marketer’s perspective, he reveled in the opportunity to write about the burgeoning world of social media, which he claims has been widely ignored by academics.
    
      

PR and social media from a marketing perspective

“Most of the textbooks that were written about Web 2.0 were written on the technical side.  As far as I know, there is not one textbook out there at this point that covers this topic from a marketing perspective,” he said. 

Each chapter begins with a PR success story. They include:

• Dunkin’ Donuts’ Facebook page that boasts more than 825,000 fans.
     
• Ben & Jerry’s “Random Acts of Cone-Ness” campaign. Employees “showed up” in undisclosed locations in three major cities and distributed ice cream in support of the company’s new waffle cone. The story attracted the attention of CNN, ESPN, national and local newspapers, and trade magazines.
          
• Gary Vaynerchuk, a New Jersey liquor store owner who founded Wine Library TV, a “shoot-from-the-hip” Internet video podcast about wine that boasts nearly 100,000 views daily.  Vaynerchuk connects with his audience through frank, honest wine talk to which people can relate.
    

Practical experience for students

What really makes this book a must-read for anyone going into PR or publicity, or for marketing student who want to learn more about PR, are the “chapter objectives” that kick off each chapter and show show students what they should be able to do after reading it, and the three special sections at the end of each chapter. They include:

1. Chapter key terms, which lists words and phrases used in that chapter, with their definition.
     
2. Application Assignments. Students can  complete from one to five assignments that involve more research, reading articles online or finding examples of strategies and tactics they just learned.
      
3. Practice Portfolio. This activity is related to the material covered in the chapter. It allows students to contribute to a marketing public relations portfolio that they can use during their job search. The portfolio can be based on a fictitious company or on a real company that the instructor assigns to them. The student “works” with the company the entire semester. At the end of the chapter on press releases, for example, students are asked to write a backgrounder, fact sheet and two press releases for their company.   

One of the problems with books about social media is that sections can be out of date by the time the ink is dry. Still, this is a valuable book that encourages the student to not just learn it, but do it. My only wish is that it had included informaton about the importance of using keywords in press releases so they are search-engine friendly. 

Don’t let the steep price deter you. There’s three times as much content as you’ll find in most other PR books, and most chapters tackle a topic in-depth, with lots of practical tips.

I loved the chapter on Building a Connector List, and how to determine the types of media that can help you spread your message. I’ll be sharing those tips later this week and excerpting more from the book in the months ahead. (Disclosure: I contributed to the book.)      

While “Marketing Public Relations” is a textbook for mid-level marketing students—one which Giannini will use in his classes this fall and which will be available for general consumption for educational institutions by spring semester—he is quick to note that the content is perfect for any organization that wants ideas and strategies to promote its products and services.

 By the way, I love the press release about the book.

Posted In: Business Promotion, Facebook, How to Interview, Magazine Publicity, Media Kits, Newspaper Publicity, Nonprofits, PR Consultants/Publicists, Photos & Graphics, Pitching the Media, Press Releases/News Releases, Social media marketing, TV Publicity
posted On: 10/26/2009: 9:51 pm: By Joan
Comments: 1 Comment

If a reporter at a magazine interviewed you for a story, reassured you that he wouldn’t present you in a bad light, and the story that was published described you exactly as you had feared, would you criticize the reporter publicly?

In the old days, most people wouldn’t.

“Don’t pick fights with people who buy their ink by the barrel,” we’ve always been told.

That’s not necessarily the case today, now that blogs and the world of social media let anyone be a publisher or broadcaster. We don’t need to rely only on traditional media to communicate our message to the masses. When they report about us, and we want to critique the job they did, we can do it in discussion forums, on our own blogs, and on sites like Twitter and Facebook. 

Publicity Hound Judith Lederman, a former publicity manager for Lord & Taylor who’s unemployed and looking for a PR job, called me recently, concerned. She wanted to know if I thought she was committing professional suicide by publicly chastizing a reporter at Forbes magazine for the shoddy treatment she got when he interviewed her for the story titled When Work Doesn’t Pay for the Middle Class.

The story came about after Judith contacted the reporter in response to a Profnet request for someone who has had trouble navigating the “Making Home Affordable” program.  The subject line on her email read: “Affordable, yeah right!”  The reporter, who said he was doing a story on refinancing options, found Judith a good subject, because a bank rep told her to stop making mortgage payments. 

After the interview was completed, the topic apparently took a turn, and the new focus was on how high-paying jobs don’t pay for people in the middle class because it renders them ineligible for other benefits. 

Judith, who’s looking for a job with a six-figure salary, said she’s not interested in perks.  She’s much more interested in finding a job and refinancing her home.  She asked the reporter to remove her from the story.  He assured her that he wouldn’t portray her in a bad light and urged her to reconsider, which she did.

When the story appeared, she was dumbfounded.  She took to her blog, TheThinClub.com, to set the record straight:

“The person described in the cleverly-worded article in Forbes is not me! Instead of painting me as someone seeking an appropriate salary so she could support herself, it portrays me as someone who is torn between the prospect of being employed and being eligible for tax breaks, college scholarships and other incentives. It simply isn’t so. It never was. In the online story, not a single quote of mine was published. My quotes would have painted a very different picture.”

She also posted this comment at the end of the Forbes’ story:

“Just want to say—since I’ve become the poster child for a middle class single mom who is being advised to work for less—I love my work, I want to go back to work, and getting a paycheck (as close to what I was making as possible, or even slightly more) is more important to me for PSYCHOLOGICAL reasons, than the perks I would get if I stayed underemployed.  I have a work ethic—one that was NOT showcased by this article!  I love working and a nice paycheck and good benefits is a reward at the end of the day… Now you know ‘the rest of the story.’ “

Judith said that since she’s job hunting for another PR job, she doesn’t want potential employers to see her as “desperate” or as a “goldigger” or as somebody who is willing to take a much lower paying job because of the tax issue.  

I told her that her personal integrity and convictions outweigh whether her blog will anger Forbes. The magazine could retaliate by not covering any of her clients. (There’s a clever work-around for that problem, I told her. Just ask another PR friend to pitch the story.) Besides, I said, if Forbes would give her that kind of treatment, they might do the same to her clients.

I encouraged her to call the magazine and complain to the reporter’s supervisor, which she decided not to do.

PR pros are lining up on both sides of the debate. The PRBlogNews.com blog supports Judith. But a columnist at MediaBistro.com, a subscription site, isn’t as understanding and wrote a column faulting her for not managing her own PR.

Where do you stand? Was Judith right or wrong, and how would you have handled it? 

Do people, particularly PR people, lose more than they gain by calling reporters on the carpet publicly at their blogs if they feel they were mistreated or maligned?

Posted In: Blogs, How to Interview, Magazine Publicity, PR Consultants/Publicists
posted On: 9/28/2009: 9:57 pm: By Joan
Comments: 7 Comments

I love showing you clips of TV interviews that are perfect examples of how NOT to act on camera.

This week, you get not one, but two videos. Each can best be described as, uh, a “teaching moment.” Both authors start stumbling, right out of the gate.

In the first video, author Uri Man’s comments are so inappropriate that he rattles FOX host Ainsley Earhardt. At the end of the interview, she turns to her co-host and asks, “Did that just happen?”

In the second video, the anchors start taunting author Karrine Steffans and things turn really ugly. Karrine’s response infuriates the anchors so badly that at the end….well, I’m not going to spoil it for you. But promise me you’ll watch to the bitter end.

Here’s the first video, from a recent segment on “America’s News HQ” on FOX News:

Thanks to Publicity Hound Jamile White of Bowie, Md., aka @EcommerceDiva on Twitter, for flagging us to this segment from GoodDaySacramento, the CBS station in Sacramento, Calif.:

Now, it’s your turn.

Which of the two do you think is the worst example of an interview-gone-bad? Are the anchors at fault? If you had been either one of those authors, how would you have responded?

Media trainers and book publicists, what would you have told these authors after the fact if they had been your clients?

Ask your Twitter followers what they think by clicking on the green “tweet” button. Or share this with your Facebook friends.

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, How to Interview, TV Publicity, YouTube
posted On: 7/28/2009: 11:20 am: By Joan
Comments: 34 Comments