If you or your PR client have a great story to tell that can motivate entrepreneurs and upper management, you might be a good candidate for Motivated magazine.

Editor Shevaun Voisin said she welcomes pitches. But before pitching, please check out the magazine’s website to get a good feel for its mission.

“MOTIVATED Magazine encourages readers to rise to their fullest potential. Pairing passion with purpose, the magazine features insightful articles submitted directly from today’s world leaders, entrepreneurs and everyday people with extraordinary stories to share.

“Each issue focuses on a theme in an effort to inspire and motivate readers on their journey toward business and personal success.  Topics range from the importance of leading, communicating, and investing, to strategizing, producing, and growing, all in an effort to achieve balance and overall happiness.”

“Be sure to read my editorials so you understand the reason why I publish my magazine…it is very important to me that contributors understand my intention behind the magazine so that they are on board with my mission to empower and educate others by pairing passion with purpose.”

The target market includes entrepreneurs and upper management executives who have an interest in growing personally and professionally.  The magazine is shelved in the business section of Chapters, Indigo, and Barnes & Noble bookstores. 

It’s distributed through Gateway and Hudson news, in airports and Loblaws grocery stores, and through subscriptions. 

Email her at Shevaun at DeclanMcAndrewPublishing.com.

If you’re a publicist or PR pro and write press releases for your clients, you’re making a big mistake if you let your clients determine exactly what the final version of a press release will say—particularly if that release is being sent to the traditional media.

Of course, they should read it for accuracy and suggest changes. And clients should always approve the final version of a release.

But problems start brewing the minute you let them insert information that has no business being there, and then fail to call them on it.

Beware control freaks and ego maniacs

Clients who are control freaks love to boss around their PR people and insert their own language into press releases. Ego maniacs demand you include puffery and other B.S. quotes so they look important. And then there’s the client who took a high school journalism course and thinks he knows everything about how to write a press release.

Sadly, they don’t understand the damage they’re inflicting on themselves by forcing you to make changes that you know are just plain bad.

I’ve heard this complaint dozens of times and it popped up again this week in my email:

“I have a small, marketing and PR business here in New York.  Sometimes I create press releases for businesses, and many of them have been published by a newspaper that has millions of readers.

“I give my client one proof for minor changes. The problem is that a lot of them are not very educated. So sometimes they ask for changes that do not make any sense, or they ask me to change everything.  Then, I walk away because if they want too many changes, they don’t need me. They can do it themselves.

“Is there a better way that I am not aware ?”

Yes.

Get it in writing

Deal with that problem before you take on a new client, not after.

Your proposal or simple one-page letter of agreement should specify that you won’t submit submit press releases or materials to the media that will embarrass you or the client.  When I worked as an editor, I’d occasionally get a call from a PR person who would say,  “I know this press release is awful, but my client wants me to send it to you.”

They didn’t want to anger the client. But they never thought twice about angering me. I’d make a mental note that that PR person was a pain in the neck and that the client wasn’t worth covering.

When I left the newspaper business and did PR, including writing press releases, for my own clients, I’d tell clients that part of my job was to also keep them out of trouble with the media.

“If I send this release, it will mean trouble for you,” I’d tell them, being careful to use the word “you.” My words carried a little more weight because I worked as a newspaper editor for two decades. If they disagreed, I stood firm.

Don’t put your reputation on the line by letting clients have the upper hand. You’re better off walking way from a project, like the writer above did, and leaving $200 on the table than damaging your good name and submitting something that you know reflects poorly on you, particularly if your name is on the press release or if you’re the key media contact. (See 24 Ways to Add Clients to Your PR Practice.)

The same goes for crappy pitches. I can’t count the number of times PR people pitched horrible stories that they knew were bad, but they placed “being obedient” above being smart.

Press releases for consumers

Press releases written specifically to reach consumers online are somewhat different.

If you aren’t sending those releases to the media, the risk of letting clients determine what goes and what stays isn’t as great. Just remember that if reporters and editors find the release and want to write about it, and the writing sounds contrived or overly promotional, that could be a turn-off.

If you’re a PR person and you’ve run into this problem, how have you handled it?  If you work for multiple bosses who must “sign off” on your press releases, what’s the best way to avoid management-by-committee problems? Share your ideas here.

If you need press releases written or distributed and you’re looking for good vendors, check the publicity resources page at my website.

Shotgun Sports magazine is looking for articles on trap, skeet, hunting, sports clays and 5-stand.

Hunting articles can include the following topics: upland birds, large game, small game, waterfowl and turkeys. Readers consider these to be the toughest targets: deer, grouse, waterfowl, quail, turkeys, chukar, pheasants and elk (not often taken with a shotgun, but it can be done), so they’d like help with those.

“When you are writing about clay targets, these are the ones they say they most need help with: rabbits, dropping targets, long, flat crossers, chandelles, battues, long, fast crossers, hard rights, straightaways in the wind, teal, trap doubles, and very slight angles that look like a straightaway and, of course, the mental side of the game,” editor Linda Martin says. ” The non-competitive shooters just want to know how to have more fun and beat their own personal best.”

She said readers want more reloading advice, gun-cleaning and maintenance tips, and advice that will help non-competitive and new or struggling shooters improve. They’d also like tips on how to overcome those one or two targets that seem to be keeping them from moving ahead.

Email your stories to her for the 2010-2011 Shotgun Sports schedule

Jill Starishevsky of New York, NY writes:

“I am a prosecutor of child abuse and sex crimes in New York City.  I wrote a children’s book called My Body Belongs to Me to teach children that if someone touches them inappropriately, they should tell a parent or teacher right away. 

“In a non-threatening, engaging manner, this guide establishes boundaries and teaches kids that when it comes to their body, there are some parts that are for ‘no one else to see’ and empowers them to tell a parent or teacher if someone touches them inappropriately. 

“Most importantly, this narrative assures young ones that sexual molestation is not their fault, and by speaking out, the child will continue to grow big and strong.  A ‘Suggestions for the Storyteller’ section is also included to help lead a comfortable discussion afterward.

“How can I promote this book in traditional and social media?”

(Read more about how to submit your own question to this blog.)

Every year since 2001, Rebecca Morgan and her cadre of volunteers have been going into the Willow Glen neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., just before Halloween and encouraging readers to give 6,500 of their “gently read” books to children in place of trick-or-treat candy.

“Books feed children’s minds, while candy only feeds their cavities,” says Rebecca, a speaker, author and consultant. “Many children rarely receive books as gifts, so even gently read books are special treats.”

The Books for Treats campaign has been bolstered by lots of local publicity as well as articles in Spry magazine, which is distributed to 9 million households in national newspapers, and in the American Association for the Advancement of Science magazine.
  

Taking the campaign nationwide

But this past October, Rebecca pursued a wild idea for publicity that attracted national attention.

“I’m reading the Luann cartoon in the paper and I see that once a month, Luann goes to the library to read to the kids,” she said.

She suspected that Greg Evans, Luann’s creator, supported literacy. So she Googled his name and, within seconds, found his email address. She wrote to him and asked if he’d be willing to have Luann give out books at Halloween.

The result is this strip, published Oct. 29 in hundreds of newspapers, and reprinted here with Greg Evans’ permission:

It includes the URL of Rebecca’s Books for Treats site in the lower right corner of the strip. Two days later, on Halloween, another strip shows Luann taking a stack of books to her parents and suggesting that they give trick-or-treaters books instead of candy.

“When it hit the blogosphere, and I got 60,000 hits that week at my website, up from only 250 a month,” she said.
    
      
Whom to pitch and where to find them

Rebecca says she hopes Greg isn’t inundated with pitches.

Not to worry, Rebecca. Publicity Hounds can refer to this site which includes hundreds of links to comic strips that might tie into their causes or issues. 

Here are some ideas to get you started, along with my ideas for the strip you might want to pitch, and the name of the artist:

• The military: Beetle Bailey. (Mort Walker)
     
• Babies: Baby Blues (Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman)
     
• Dogs: Mutts (Patrick McDonnell) — There are dozens of comic strips devoted to dogs, cats and animals.
    
• Latino-related issues: Baldo (Hector Cantu & Carlos Castellanos)
     
• Cats: Garfield (Jim Davis)
     
• Families: Family Circus (Bil Keane)

I know you can think of more. If you see a strip that ties into what you want to promote, Google the name of the strip or the creator. Or check the strip’s fine print and you might find the URL.

Does the artist have a blog? If so, you may have struck gold because that’s a perfect place for you to start a conversation with the artist before pitching. Artists’ and journalists’ blogs offer valuable clues about how to pitch them.

Is the artist on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media sites? If so, start the conversation there. And then send your brief pitch, just like Rebecca did. (See “How to Create the Perfect 30-Second Pitch.”)

What other favorite comic strips might tie into your cause or issue? Do you regularly read strips about your industry or occupation? If so, which ones?

By the way, I think Rebecca’s Books for Treats campaign would be perfect to pitch to dental associations.

Jeanne Krieg of Savage, Minnesota writes:

“DryMate is a manufacturer in Minnesota with a line of absorbent and washable mats for home, pets, autos, hunting, garage and outdoors.  We even sell a mat that goes under your Christmas tree stand to catch spills, dirt etc.

“Since our product is made from a fabric with a bonded backing, do we want to reach textile editors of publications? Or category-specific editors? Or both? To whom do we send pitches and press releases?

“And can your Hounds suggest ideas on how we can pitch our product to either consumer or industry publications?

If you do free or paid speaking engagements, there are opportunities galore to get in front of audiences that need to hear whay you have to say.

But some Publicity Hounds don’t quite know where to begin. In Friday’s issue of the SpeakerNet News ezine, Michael Schatzki said he wants to give a new hour-long speech he has created at least 20 times so he can polish it before charging a fee.  

His target audience is people in their late 30s to early 60s, business people or a general audience. His topic is on how to motivate people to fitness. Micheal asked for tips on how to let groups know that he speaks for free. He’s compiling all the results for the SpeakNet News archives. 

I responded and offered these nine ways to publicize free or paid speaking engagements:

1. Contact local chambers of commerce, Rotary, Kiwanis, Business Networking International, and any other business networking groups.
     
2. Consider joining Toastmasters. You’ll get instant feedback. And Toastmasters know which groups in town welcome speakers.
     
3. Go to MeetUp.com and see what business groups are meeting near you. I belong to a MeetUp group for Internet marketers in Wisconsin, and at our last meeting, we discussed which speakers we could invite to speak for free.
      
4. Go to Craigslist and check out the community category. You’ll find sub-categories for classes, events and small business. Post a note in the best category offering your services. Make sure you don’t post the same item to more than one category. See How to Use Craigslist as a Global Publicity Tool.
           
5. Get a local business journal, daily or weekly newspaper or business magazine and check the section of the paper that announces local business events and who is speaking. You’ll find many groups you probably never knew existed. There’s usually a phone number to call for registration. Call that number and ask for the meeting planner.      
      
6. If you’re Twittering (you should be), let your followers know about your topic and ask them for suggestions. If you’re speaking in a specific geographic area, use a hashtag (#) with the name of a city in your tweet, like this—#Chicgo— so people who are searching for information on that city will find your tweet. Learn more about how to use hashtags for publicity.
      
7. If you’re on LinkedIn (you should be), post the question in their Q&A section and you’ll probably get many responses from people who do business near you.
     
8. If you’re on Facebook, ask your friends to spread the word. See 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook.
     
9. You probably won’t have to resort to paid ads. But if you do, you can target people in specific geographic locations with fairly cheap ads on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Do you do free or paid speaking engagements? If so, what are some of the ways you publicize them?

(Shutterstock photo)

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.

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?

If you’re participating in Make a Difference Day, the annual day of doing good in the U.S., let your local media and bloggers know.

Typical projects. like cleaning up neighborhoods and helping the elderly with repair projects, make great stories for newspapers and magazines, and great visuals for television, particularly if the media are part of the Gannett Company, Inc. which sponsors the event through USA Weekend magazine.  

This year, the event will be Saturday, Oct. 24. 

You can get tips about planning a volunteer project, and register your plans in the Make a Difference DAYtaBANK. This searchable database will help you recruit volunteers and get recognition for your efforts.

Once your project is registered, you become eligible to receive free breakfast for your volunteers from Newman’s Own. A total of 50 projects (one from each state) will be chosen to receive a donation of Newman’s Own Sweet Enough Cereal to feed their volunteers on Make A Difference Day. 

Don’t forget to share your Make a Difference activities with your social media friends and followers:

• Recruit volunteers from your Facebook groups, and Meetup.com.
• You can upload video after the event to Facebook, Twitter and your YouTube channel. 
• Upload photos to photo-sharing sites like Flickr.
• Update your Twitter followers throughout the day.     
• Report on activities before and after the event at your own blog.
• Thank your volunteers through newspaper and magazine letters to the editors and via social networking.

Your projects—and the accompanyhing publicity—don’t necessarily need to be grandiose. If you’re doing something to benefit your local church, for example, try to get a story into the church bulletin. If you’re helping a local nonprofit, offer to write an article for their newsletter.