Issue #975 Dec . 8, 2015
Publisher: Joan Stewart
“Tips, Tricks and Tools for Free Publicity”
In This Issue
- Another Cool Pitching Tool
- The TV Newsroom’s Morning Meeting
- Mesmerizing Job Titles
- Hound Video of the Week
This Week in the Hound House:
My dust mite allergies are wearing me down. I’ve bought all the hypoallergenic bedding. A $300 HEPA vacuum cleaner is on my Christmas list. My allergist wants me to rip out all the carpeting in my bedroom. If none of that works, he orders the heavy artillery: one shot per week for a year, followed by shots every other week for four more years. At least I’m not allergic to my dog.
1. Another Cool Pitching Tool
One secret to scoring a major media hit is having enough time to craft a pitch and deliver it before their deadline.
If you want to get into a big consumer magazine’s Father’s Day edition, for example, you’d better start pitching in just a few weeks. Many big magazines have long lead times.
Publicity expert Paul J. Krupin to the rescue! He has created a 12-month digital calendar that tells you about major and minor holidays all 365 days a year. Along the left side of each month, you’ll also find a heads-up list of lead times for seasonal stories. (To save the PDF, use the Save button in the upper right corner.)
January’s calendar reminds you that Valentine’s Day is in one month, Earth Day is in three months and Independence Day is in six months. That forces you to think now about stories down the road, and it serves as a handy reminder to check deadlines for the media outlets where you want coverage.
My recent training on “How to Create Your Own Day, Week or Month of the Year and Get Mountains of Publicity” explains exactly how to get your event or day into Chase’s Calendar of Events, the granddaddy of resource directories for holidays.
Next week, you can get it for half price by using a coupon code that comes with the free ebook, “The Best of The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week of 2015,” a compilation of my best 24 tips from last year, my annual gift to you. Stay tuned…
2. The TV Newsroom’s Morning Meeting
Mary Richards, Lou Grant and the rest of the gang at WJM-TV in Minneapolis are about as close as you’ve ever gotten to seeing a TV newsroom’s morning meeting.
Every local TV station news department has one. And even though they aren’t nearly as interesting as those on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” they’re still critical to your publicity.
Former TV producer Roshanda Pratt takes you inside a local TV newsroom and shows you what happens at the morning meeting, where news execs choose the stories that will air that day.
Her best piece of advice for making sure your story is top of mind when they enter the meeting: pitch yourself or your product, cause or issue as the local angle to a hot national story.
In her guest post at my blog, she explains when to pitch, how to pitch, and how to make your story stand above all the others. See “How to Entice Your Local TV News Team to Cover Your Story.”
If you want to write for my blog too, see my guidelines on how to pitch me.
3. Mesmerizing Job Titles
Starbucks has its baristas and coffee masters. Apple has its geniuses at the Genius Bar. And at Best Buy, they’re known as the Geek Squad.
None of the jobs are unique. None require degrees or IQ requirements.
But the titles are so unusual–maybe even hypnotic–that they’ve become valuable recruitment, retention, sales and marketing tools that cost nothing. They’re also perfect when part of a company’s PR campaign because they’re so different and command attention.
Dr. John Sullivan–an HR thought-leader, author and speaker–says it time for companies to create a strategies and programs to ensure that for at least key jobs, the title and the content of the job become key selling points and branding tools. You can do this too with your own job title, even if you’re the only one running the show.
Need ideas?
Read his article Exciting Job Titles Can Be Powerful Recruiting and Retention Tools.
4. Hound Video of the Week
Thanks to BL Ochman of New York City for this video of what it really means to be dog-tired.
[Tweet “#PublicityTips from @PublicityHound– Another Cool Pitching Tool #PitchingtheMedia”]
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