Lots of people don’t think twice before advertising where they are, or where they’re going, on Twitter or Facebook.

“Dinner’s only half made, but I’m rushing to pick up my kid from soccer.”

“Leaving home and heading to a client meeting at Pete’s Bistro.”

“Outa here for a weekend on the ski slopes.”

If that describes you, and you also use the FourSquare app on your phone, don’t be surprised if your smiling face and your next tweet show up on PleaseRobMe.com, a site that mocks people who broadcast to the world when they’re leaving home and where they’re going.  

Here’s how it works. People download the FourSquare app to their phone and create a profile. You can invite friends from your Gmail, Facebook or Twitter accounts. You then use FourSquare to ”check-in.” When you tell people where you are, FourSquare tells your friends where they can find you and recommends places to go and things to do nearby.

The problem occurs when you tell FourSquare to automatically broadcast your whereabouts to your Twitter and Facebook followers. As soon as somebody checks in, their tweet or message shows up on a scrolling list on PleaseRobMe.com’s home page. Dozens of new messages appear each minute.

Thieves can use the information on PleaseRobMe.com several ways. They can set up a filter and search by username or city. Both Twitter and FourSquare note when you have marked your location. That gives thieves an idea of about how long you’ll be away from home.

“The danger is publicly telling people where you are,” says PleaseRobMe. ”This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.  So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home.”

Social Media Rx, the social media assessment I created with my business partner, Jeanne Hurlbert, through our company, MySocialMediaSolution.com, warns people about sharing information about when their homes are unoccupied. The assessment is a series of multiple-choice questions designed to test the user’s knowledge of social media. The report it generates gives each user a customized formula that guides them on what to discuss at social media sites. And it offers hundreds of other helpful suggestions about social media protocol, tips and tools, including advice about safety.

Here’s what our report says about advertising when you’re going on vacation:

Sites like Twitter, where some people bare all, could be a criminal’s best friend. Some people love sharing details of their vacations and other out-of-town trips with their social media friends. But not us. We think it’s smart to never let people know when we’re leaving a house or office that will be unoccupied.

What about you? Do you use FourSquare with Twitter or Facebook, and if so, do you restrict the types of messages you broadcast to the world?

What about PleaseRobMe.com?  Do you think the site is a public service because it underscores the safety problem? Or does it give burglars one more tool? Do you think most of the people who show up on that site have any idea that they’re there?

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.

If you asked me to describe my ideal business partner, never in a million years would I envision someone with a PhD in sociology.

Such degrees, I always believed, are expensive pieces of paper printed by the diploma factories otherwise known as universities. They seldom lead to “real world” jobs outside of academia.

I certainly wouldn’t want a Phi Beta Kappa tagging along with me. Such a highfalutin academic would be horrified to hear that I flunked five college courses and almost didn’t graduate because I was three credits short of a diploma just six weeks before graduation.

Meet Jeanne Hurlbert, a PhD sociologist at Louisiana State University, survey expert and Phi Beta Kappa, who was studying social networks long before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was born. When I heard her on a teleseminar in January this year, I was hooked less than 10 minutes into the call. I emailed the teleseminar host immediately and gushed, “This woman is brilliant! Where did you find her?”

Jeanne (pronounced Jeanie) was the guest expert, and she was explaining the importance of using customer profile surveys to gather scientific data about what our customers want. Don’t make false assumptions about products to create or services to offer, she cautioned, based on discussions you’re having at social media sites.  False assumptions can derail your business.

Her message hit home.

For a few years, I’d been wondering where to take my business ever since newspapers started marching toward the graveyard. Traditional media has far less influence now than it did 20 years ago for any Publicity Hound who’s self-promoting.

Two days after the teleseminar, I hired Jeanne as a consultant to help me create a customer profile survey. She suggested questions I never would have thought of asking, and she devised a clever way to generate customer testimonials for my website and product pages.

In March, when I was called to Ohio for a funeral for three days, right in the middle of the survey, she kept all the plates spinning, personally attending to dozens of customer service problems we encountered when the technology “hiccuped” and many of the respondents had trouble accessing the survey.

Social media: The bridge to a partnership

The results of Jeanne’s survey were like the footbridge to our partnership.

Many of the respondents admitted that they were completely confused—and sometimes terrified—by social media.  Jeanne and I talked about how we were, too, when we started creating profiles at the social media sites and how it’s still often overwhelming.

I confessed to her two of my big social media sins:

• Blatant promotion without knowing any better
    
• Being too embarrassed to ask about things I didn’t understand. Here’s a good example. When you go to a blog, why is there sometimes a big cluster of words in a box, and some of the words are bigger than other words? Sometimes, the words don’t even appear to be related. I eventually learned that that’s called a tag cloud. It’s a visual representation of topics discussed at the blog.  The bigger the words, the more often they’re discussed.    

Then she came clean with me:

• She thought social media was a flash in the pan and only for kids. 
    
• When she started participating, she assumed it would be a fairly easy ride because she’d been studying social networks for years and, after all, she had that PhD.  But she eventually learned that she was lost.

That’s when I knew we weren’t so different after all.

One conversation led to another. She interpreted my survey results and suggested new products and services I could offer my customers. The survey led to a shift in my business, with far greater emphasis on online publicity and social media.

Then, in May, Jeanne suggested we start a business.

She already had the technology in place to create a detailed questionnaire on any topic and return to the respondent a customized report  based on the answers. She called it an assessment, and suggested that the logical topic was social media and how people should use it for business.

We could combine her technology and knowledge of social networking with my more than 10 years teaching people how to self-promote. The results would be a customized “here’s what to do” report that removes the fear for anyone struggling with social media and gives them hundreds of solid suggestions on how to map out a social media strategy and stay on track.

If I had something like that in my hands when I started blogging several years ago, I reasoned, I could have shaved years off my learning curve. I jumped at the chance to join her, and we formed My Social Media Solution, LLC. It’s the perfect complement to my regular business, The Publicity Hound, and my weekly ezine, which will still be going strong.

Social Media Rx: Just What the Doc Ordered

In a few weeks, we’ll introduce you to “Social Media Rx: Your 20-Minute Prescription for Cutting through the Clutter, Chatter and Confusion.”

After completing a 20-minute questionnaire, each respondent receives a customized report along with a formula that suggests exactly which topics they should be discussing at social media sites, and how often, based on their job and career, hobbies, interests, family, areas of expertise, and other factors. No two reports are identical. We’ve even applied for a patent to protect the process we used to create this product.

Your report comes with six checklists that detail which tasks you should complete daily, weekly and monthly at  social media sites. The checklists even show you which of those tasks you can delegate if you’re lucky enough to have an assistant, and which you should do yourself, like writing your own blog posts.

More about this in a few weeks.

And She Loves Dogs!

Jeanne teaches spin classes at 5:30 a.m. She scuba dives. She loves spending time with her husband, Jack, and their 8-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. And she has two dogs.

We’ve never met in person. But it seems like Neily, her Corgi, and CB, her rescue long-haired Chihuahua, are on a first-name basis with Bogie, my German Short-Haired Pointer, and Tracker, my Weimaraner, because they all bark at each other while we’re talking on the phone.

Jeanne and I often coordinate our schedules while walking the dogs, feeding the dogs, yelling at the dogs, dispensing treats, wiping muddy paws, shoveling dog food into bowls, and corralling them into their crates at night.

More than a few times, the daily walks for her two boys and my two girls have had to wait.

Social Media Rx has been more than eight months of back-breaking work and, often, frustration, particularly when it comes to technology. We’re excited to finally introduce you to it.

And when we do, Neily, CB, Bogie and Tracker will be happy to have us back again.

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)

Companies and nonprofits everywhere are scrambling to create social media policies.

But before you appoint a special committee within your organization to do weeks of research, and then summon your expensive attorneys, scan this helpful list of more than 80 sample social media policies. If you have your own policy that isn’t listed here, add it to the list for more exposure and, perhaps, publicity.  

I love this list because you can identify three or four organizatons similar to yours and probably find policies that address the concerns of your particular industry. Nonprofits, for example, would probably want a policy that addresses what volunteers can and can’t do in social media under the nonprofit’s name. 

Several weeks ago, I used LinkedIn’s question-and-answer feature to tap into my own network to hunt for social media policies, and then reported what I found. This new list of more than 80 policies is much more comprehensive, well-organized and all in one place. 

Tip: How about sharing the list with YOUR network on the social media sites, including LinkedIn?  

What do you do when you’re walking past the sales department in your company and you see a sales rep uploading a photo of him and his drunken buddies to his Facebook page?

What about that strange guy in Receiving who tweets about all things Gothic and, occasionally, slips the name of your company into his weird tweets?

Or the woman in HR who thinks social media is a waste of time and gives dirty looks to anyone who even talks about it?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a social media policy right at your fingertips to avoid problems like those? Sure it would. But writing one could be a nightmare.

So relax. I found several dozen samples you can refer to when writing your own policy.

Last week, I was preparing a presentation on social media for managers in Executive Agenda, a professional development group for senior executives in Wisconsin, and needed a sample social media policy. To save time, I went over to LinkedIn and asked if anyone had a sample they’d be willing to share.

Eleven people responded. I struck gold! You can, too:

• Marketing communications strategist Alan Stamm shares this list of more than 30 social media policies, compiled by Barry Hurd at 123 Social Media in Seattle. It includes  policies for Harvard University, the U.S. Air Force, HP, Intel, Cisco, GM and ESPN.
• Alan also linked to blogger Filberto Selvas who comments on what he found within policies from those organizations.
• Ari Adler, who wrote about corporate social media policies for Ragan.com,  shared a particularly helpful Top 10 Guidelines for Social Media. It’s copyright-free and can be used with or without attribution to Shift Communications, which helped a client write it.
• Freelancer Fawn Fitter shared an article she wrote for Microsoft.com on how to Accommodate Younger Workers in Your IT Strategy.

• Lynne Eisaguirre, a former employment attorney, cautions: “You also need to consider the advice of your IT people about the danger of using too much bandwith, importing viruses and the like.

By the way, if you aren’t asking questions on LinkedIn, you’re not taking advantage of a powerful shortcut to doing research. Answering questions is also a great way to promote your expertise on LinkedIn.

Next, I’ll take the video and post it to my YouTube channel. Then I’ll share it with my Facebook Fans. Failing to create Fan Pages on Facebook, by the way, is a major missed opportunity, because Fan Pages are the only place Facebook allows you to promote. You can also have an unlimited number of Fans. Read about other missed opportunities on Facebook. 

And then I’ll tweet about it, leading my Twitter followers to this blog.

There are countless other ways to recycle content, but you get the idea.  If you’re writing a string of tweets about a particular topic, can they be turned into article for EzineArticles.com? Can that article then be turned into a video?

When you find yourself creating content for social media sites, stop and ask yourself: How many ways you can milk the cow that’s already in the barn?  

If you’re new to blogging, or you’ve been blogging for awhile but sometimes find yourself struggling for something to write about, here are nine ideas to get you writing quickly:

1. Take a poll.  Using a free tool like Survey Monkey, you can poll your readers on a fun, controversial or hot topic.  You will, of course, write another blog post sharing results of the poll. For blog polls, the quickest and easiest thing to do is use a widget.  You can get one at PollDaddy.com (they have a WordPress plugin) or you can use the WordPress survey plugin to put a poll inside a blog post.

2. Use Google Alerts.  Create alerts for your topics at Google.com/alerts. Google will email you as often as you wish with great content that ties into your topic.

3. Create Top 10 lists.  Letterman made these famous.  Readers love them!

4. Create a video.  Video is hot, hot, hot and it will pull traffic like crazy. Here’s one I created on how to get your consumer product into holiday gift sections. If you’re intimidated by video, let Mike Stewart help.

5. Comment on somebody else’s video which you can also post to your blog.  You’ll find millions of videos at YouTube. I blogged about this video that shows Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Mark Murphy, a strategist during John McCain’s 2000 campaign for president, who were caught criticizing McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for vice president.  It happened during a panel discussion on the set of MSNBC, where Murphy is a commenator.

6. Report on interesting conversatons on Twitter.  I frequently blog about discussions I have with my Twitter followers, how we help each other, and how Twitter is a fabulous tool for publicity, if you use it correctly.  I use screenshots, too, to dress up the blog post. (Caution: Don’t let Twitter and Facebook steal you away from your blog.)

7. Find content at Digg.com. Use the search box at this social bookmarking site to find interesting content on a specific topic. You can guage the popularity of the topic by how many Diggs it has received.    

8. Share humorous content.  Funny photos, jokes and videos—particularly those that ties into your topic—are a nice break from the serious stuff.

9. Recycle content from other sources.  If you’re a speaker, extract content from your handouts.  If you’re an author, excerpt from your book.  I frequently cut and paste helpful comments I post to other blogs, like the comment you’re reading, and turn it into a post at this blog. I wrote seven of these nine tips this morning for the Blogging Made Easy post I read at the Salon.com blog. (It’s the second comment.)

How do you find interesting content for your blog?

(Shutterstock photo)

Thousands of people who are being downsized, right-sized and capsized during this bad economy aren’t waiting around for a job offer. They’re looking to the Web for their next career—and maybe even riches.

Enter e-Riches 2.0–Next-Generation Marketing Strategies for Making Millions Online, a new book by Internet success coach Scott Fox.

If you’re one of the victims of this economy and you want to start selling online, or you’re new to Internet marketing, you can learn all about the basics of what it takes to create a successful business online. If you’ve been selling online for several years, the book will bring you up to speed quickly on how to add social media to your marketing mix.

Here are Scott’s 10 recommendations on how to use social networking as a marketing tool.

1. Invite a half-dozen or more friends to get your network started. Practice using the tools of the social network to communicate with them. For example, you can “add” friends on MySpace, “poke” or “write on the walls” of Facebook connections, or respond to some questions in the LinkedIn “Answers” section. (See Social networking ROI: A testimonial more valuable than an ad.)
              
2. Start engaging, publishing, and interacting. Get to know some people—that’s  why you’re here.
       
3. Be authentic. A big part of being authentic is letting the “real you” out to play. Nobody wants to play with a “suit,” so don’t be afraid to be yourself (within professional and legal limits, of course). Mixing the personal and business sides of your life is more common than it used to be.
       
4. Only try to connect with others with whom you really do have common ground. Indiscriminate friend requests are “friend spam.” They are  no more appreciated than email spam or junk mail in the real world. (And if people you don’t know starting linking with you, your own network will soon be less valuable, too.)
                
5. Ask for help. Most social network users are online to be social, and most are happy to help by sharing their knowledge about how the systems work.
              
6. Use feeds to keep up with your friends’ activities and broadcast your own. Posting your own status constantly and cleverly is a great distributed engagement marketing tactic. This is one of the “missed opportunities” I discussed during the teleseminar I hosted this month on 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook. 
      
7. If you have a blog, feed its posts into your profile page. This will automatically help keep your pages fresh and share your writings with a new audience, too.
      
8. Join some groups—learn the lingo and the tools of the network by using them and observing how others use them, too. Joining groups will also begin to create a natural dialogue with other users that will grow over time.
      
9. Be a good and involved citizen in those groups to cultivate new friends. There’s no better way to gain the respect of any community than adding value by sharing info, support, or companionship—and these tools will amplify the effect. If you are an expert, social networks are a great way to spread your reputation cloud for that expertise.
     
10. Create your own group. Once you are comfortable, start a group around your product or brand. Position yourself as an expert resource and offer to help and facilitate community. Members usually proudly display the names of the groups to which they belong on their profile pages. This can lead to lots more clicks (and members) as others see your group’s name or logo on friends’ pages and in their feeds.

Scott’s book includes more than a dozen examples  of real-life Internet marketing success stories, from a North Carolina furniture store that profitably captures high-end customers using pay-per-click search engine text ads on Google, Yahoo! andMSN (Chapter 21), to the article syndication strategy that has helped a Christian stay-at-home mom to attract lots of profitable traffic for her blog (Chapter 16).

The book  is $25 and published by AMACOM, the American Management Association.

Jeanette Simpson of Lakewood Ranch, Fla., writes:

“I have just published my first book, From Interior Design Intern to Employee: How to be a Keeper (Including Tips from Those Who Hire.)”

“It’s written specifically to help interior design interns transition from college to career.

“Aside from social networking, contacting university design departments and all vendors, reps, designers and architects I know, how can I reach my target audience—college students?

“Any advice from your Publicity Hounds would be greatly appreciated.”