Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work–And Why Your Company Needs Them – Popular text by the now even more popular Peter Shankman. If you’re using HARO, you need to read his book, too. It’s not all about stunts, either. There are some grounded ideas in here about how to improve the power of your writing.

Pull this book out the next time you need to write another press release and I guarantee you that it will change the way you write.

This is a conversation we have regularly with clients, in our efforts to help them figure out how to get more from their marketing budget. Our answer typically revolves around looking for as many possible different ways to re-purpose content so that the cost of a single project is spread out over multiple deliverables. Here’s my list:

1. Press Releases used to be just for press but the truth is that your customers, partners and investors want to read them, too. After you pitch a release and put on the wire, don’t forget to place it on your website. Next consider linking to it from your monthly newsletter. Print out a few copies and place them on the receptionist desk (if you have foot traffic in your office), print out a few more copies and hand them to sales reps (if they are likely to become foot traffic someplace else) then consider emailing a copy to the prospect you spoke with yesterday, the guy who won’t take your call and your banker (it is always good to elevate your self-worth with your banker).

2. Don’t limit the recipients of your postcard to the folks on the mailing list that you just rented. Seed your list with customers, too. Carry them in your briefcase or purse when you go to meetings this week and hand them out INSTEAD OF business cards. Get a PDF version of the card and share with your sales force. Show them how to add it as a thumbnail to their autosignature.

3. Newsletters should live all month long. Whether you email them or direct mail them, don’t assume that because we’ve passed the first of the month that they are no longer newsworthy. Keep hard copies in an acrylic display in your conference room. Add the current issue to your press kit. Upload the articles individually to your on-line knowledgebase. Post them in an archive to your on-line newsroom.

More ideas coming later. It’s lunch time now so I’m going to practice these ideas on the folks at my lunch meeting.

It used to be that AP and UPI decided what was newsworthy, based on what their reporters saw that day and the thousands of press releases that came across their wire. Subsequently they would filter news to the dailies and voila today’s news appeared on your doorstep by 7AM.

In an era of 24-hour news consumption the model has changed and that is why you have to change your media model, too.

Consumers are no longer content to wait for their 7AM paper nor are their happy with the filters used to dictate what is news. That is why we’re seeing so much success among news distribution points that go straight to the consumer.

Both Yahoo and Google allow you to search only on “news” items, essentially press releases. But you don’t have to do a daily query. If you don’t have Google News Alerts set already, you should try it. It’s a great way to capture all news on any particular subject (like your company, your competition or you) and have Google Email it to you as often as you want.

But the point of the diatribe was not to show you neat tools for reading the news but to make sure you were taking into consideration the true consumers of your news releases each and every time you write them. The life of a press release shouldn’t stop at the wire service or the inbox of your target media. By now you’ve probably already thought to put it on your website (newsrooms are great sources of info to learn about a company) but I hope that you are also sending it out to your customers and prospects.

Sometimes “news” is a great excuse to remind or reconnect. And that is why youv’e got to keep you ultimate audience in mind when crafting those releases.

Now that you thought about the “why,” Gail Martin provides some nice tips on “how” to write for the consumer.

I passed my copy around at a recent team meeting to a roaring response from my graphic and web designers.

Best pricing I’ve seen on the book comes from Amazon although you can buy the books directly from Scott and he has offered to do a teleseminar for companies that purchase 100 copies (an idea I believe he borrowed from Seth Godin).

Having felt the changing winds of social media while working in a Web 2.0 world, business owners and PR professionals alike are feeling pressured to respond. But I’m finding that more often than not these same pros are faced with some level of uncertainty as to how and where to get their feet wet. When I bring up the subject of blogging with clients and prospects most respond that they don’t have time for that level of commitment or lack something to say. My friend Sherry Heyl, founder of Empowering Concepts and social media consultant extraordinaire, is quick to point out that the one doesn’t need a blog to contribute to the blogosphere. Instead, she has helped me explain to my clients the value of participation.

Just today I rec’d a link to an article from a client that was spot on his message. “How can we take advantage of this?” he asked. We could certainly compose a similarly-subjected press release but as the stats in the reports were already old news the immediate opportunity for him was simply to comment on the post, thereby sharing his expertise with an already-interested market and possibly cultivating a relationship with the authority who had published the piece. The value in that relationship? This new media reporter might reach out to my client in the future as “a subject matter expert” or better yet, allow him to appear as a “guest columnist.” Suddenly my client who didn’t have time for social media has recognized “participation” as his gateway.

LinkedIn has also secured a position for itself in the new social media newsroom. I think that is a great thing. Unfortunately it appears to be opening the doors to spam. Check out the pitch that Todd Defren recently received from Malibu Rum.

I share this with you as example number 1 of how PR Pros Should NOT use social media tools to engage bloggers.

 Fair question, I thought. While I’ve been focusing more on how to distribute she really wanted to know why and when. What I see people getting caught up in lately is using aggregating content from places like Google and the New York Times that publish data daily or more. In her mind, if we weren’t creating content that often, why would we need an RSS feed?

I tried to help her understand how once we captured the interest of a prospect , they might want to continue to monitor our efforts. By placing an RSS feed on our website or,  better yet, in our virtual newsroom, we could alert them to changes in our products and organization. Even if those notifications were distributed as press releases as infrequently as every 4-6 weeks, this would still be helpful information for that prospect who would most likely be seeing our feed in their aggregator along with dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of other feeds that they monitor.

I think we’re still on a slow learning curve here so I went in search of an answer to her “how much is enough?” question. I haven’t found any research to support my thoughts on this yet but I did uncover a fabulous and fun explanation of RSS that I think I’ll start sharing with clients.

 There are several service providers out there who will put together a solution for you but there doesn’t seem to be much of a standard definition of the offering or expectation around the price. Given that most of these providers are essentially enabling a CMS that works much like blogging software, one really has to ask: why can’t I do this myself for free?

Steve Rubel talked about this subject nearly 2 years ago when he observed that Google was using Blogger for their newsrooms but a quick revisit today finds that very organizations have picked up on this idea. Was Steve wrong? Why has the adoption rate been so slow? Clearly folks have figured out the importance of getting their releases into alternative channels via RSS so why aren’t they jumping on the bandwagon to build newsrooms?