The Publicity Hound’s
Tips of the Week
Issue #455 June 16, 2009
Publisher: Joan Stewart
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“Tips, Tricks and Tools for Free Publicity”
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In This Issue
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1. Letterman’s Lesson
2. Facebook Vanity URLs June 28
3. Give Away Food for Publicity
4. Let Corporate Sponsors Promote You
5. Promoting a Kosher Cooking Show
6. Help This Hound
7. Hound Quote of the Week
8. And at My Blog…
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1. Letterman’s Lesson
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When you’ve done something dumb, and you need to apologize, do it
quickly.
Do it thoroughly. Be humble. Accept blame. Explain how it will
never happen again. Most importantly, look like you mean it.
David Letterman’s first mistake was the bad joke about
Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter being “knocked up by Alex
Rodriguez.” The second was turning his apology into an eight-
minute segment last week, two days after he used the joke in his
monologue.
He looked so uncomfortable that it made me squirm. The apology
was punctuated with even more jokes and lots of laughs from the
audience.
It didn’t work. Instead, it allowed the controversy to swirl out
of control. By yesterday:
–The story had been front and center, every day, for a week.
–Women’s advocacy groups, including the National Organization of
Women, blasted Letterman at their website and on news shows.
–Palin supporters, calling themselves FireDavidLetterman.com,
planned a protest for today, outside the show’s studio at the Ed
Sullivan Theater in New York’s Times Square.
Letterman apologized again last night and Palin accepted his
apology. But he did more damage to himself than necessary by
trying to slither out of trouble the first time with a half-
hearted mea culpa.
Another example of how not to say “I’m sorry” surfaced yesterday,
when GOP activist Rusty DePass likened Michelle Obama to an
escaped gorilla. DePass removed his Facebook page Sunday after he
was caught commenting on a report that a gorilla had escaped a
zoo in Columbia, S.C.
“I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors–probably
harmless,” he commented.
When a blogger noticed the comment and reported on it, DePass
told WIS-TV in Columbia, “I am as sorry as I can be if I offended
anyone. The comment was clearly in jest.”
Then in a dumb-and-dumber moment, he added, “The comment was
hers, not mine,” claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark
about humans descending from apes.
Crisis counselor Jonathan Bernstein says a fast, thorough apology
is one of the best ways to atone for your PR sins. During my
interview with him “How to Keep the Media Wolves at Bay,” he arms
Publicity Hounds with all the tools necessary to keep the media
off your back and keep a story from blowing up in your face.
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2. Facebook Vanity URLs on June 28
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If you claimed the vanity URL you wanted for your Facebook
Profile, congratulations.
On Friday night, more than 1 million user names were snapped up
within the first hour. But you’re not done yet.
Facebook users who created Fan Pages by May 31 this year and who
had accumulated at least 1,000 fans by that date were also able
to claim vanity URLs for their Fan Pages, on Friday.
Everyone else has to wait until June 28. If that includes you,
mark your calendars.
Facebook Fan Pages–sometimes referred to as Product Pages,
Company Pages or Business Pages–are the only way to promote your
business on that site. Creating and promoting Fan Pages can put
you miles ahead of your competitors who don’t know about these
powerful tools.
Because Facebook doesn’t limit the number of Fans you can
attract, but limits you to 5,000 Friends, you’d be crazy not to
create Fan Pages for various topics in which you specialize, or
various niches you are targeting.
Google indexes these pages, by the way, so they can show up in
the organic search results on the left side of the screen when
somebody searches Google for your keywords. That’s why you must
make sure relevant keywords are within the titles of your Fan
Pages.
During the teleseminar I hosted June 4 on “11 Ways to Avoid
Missed Opportunities on Facebook,” the 28 pages of illustrated
handouts included four examples of Fan Pages, two options for
creating Pages, things you need to know about Pages, three ways
to find an unlimited number of Fans, and the best ways to promote
other people’s Fan pages so they promote yours. We recorded the
teleseminar and it’s available as a CD, MP3 or electronic
transcript.
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3. Give Away Food for Publicity
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It’s time for summer festivals, concerts, rib burn-offs, county
and state fairs, farmer’s markets, church carnivals, and many
other events tied to food.
If you’re promoting one of them, make food a valuable publicity
tool:
–Deliver your signature dish to local deejays in town a day or
two before the event. The Wisconsin State Fair delivers “six
packs” of giant cream puffs to radio stations throughout
Wisconsin the day before the fair opens. The result? Thousands of
dollars in valuable publicity without having to pay a penny.
–Try to get one of your chefs or cooks onto a morning TV news
show to demonstrate how to make a dish that will be featured at
the event. The hosts love to help cook on the set. And the hungry
production crews devour the food when they’re done shooting.
–Contact the food editor of your local newspaper and offer
several recipes for food items that will be featured at your
event.
–Offer recipes to your weekly shopper, the tabloid newspapers
that are given away in almost every community.
–Issue a challenge and make food the prize. A hamburger chain in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin gives customers six burgers for just $5 when
the Brewers score five runs or more in any game, win or lose,
home or away.
Those are only five ideas. You’ll get lots more, plus tips on how
to navigate the media’s ethics policies, serve food at news
conferences and on company tours, avoid problems when offering
gifts of food to the media, and more. See “Special Report #43:
The Do’s and Don’ts of Offering Food to the Media.” Only $15.
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4. Let Corporate Sponsors Promote You
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You’d think that in this bad economy, landing a corporate
sponsorship is tougher than ever.
Not necessarily. Companies and nonprofits are often putting
pricey ad campaigns on the chopping block before anything else.
Sponsoring the promotion of a book, author, speaker, product or
service sometimes amounts to peanuts compared with other
marketing expenses. Because many people ASSUME sponsorships are
harder to come by, they might not bother going after them.
That’s exactly the reason you should.
Brendon Burchard, an author and speaker, has figured out some
really ingenious ways to land corporate and nonprofit promotional
sponsorships and use them to fund his marketing efforts.
–Sony, for example, featured his company on a website with more
than 5 million visitors for f*ree. That allowed him to quickly
build a mailing list of more than 30,000 people.
–Brendon knows the magic phrase you must use to quickly convince
nonprofits to publicize your book or product to their thousands
or millions of members.
–His corporate sponsorships have been responsible for the
publicity he has gotten on ABC World News, Oprah & Friends,
National Public Radio and 63 major radio stations. (The company
pays its PR firm or uses internal PR staff to get him media
exposure.)
–Corporate sponsors have made it possible for him to receive
$500,000 in advances for his second book.
–He has figured out how to get major companies like Wachovia,
Coke and Toyota to promote and sponsor his books, publicity and
speaking tours.
In other words, he’s using somebody else’s influence, somebody
else’s contacts and somebody else’s money.
But Brendon says the process most people use to do what he does
is hit and miss, at best. They don’t know the right people to
approach within a company or nonprofit. They don’t know the five
elements they must include in their written proposal. And they
don’t know about the website they can use to find potential
sponsors and promotional partners.
Curious about how he does it?
Listen to him explain during a free 90-minute teleseminar on
Thursday, June 18, with my friend, Steve Harrison. You can choose
from two times: 2 p.m. Eastern or 7 p.m. Eastern.
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5. Promoting a Kosher Cooking Show
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This week, three Publicity Hounds have tips for Avrom Honig who
wants ideas for how to promote an Internet TV show called Feed Me
Bubbe (Yiddish for grandmother). She demonstrates how to cook a
variety of kosher food.
From Jennifer Manocchio:
“Send the excellent media coverage you have received so far to
the big food magazine editors and invite them to come cook with
Bubbe. Just be careful not to send media coverage to competitive
outlets.”
From Gail Sideman:
“Use a High Holiday or Chanukah angle. Bubbes are stereotypically
recognized for their holiday cooking prowess, and these
publications/show often run features or sidebars about Jewish
holiday food. You might emphasize honey-flavored/infused foods
for the New Year, varieties of latkes for Chanukah and so on.”
From The Publicity Hound:
Just for the heck of it, I think you should try contacting the
Food Network (go to their website) and let them know what you’re
doing.
They’re a little too slick and polished for you and Bubbe, but
the fact that you both have a huge following could really work in
your favor.
I’d also pitch the dozens and possibly hundreds of bloggers who
write about food, anything Jewish, and the elderly.
Read all the responses to this week’s Help This Hound question.
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6. Help This Hound
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Judith Sherven and Jim Sniechowski of Las Vegas, Nev., write:
“We’re already best-selling authors of five relationship books,
and we have turned our attention and expertise to soft-sell
marketing. Our new book, The Heart of Marketing: Love Your
Customers and They Will Love You Back, Morgan James Publishing,
May 2009), already a best-seller at Amazon, promotes selling as
spiritual service and marketing from the heart.
“This book is the voice for consciousness and conscience, caring
and community in commerce–and has been released at this time
when the aftershocks of hard-sell greed are being felt all around
the world.
“Please don’t bother suggesting ‘get on Oprah.’ That is already a
definite goal. Please DO suggest the best ideas you can think of
to get the book standing on long legs so that word of mouth takes
over and drives the book onto the New York Times Best Seller
list.
The Publicity Hound says:
You have so many options for promotion, including traditional
media and social media. Let’s see how many ideas my Hounds can
suggest. Book publicists and authors, let’s see your best stuff.
Post your ideas to my blog.
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7. Hound Joke of the Week
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The other day I saw two dogs walk over to a parking meter. One
of them says to the other, “How do you like that? Pay toilets!”
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8. And at My Blog…
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