PR Week offers some great tips on how to prepare your CEO for TV interviews. Most of these items are useful for print and radio, too. They’re courtesty of Jerry Doyle, EVP at CommCore Consulting Group. 1. How well does he know the subject matter for the interview? It is perfectly reasonable to expect that… Read More
5 ways to drive sales with online publicity
Small-business marketing expert Lois Carter Fay, APR suggests these 5 ways to drive sales with online publicity: –Use others to promote you. Create something “viral”–something that people love to pass on to their associates–and you can really rake in the sales. When you think “viral,” think fun, useful or something that everyone wants, like a… Read More
Buckle Up Florida campaign gets ideas galore
Jennifer Marko of Tampa, Florida wantes to know how to promote the “Buckle Up Florida” campaign designed to encourage people to use their seatbelts. Here are a few ideas. From Dan Limbach of Oak Park, Illinois: Give an unusual twist to the concept of the “cutest baby” photo contest. Ask people to submit the most… Read More
“Savvy Senior” columnist self-syndicates
Every so often, an excited Publicity Hound writes to tell me about a terrific idea for a column they want to write and sell to one of the big news syndicates so they can become rich and famous like Dear Abby, Ann Landers, Mike Royko and hundreds of others. Not so fast, I tell them.… Read More
Tips for submitting articles online, offline
If you’re submitting articles for online publications, don’t make the mistake of thinking you should follow the same rules you follow for getting articles published offline. Or you’ll blow your chances of ever getting them distributed on the Internet. Here are three major differences: –If you want something published in a print publication, you should… Read More
When being cute works and can result in publicity
Cute headlines on news releases. Cute lead paragraphs. Cute story pitches. It’s enough to make a reporter gag. Unless, of course, they crave cute. But how do you ever know? When pitching a story or sending a news release, err on the side of caution. Don’t send anything that smacks of cute to reporters who… Read More
Photos on CD help TV reporters illustrate your story
Publicity Hound Brad Wilson of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, passes along a handy tip on how to make TV reporters love you. Give them a CD of photos they can flash on the screen during news or feature stories, even if they already have the film footage they need. Nineteen-year-old Brad recently returned from a… Read More
How to avoid being misquoted in media interviews
The next time you think a reporter misquoted you, ask yourself if you were indeed misquoted. Or did you say something dumb to the reporter that found its way into print? And now you regret it? Jill Henry, a contributing writer at the Springfield Business Journal in Springfield, Missouri, wrote to me about how sources… Read More
Use computer worms, viruses for publicity
A virus has infiltrated my email, and about two dozen messages, all written in either German or Dutch, keep pouring into my emailbox. I’m sure some kind of virus has plagued you. The next time that happends, see if you can get some publicity from it. In the days after major worms hit, I read… Read More
Piggyback off the weather
The spring’s unseasonably cold weather here in Wisconsin–complete with wool socks, furnaces at full blast and hot soup for lunch–is a good reminder about one of the easiest ways to gerate publcity–by piggybacking your story idea off the weather. After sweating through a week of 100-degree temperatures a few summers ago, Publicity Hound John Landsberg… Read More