It's taken years to learn to keep some balance in my life. By nature I become a work-a-holic. So I need to schedule in fun. Today I want to take a moment out to ask you which 25 year old Bridesmaid's dress I should wear for the dirty Girl mud run. That's right! The pictures are a blast. Take a look and tell us which dress you would wear in the mud run!

http://ow.ly/6pgFZ

1. Messaging
2. Media Training
3. Construct Story
4. Media or Press Kit
5. Generate Media Opportunities
6. Build Strategic News Pipeline
7. Editorial Calendar Outreach
8. Leverage Events
9. Media tour
10. Media Events

Let’s look at that a little bit further. What does it mean? What do you really get?

PR Messaging

If your company has not already come up with its positioning and a clear set of messages, your PR firm can craft those for you. They should be reinforcing your brand, positioning and messages throughout everything they do. This is key and fundamental to the success of every marketing program.

Media Training

Everyone in your company who will be interviewed by the media should trained on how to communicate effectively with them. You need to learn how to answer questions in a way that supports your messaging. You should be prepared to expect certain questions and the best ways to get your message across.

Construct Story

Your PR Agency should be able to take your messages and translate them into multiple stories that appeal to a variety of media that target your ideal customer. They will also create and pitch each story to the media.

Media or Press Kit

A media kit (sometimes called press kit) is like a resume for your company. It includes:

1. A letter of introduction to the company
2. The company profile, history, and management
3. Product and service information and brochures
4. Recent reviews, publications and articles
5. Press releases
6. Audio or video files of interviews, speeches and performances
7. A sample news story
8. News related to the industry or investor news
9. List of frequently asked questions
10. Other information such as awards, photos, white papers, schedule of promotions and events, statistics, samples or examples, logo and image art, an order form.

Generate Media Opportunities

Create a targeted list of media and analyst contacts. Start contacting them locally then build nationally and internationally.  Pitch stories. Position your company as the go-to source of information on your subject.

Build Strategic News Pipeline

Develop a scheduled series of news releases (press releases) and draft the announcements that strategically roll out different aspects of the story.

Editorial Calendar Outreach

Identify publications that target your ideal customer and make a list of the planned stories or editorial opportunities that exist within their annual calendar.  Pitch you product/service where appropriate.

Leverage Events

Develop a PR strategy to leverage events that your company hosts or participates in. Recruit press to cover the stories.

Media tour

A media tour is when you meet with editors and reporters to introduce your company, product or service. The end goal is to build the relationship so that they print an article about your product, service or company, or that they come to you for quotes.

Media Events

Just as  you need to build community among your customers, you need to build community among the press. You want to build your brand or image in their mind and then stay top of mind with them. An event is a perfect way to do this. It may be as simple as a sneak-preview party or a press appreciation party. Free food and drink is always appealing.

With the exception of the media kit and the media events, most of these activities do not cost much money in terms of materials. But they do take time. If you want to write a plan for yourself, you should include most of these tactics. Typically a company will outsource these functions because they don’t have the time and the existing relationships with the press. if you choose this route, look for a firm that already has established relationships with the media outlets that reach your target customer.

The reason I felt compelled to even mentioned it here is that the article states that,

Hassan, 45, is charged with one count of second-degree murder in the Feb. 12 death of 37-year-old Aasiya Hassan at the offices of Bridges TV, the station the Pakistan-born couple established in 2004 to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims.

Does anyone else see the irony?

Hassan establishes a TV station in NY to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims and then proceeds to chop off the head of his wife. Hello? What are you thinking Hassan? If you weren’t going to jail for the rest of your life I’d say you need a new PR strategy!

You can read more about the situation at MSNBC.

• Marketing Communications: could be an AD agency or just a graphic artist, copywriter and web designer. The Ad agency would also have a creative director that oversees the other 3 specialists. They create your identity, logo, brochures, website, packaging, ads (both online and off) and most materials. Can also create email newsletters. A direct marketing specialist would also fall into this category.
• Web site: web designer works on the visual representation, web developer handles ecommerce, community forums and other functionality, SEO expert gets your chosen keywords emphasized,
• Social Media: blog/community manager oversees blog content and responds to community members (blogger could also be in a different dept. like PR). Twitter and forum communicator.
• PR: gets feature articles written, product placements, press tours, press kits, press releases, speaker placement, quotes,and more.
• Event Marketing: identifies, schedules and prioritizes marketing events, creates booths, demos, etc.
• Channel Marketing: work with resellers, OEM, Affiliate managers and Evangelists: who get 3^rd parties to sell your products or services or use them in their own products
• Business Development & Sales – works directly with key customer accounts to close a sale.

This is most of the major categories of specialists. The ones you need to work with can vary depending on your type of business.

What other marketing specialists have you used?

The Federal Trade Commission has finally issued an update to their guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials as used on the internet and social media. The last update was in 1980, well before the influence of websites, blogs and social media.

If you are a blogger, affiliate marketer or internet marketer, you need to be aware of how these revisions affect you and your business. You may want discuss these changes with your attorney and make adjustments to your web site, blog or social media campaigns.

The full text of the press release is available here.

The full text of the Act is available here.

In summary, the clarifications to the FTC Act are:

1) Advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.

2) “Material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. So, Bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

3) Celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

It’s a good idea to ensure your web site, blog and social media strategy are following these new guidelines for the use of testimonial advertising and endorsements.

Public speaking is when you deliberately speak to a group of people in order to inform, influence, or entertain them.

The key to success as a public speaker is to be able to change the emotions of the listeners. This is why public speaking is often more effective than recorded audio or video or even streaming media.

In a live in-person format the public speaker is better able to “read” his audience and adjust to their verbal and nonverbal behavior, thereby being more effective. This is your opportunity to establish yourself as an expert, engage your audience and establish a relationship with them.

From there you will move them to the next stage of the sales process, whether it be buying an item from you immediately or simply signing up for your mailing list or handing you a business card.

Tips:

• Identify a topic on which you are knowledgeable. Create a presentation or speech. Have 2 versions of your speech or 2 topics. One should be short 20-30 minutes (for lunch engagements). The other longer, about 45 minutes (for keynote speaking).
• Find organizations of people who could benefit from your expertise.
• Get on their speaker calendar. Book the engagement.
• Start small and grow the group size.
• Start with a friendly audience, people you may know or are acquainted with.
• Get the list of attendees.
• Offer items for sale in the back of the room.

Places for Public Speaking:

• Chambers of commerce
• Professional networking groups
• Professional Associations
• Industry Conferences
• Industry Trade Shows
• Meetup.com Groups
• Guest speaker at colleges, universities and other schools
• Neighborhood groups, Recreation centers
• Free Universities, Parents groups, PTO/PTA’s, Community Center, Continuing Education Programs
• Home-based parties

If we define publicity as” one’s deliberate attempt to create or manage the perception the public has of them“, then why was the Heene father so wrong?

First, let’s look at what he did right…

1. He initially created a lot of excitement, noise and buzz as well as concern and fear for the safety of his child.
2. He created intrigue and mystery over the oddity of the homemade balloon.
3. He created a controversy over the whereabouts of his son during the ordeal and the family’s intentions behind it.  Where was the balloon boy and why didn’t he answer when called?
4. He created a debate which led to polls, public opinion, speculation, anger outrage, etc.

So where did he go wrong? If the saying is “any press is good press“, then why do we want to see him sent to prison? Why is he not forgiven for his pathetic behavior like we forgave Paris Hilton for hers (or insert the name of your favorite celebrity here)?

This is where he went wrong…

1. He did not already endear himself to the American people. For most of us, this is our first time hearing of him. We do not have an existing relationship with him.
2. He used an innocent child. While Paris endangered the safety of others when she got drunk and got behind the wheel of a car, she did not use a child to get drunk nor require a child to drive her.
3. He cost us all money before the legal battle. He made a false 911 claim, utilizing resources that we pay taxes to support. He used the military and FAA resources, which also cost us as tax payers money. OK, so Paris only cost us money once she got busted.
4. He diverted life-saving resources away from others and risked the lives of those service people.
5. He lied to us. Americans hate liars.

Where does that leave us? Well, I’d say the next time you plan to create some publicity for your business, try to include excitement, noise, buzz, intrigue, mystery, controversy and a little debate. Endear yourself or business to your customer. Be responsible and accept responsibility appropriately. Find win-win compensation for those involved. And, whatever you do, remember, “Honesty is the Best Policy!”

Is there anything you would add to this?

• PRWeb – When you submit your news releases to PRWeb, they will be indexed by search engines like Google, sent to top news sites like Yahoo! News and placed into RSS feeds with more than 250,000 subscribers which include bloggers, journalists and consumers. PRWeb also helps you build backlinks and inbound links from other premium sites, one of the most important assets to build your website’s credibility in search engines. All of this helps drive traffic by empowering more people to find you online and click through to your website.
• 1888pressrelease.com – Our unique services allow you to distribute releases to search engines, newswires and websites to help increase awareness of your product, company, or self for free.
• ClickPress – Once news submitted to ClickPress has been approved it is available not only to visitors to our site, but also to major web and news search engines. All submissions are free and news releases will remain in our searchable archives indefinitely. While ClickPress is aimed at PR and IR professionals, others are invited to submit their news, providing their news releases are presented in an acceptable format..
• free-press-release-center.info – An online news and press release distribution service for small and medium-sized businesses and corporate communications. Our aim is to raise the standard for online news distribution. The power of FPRC is in the keyword linking. With each press release you can choose a keyword and a URL (different to your main site URL) which will appear as a link (using the keyword as the anchor text) in your press release. This gives you free links to your site using the anchor text of your choice. Plus it is in a natural context, i.e. the text of their release.
• i-Newswire.com – Our mission is to help you announce newsworthy events / happenings. We have teamed up with many leading news sources that display our submissions on their web sites / search engines. We won’t tell you where and when your news item will appear as we want to offer a “fair service” – meaning it doesn’t matter if you submit your release free or featured: “We distribute every press release to all our partners”, no matter if you run a small/new company with low funds or a huge multi-million dollar business..
• NewswireToday – NewswireToday Newswire Today is a press release newswire distribution service, a directory of businesses, products and services, and online publication of articles. Achieving big results for companies of all sizes has made Limelon one of the largest Advertising firm in the industry.
• PR LEAP – PR LEAP offers an SEO and Social Media press release distribution service that is more affordable than the top 3 wires. Our member’s press releases can be found on Google News, Google Search, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com News, Ask.com, Topix.net and many more.
• PR.com – PR.com is a directory of businesses, products and services, a press release distribution service, job search website, and online publication of articles, reviews and celebrity interviews.  With a full company profile, each business listed on PR.com has a powerful means by which to generate quality leads as well as gain worldwide and local exposure for all of their products, services and other business information.
• 24-7pressrelease.com – 24-7 Press Release is an effective press release distribution service offering an affordable alternative to expensive PR and press release promotion services. Since the company’s inception, 24-7 Press Release has serviced over 20,000 clients and distributed more than 33,000 press releases. Submitting press releases with 24-7 Press Release is always FREE but we offer enhanced distribution packages for clients who have additional requirements for targeted, geographic or industry specific distribution.
• PressReleasePoint – PressReleasePoint.com is a free press release distribution website to connect PR professionals with journalist. Online marketers can generate media visibility and maximize online presence by distributing press release through PressReleasePoint. You can use our service to post to 50+ free press release submission sites in this list.
• PRFree.com – PR Free is the only press release distribution service backed by a true wire service, Eworldwire. Eworldwire has rapidly grown to become one of the most respected and technologically advanced wire services. Eworldwire now has employees in three continents, and affiliates and representatives in six (know anyone in Antarctica.
• PRWeb Direct™ – PRWeb Direct is the service bureau for the PRWeb® newswire.  This unique service allows users to maximize their online distribution through PRWeb by taking advantage of the expertise of the PRWeb staff in submitting, scheduling and optimizing distribution.  Several additional services are available to PRWeb Direct customers that are not available through the standard PRWeb site. These services include a simplified insertion process (our professionals do most of this for you).   In addition, with the integration of Business Wire into our distribution network you can now leverage the best of the top two press release newswires (additional fees apply).
• PRZOOM – PRZOOM is a free news & press release distribution service to companies, PR agencies, business journalists, freelance writers, news content providers.

To get more free resources lists such as this, download our FREE REPORT: 187 Free Ways to Explode Your Business.

A news release provides reporters with the basics of a feature story and is used to attract attention or publicity for items such as events, promotions, awards, new products, new services, sales, accomplishments.

A media release is a short article that you send to the media so they publish a feature story about your product, service or company. It is written in a way that tells a story that will interest their readers, viewers and listeners.

A press release is sent to the media to encourage them to write articles on a subject. It is biased toward the writer’s objectives. It describes the who, what, where, when, why and how of a story.

A press statement is an official statement or account of a news story.

Tips for writing press releases:

• Write a press release regarding your company’s product or service, new offering, grand opening, event or something new you are doing.
• Include your most important keywords in your press release. This helps people searching the web for your topics to find you.
• Include a link to your website. The links back to your site from other sites posting your press release will help increase your website’s page rank in search engines!
• Other websites will pick up and post your press release on their site. Many will create a permanent link to it. This enables customers searching for information on your topic to find you.
• Use a free press release distributions services to blast your information out across the web.