Susan Murphy of Pleasant Ridge, MI writes:

I’m looking for some interesting avenues in which to promote our client, an environmental scientist who specializes in toxic mold education, detection and remediation.

Connie Morbach, M.S. CHMM CIE, is a respected national authority in indoor air quality (IAQ) who has performed over 10,000 residential/commercial air tests and environmental evaluations.

Since 1994, her team has witnessed the illnesses and devastation caused by many ill-equipped and unscrupulous IAQ/Mold ‘professionals’ in their industry, and they continue to help so many who have suffered from these injustices. She has just started a blog and is tweeting to share her knowledge as well.

Connie has been featured on a half dozen indoor air quality investigative segments for NBC’s the ” Today” show (“Why your gym may be making you sidk” and “Watch out for hidden germs in supermarkets”) , as well as “Rachael Ray” and “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” in the past but she hasn’t had a PR firm since then.

She’s looking to get the word out again about her expertise and I’m hoping your loyal Hounds can suggest some thoughtful ideas.

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.

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.)

Consuelo Okdie from Tampa Bay, Fla., writes:

“I’m hoping that you or one of your readers will be able to tell me how to get my artwork used as set decoration for TV or films. 

“My work is unique in medium and application as I am one of a very few artists using polymer clay to create illustrations & paintings.  Any information you may be able to give me will be greatly appreciated.”
 
The Publicity Hound says:

First, you need to be willing to do the research necessary to pitch set designers, costume coordinators, production coordinators, prop masters and product placement decision-makers for specific movies and TV shows. I hosted a teleseminar with Amy Bates Stumpf two years ago on How to Get Your Consumer Product  onto the Sets of Movies and TV Shows.

A few quick pointers from that training session:

• The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety are magazines that report on upcoming production schedules. That’s a good place to start.
    
• If you’re pitching specific TV shows, be sure watch the show first. In your pitch, explain why you think your product or artwork is a good tie-in.
      
• Don’t send unsolicited products.
     
• Pitch early. Getting in on the ground floor of a TV show or movie or you might miss your opportunity. 

If you’re looking for publicity from bloggers or traditional media but can’t think of an idea to pitch to them, here’s a quick way to find several. 

Longtime Publicity Hound Norman Lieberman reminded me about this yesterday when he emailed me to see if I had a list of questions that Publicity Hounds can ask themselves, designed to uncover nuggets of information that are possible story ideas.

I gave Norm two resources. The first is my “Story Idea Tickler List,” part of the handouts for my “Savvy Media Relations” workshop: 

1. What’s new or unique about your business?
      
2. What do you offer that your competitors don’t?                                                   
         
3. How do you help people solve problems, save time or save money?
       
4. What business mistakes have you made that you learned from?
      
5. What new trends have you spotted in your industry?
      
6. Is there a social or political issue you feel strongly about? (Write an opinion column, letter to the editor or blog post.) 
       
7. Are you sponsoring a contest or an award?
       
8. Can you piggyback your topic off a holiday or anniversary?
       
9. How are you using technology in your business?
       
10. Do you have any good visuals that tie into your story idea for television?
        
11. What about your personal life? (Hobbies, travels, food, clothing, etc.)
        
12. Have you formed an interesting partnership or alliance?
        
13. What how-to articles could you write?
             
14. What topics are good fodder for a tip sheet? (9 tips for….)
        
15. On what radio talk shows would you be a good fit and what’s the hot story of the day that ties into your expertise?
        
16. Are you the local angle to a national or regional story?
           
17. How are you using social media in your business? 
       
18. How can you piggyback onto celebrity news? For example, here are 10 ways to generate publicity from the Tiger Woods mess and here’s how Connie Dieken, a Cleveland TV personality and media trainer, got publicity by piggybacking onto celebrity outbursts.
       
19. Do you have an interesting  stand-alone photo you can offer the media? Newspapers and magazines often use these photos as fillers.

If those aren’t enough, you can check out the free sample chapter of my ebook, “How to be a Kick-butt Publicity Hound” where you’ll find more ideas, and a fuller explanation of some of the ideas listed above. 

What ideas have you pitched recently that other Publicity Hounds could also use? Share them here.

Piggybacking onto hot celebrity gossip ranks right up there as one of the best ways to generate free publicity for your product, service, cause or issue.

But hurry. This story may be old news by the end of the week.

Here are the Top 10 ways to create free publicity for yourself by participating in the Tiger Woods conversation online and offline:

1. If you’re an expert in a topic that ties into this drama, pitch influential bloggers who are writing about the story. Explain your area of expertise and offer commentary.
       
2. Post comments at high-traffic blogs like Huffington Post that are discussing the story. Ditto at blogs written by journalists, like sports columnist Jason Whitlock whose post on Tiger’s Real Crime? Not Playing the Media’s Game attracted more than 500 comments in about two hours this morning. Weave into your comment information about your expertise. If appropriate, lead people back to your website where they can find tips, advice or a quiz that ties into the topic.
        
3. If you’re a divorce attorney who can talk about prenups, an ad agency executive who’s an expert on branding or celebrity endorsements, a crisis counselor or PR pro who can discuss PR 101, and even a minister who can offer tips on how to forgive, write a letter to the editor of local, regional and national publications where the stories are appearing.
         
4. Call your local TV stations and offer yourself as the local angle to this international story. Offer a list of short tips.
         
5. Create a short two-minute video offering advice on what others can learn from Tiger’s mess and upload it to YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. Tag it with keywords that people are using to search for information on the story.
         
6. Subscribe to free media leads services like HARO and PitchRate, or paid services like ProfNet and PRLeads, so you know about the types of sources journalists are seeking for their stories.
           
7. Offer to write a guest blog post about it, with tips and advice. BloggerLinkUp helps guest bloggers and bloggers who need guest posts find each other. 
       

8. Pitch clever angles to this story to drive-time radio show hosts. Example: A cell phone expert can pitch a story on “Got a dirty little secret? 5 ways to cover your tracks on your cell phone.”         

9. Write your own blog post that ties into Tiger Woods, include lots of outbound links, and then bookmark it at sites like Digg and Delicious. The “Top 10 Tips…” headline works well. I got the idea for this post while reading Tip #3 in Bryan Eisenbertg’s blog post on Top 3 Problems of Social Media.
           
10.  Do all of the above, and link to them from Twitter and Facebook.

If you’ve piggybacked off the Tiger Woods is story to generate free publicity for yourself or clients, or you’d like to add to this list, join the conversation.    

If you’re dying to get onto Oprah, stop sending unsolicited books, press kits and other junk.

Instead, spend some time reading the blog posts from the show’s 14 producers.

Yes, they blog. Is it OK to contact them? You bet! Check out the invitation:

If you read just one week’s worth of posts from producer “Caroline,” the first producer on this list, you’d know that:

• She likes mint chip ice cream.
      
• She loves kittens.
      
• She had a really tough week. 

Why does knowing that help? Because smart Publicity Hounds can weave information about those topics into their pitches. They can also take the time to comment several week’s BEFORE they pitch. That shows the producers that you care about what they write. 

You’ll be disappointed to learn that many of the producers haven’t blogged since the summer. But if you take the time to read what they HAVE posted, you’ll be a lot farther ahead than other people who are far too busy to do this kind of important research. I was surprised to see a skimpy number of comments at most posts. That tells me that people might not know about the blogs, or they read them but are too lazy to comment.

Susan Harrow, who I interviewed for tips on “How to Get Booked on Oprah,” says the best pitches are those that fall within several categories that can be considered Oprah’s hot-button topics. Reading the producers’ blog posts will help you identify those topics. 

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.

John and Bobbi Robinson of Vanderbilt, PA write:

“Unity, a Journey of Hope, is our nonprofit that grants wishes to adults with a life-limiting illness.

“We take them to concerts and sporting events, introduce them to people they want to meet, send them on vacation with a friend or family member, or send them on trips to meet relatives they haven’t seen in awhile.

“It has been impossible to get our story onto the local Pittsburgh TV stations. Coverage in the local newspapers has been awesome.  But the TV stations are like a fortress. If your Hounds have any ideas on how we can pitch an idea to the local stations and get on the air, their help would be appreciated.”

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.