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

8 Ways to Get the Biggest Marketing Bang Out of SlideShare [Love Tip #4 for capturing leads] http://ow.ly/aLJGG

How to Use Facebook Ads to Get More Quality Leads and Attract More Blog Traffic. http://ow.ly/aLP4N

Wall Street Journal uses Facebook timeline to tell the story of Facebook’s IPO [Very clever] http://ow.ly/aNlnY

5 things they never tell Twitter newbies, but should. http://ow.ly/aNBnb

What to do when a LinkedIn recommendation for you isn’t quite right. http://ow.ly/aNl4q

27 highly recommended WordPress plug-ins. http://ow.ly/aOtTl

PR Peeps: Check out the “insta pitch” idea from PR guy Christopher Lee Nutter. [6th sub-head] http://ow.ly/aP0Ig

25 Link-Building Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website. http://ow.ly/aPajJ

Infographic explains how long it takes to become an expert in various fields. http://ow.ly/aPcdD

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

How to write a hip-hop press release. http://ow.ly/9NW5M

How To Add Tech Billionaires To Your LinkedIn Network Right Now – Forbes. http://ow.ly/9Ooag

12 Most Little Known Tricks to Use On LinkedIn. http://ow.ly/9Ooua

8 ways to drive traffic to your website with Google+. http://ow.ly/9OpeU

Your social media dashboard is killing you if you make this major mistake. http://ow.ly/9PWZe

Proud of your company’s social media success? Compete against others in this fun contest, sponsored by biz journals. http://ow.ly/9PWJg

Facebook Photos Now Shown In 4X Bigger High Resolution and Can Be Viewed Fullscreen. http://bit.ly/GN7UF8

3 Steps: Setting Up the LinkedIn “Follow Company” Button | SEO Blog | Excira http://ow.ly/9Oom2

PR crisis deepens at Susan G. Komen | Articles. http://ow.ly/9OEES

3 places to send a press release. [See my comment on this blog post for 5 more ideas.] http://ow.ly/9NWmK

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

B2B marketers devote 26% of their budget to content marketing. [Infographic] http://ow.ly/9DnP2

Facebook’s latest news, announcements and media resources – Announcements – Introducing Interest Lists – Facebook http://ow.ly/9Ehxj

Pinterest = digital crack for women. (Hooked yet?) Lots of opportunities to pull traffic. http://ow.ly/9saIt

LinkedIn is better than Facebook (for identity thieves looking for rich victims). http://ow.ly/9uoJu

4 Tips for Creating Your LinkedIn Company Page | Social Media Examiner. http://ow.ly/9upsl

Drive new traffic to your old blog posts using Pinterest. Here’s how I’m doing it: http://ow.ly/9FBWw 

Send your Pinterest followers to your YouTube videos, free articles page & old blog posts. Neat example: http://ow.ly/9FC47

Blogs Trump Facebook for Trust and Spending. http://ow.ly/9FCb4

Making Headlines Shine (and Getting Your PR Releases Read!) | Bulldog Reporter. http://ow.ly/9FCx1

5 ways to handle negative Facebook comments. http://ow.ly/9FROH

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

7 Crucial Tactics for Writing a Radically Successful Guest Post http://ow.ly/8TLYO

Farts: The topic of a 6th-grader’s 1st-place speech. Here are 5 lessons from the speech: http://ow.ly/8TPHk

5 ways LinkedIn can freshen up and be more relevant http://ow.ly/8VfF5

6 ways to get more B2B leads from social media  http://ow.ly/8VkBW

5 tips for measuring ROI of PR and determining if you’re beating your competitors  http://ow.ly/8WCf0

11 things that annoy journalists and bloggers  http://ow.ly/8X9oS

5 tips for choosing a LinkedIn profile photo (and other LinkedIn mistakes to avoid)  http://ow.ly/8YmE2

Google offering $25 in gift cards to let them track you  http://ow.ly/8YnF3

Tip for Publciists: Have a new client? Make sure they know how to do media interviews.

Sleazy and dishonest if true: Pinterest secretly cashes in on user links by adding its own affiliate codes  http://ow.ly/8YxOu

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

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

If you haven’t made any resolutions for improving your publicity or social media efforts next year, promise that you’ll steal at least one tip from this free ebook, “The Best of The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week of 2011” and do it.

This is the seventh year I’ve compiled the very best tips from my weekly ezine and offered it to you as a holiday gift—along with my enthusiastic recommendation to regift it to your friends and clients.

Click here to download the book. (If you’re having trouble, try a different browser or a different computer, or email Scott Buffaloe, my customer service manager, and he’ll send it to you.)

Here’s what you’ll find in this year’s book.

Social Media Tips Galore

• Tips on how to attract more Twitter followers by using Twellow, my favorite Twitter directory, to really drill down and identify people in your target market—and make it easy for others to find you
• 6 bios that need updating. Trust me. They’re either filled with stale information, or your bios are missing key links for new social media profiles you’ve created.
• 3 strong reasons for joining groups on LinkedIn, and the recommended number of groups to join.
• How to create a link for a Facebook status update so you can pull more people to your Facebook page. This still stumps many Facebook users.
• 3 ways to use Twitter lists to save time, get in front of influential bloggers who write about your topic, and start to build relationships with journalists.
• A big no-no that several LinkedIn “gurus” are teaching about how to write your LinkedIn profile.  It looks bad, it smells bad and it can get you into trouble.
• A  new feature on YouTube that lets you edit your videos right in the browser!
  
• Where to find a valuable template on how to write a product review that you can share on the social media sites or at your blog.
• Where to find “52 Headline Hacks,” a handy cheat sheet for writing blog posts that go viral, or headlines you can use on articles.

Publicity Tips for Traditional Media

• An important reminder if you’re planning an event so you don’t blow a big chance at publicity in a magazine.
• 6 ways to avoid corrections and what to do if a mistake in your press release or article slips through and ends up being published.
• The one word to never use when you’re talking to journalists.
• Angles for news stories you can pitch so you can get onto the most watched TV newscast of the entire week on your local station.
• Why press releases are usually ineffective if you want a journalist to cover your story—and the one thing that works instead.
• 3 types of publicity photos that scream “We’re lazy. And we don’t mind boring you with this photo.”
• The one person to follow on Twitter who can provide lots of hot leads from traditional media who are looking for sources to interview.

Tools for Online Publicity

• A hyperlocal website that’s begging for neighborhood news in 16 bigger cities in the United States. This site is perfect for news from clubs and civic groups, schools, nonprofits, churches, political campaigns and neighborhood groups.
• A news powerhouse that you should be pitching because its stories get high rankings on Google News and Google Blogs. You’ll also find a link to a valuable video that explains exactly how to pitch.
• A local publisher that wants news from hundreds of communities in 19 states in the United States. They’re competing with local newspapers for stories, photos, videos and ad dollars.
• 4 tips for creating your 2012 Publicity Plan for online and traditional media.

Tips for Building Your Business & Nonprofit

• Where to find step-by-step instructions on how to format a book for the Nook, the Barnes & Noble ereader, and Amazon’s Kindle—sometimes in less than 30 minutes.
• Where to find detailed instructions on how to produce webinars that sell your products and services. Includes a recommendation for what webinar company to use.
• Nonprofits, 9 ways to make it easy for people to donate at your website.

If you like these tips, you’ll love the newsletter. Today’s issue will be published this afternoon and it includes a cute dog video. Sign up here.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a very Happy New Year!

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.

When a favorite journalist is promoted, leaves the newspaper for a new job, or wins an award, smart Publicity Hounds swing into action and deliver their congratulations, a very important part of building the relationship.

Be aware, especially, of things like writing, editing and photography awards. They don’t  mean a hill of beans to the success of the newspaper, but journalists think they are a very big deal. I worked in newsrooms for 22 years, won many awards, and they were a huge deal.

How do you congratulate them without gratuitous brown-nosing? Here are seven ideas:

• Send a handwritten note. Most well-wishers would cop out with an email. But you want to zig when everybody else is zagging. A postage stamp and a few minutes of your time are a cheap price to pay to stand out from the crowd.
• Is the journalist on Twitter? If so, send a congratulatory tweet. Link to an article about the award so others who follow the journalist can read it.
• Are  you friends on Facebook? If so, post congratulations to their wall, and give the URL for the article announcing the award. You can also link to the winning article or project.
• Create a short “way to go!” video and email the link. With a little editing, you can also provide the link for the winning project. Consider posting the video to their company’s website.
• Go ahead. Ask the journalist if it’s OK to post the video to YouTube.
  
• Is the journalist on LinkedIn? If so, consider writing a recommendation. But sure to explain what factors made their work so special, or what happened as a result. This is the place to recommend, not just congratulate.
• Call and leave a short, cheery voicemail message.

Don’t do all of these, or it will, indeed, be brown-nosing. And never sneak in a pitch while you’re congratulating.

What Else You Shouldn’t Do

• No flowers. Women reporters I’ve worked with love flowers, but they’d get the heebie-jeebies when sources sent them.
• No gifts, gift cards or anything of value. Many newspapers have ethics policies that prohibit reporters from receiving these. Don’t put someone in the uncomfortable position of having to return a gift to you.
• No tickets to sporting events, the theater or other entertainment venues.
• Don’t invite the journalist to lunch and dive for the check. He might not be able to accept a free meal. See 18 ways to schmooze with reporters.

Don’t forget sports reporters, copy editors, photographers, graphic artists and other newsroom employees. Ditto for TV producers, anchors, sportscasters, meteorologists and radio talk show hosts. They love being congratulated, too.

What have I missed? If you’re a PR person, a journalist or a Publicity Hound, what ideas can you share that have worked well?

Also see: 12 ways to say “thanks” to a blogger or journalist

You can now beef up your LinkedIn profile by adding any volunteer experience, a list of causes that you care about, and any organizations you support.

After all,  volunteering is as good for your career as it is for those you help. And your volunteer efforts are one more way to generate publicity.

Here’s how to add this new section to your Profile.

Step 1: Log into Your Account.

Step 2: In the Menu bar at the top, click on Profile > Edit Profile.

Step 3: Scroll down to just before the Summary and click on “Add Sections.”

Step 4: On the left, under Sections, click on Volunteer Experience & Causes

Step 5:  Add your volunteer experience and causes you care about.

Step 6: Click on Add to Profile

What other ways do you use LinkedIn to promote your expertise?

Other Tools to Help You on LinkedIn: 

Your LinkedIn Power Formula: Learn How to Make Killer Contacts, Pull Crowds to Events, be a Star in Your Industry & Track Down Leads Like a Bloodhound

Your LinkedIn Power Formula Part 2: Advanced Strategies for Writing a Killer Profile, Cashing in on Groups and Creating Company Pages