Leveraging Email & Social Media for PR Results
Journalists and PR professionals are increasingly using all forms of media in their day-to-day reporting and now see them as legitimate channels for communication. MyPRGenie, a leading PR and marketing platform, recently conducted a research survey to see which of these channels are most popular among reporters and how they can be used effectively. The findings of this survey, to which over 2400 journalists and PR professionals responded, clearly point out that most reporters prefer to receive releases through email. Here are some tips for making sure that your email pitch stands out among the thousands of emails reporters receive Read More
5 PR Pitch Mistakes to Avoid
Around Christmas time, I helped a friend who is a columnist for a well-known national magazine cull through a large volume of pitches he was getting from a request for information that he’d posted on HARO (Peter Shankman’s great Help a Reporter Out service that matches sources with writers looking for experts). It’s possible that the task of culling through HARO looking for media opportunities the week before Christmas fell to the most junior staffer in the shop. But don’t they teach the basics of PR pitching in college anymore? I work with an undergraduate marketing intern who knows better Read More
Influence Marketing Tips from Hobbiton & Hogwarts
Most marketers would agree that finding and persuading the individuals who shape markets is critical. Word of mouse — the online buzz that comes when key influencers are tweeting, chatting, and posting about a product – is often the difference between an industry leading brand and a laggard. If you’re looking for a bit of magic to boost results in your 2012 marketing efforts, you might want to follow the lead of magic makers like J.K. Rowling and Peter Jackson, who ignored traditional media in favor of wooing and winning the hearts of social media and Internet influencers. Author J.K. Rowling Read More
Content Marketing Increases Despite Skeptics
Digital lead generation through content marketing was once viewed as an expensive and unproven technique. As recently as 2010, surveys showed that up to a third of executives were unsure that the strategies were worth their time according to a recent article by Nicholas Kinports. That’s not far from the results that we got when we surveyed 190 U.S. and Canadian marketers with the title CMO, Vice President, Sr. Vice President, or Director of Marketing several months ago. In our survey, 45% of the marketers surveyed said that they used content marketing as a lead generation tool, but 55% did Read More
17 Fun Freebies that Build Thought Leadership
If you’re a smart marketer, you know that the easiest sale of all is a sale to someone who already knows, likes and trusts you. One of the best ways to create loyalty long before a customer buys from you and position yourself as a thought leader is to offer a valuable freebie that ties into your topic. A free ebook, White Paper, quiz, special report or a calculator can be a convenient way to enhance your expertise, position yourself as the go-to expert in your field, and generate free publicity for your company. Journalists and bloggers love telling their readers Read More
How to Create Contagious Content
Earlier today, Distributed Marketing Blog Editor Deb McAlister-Holland joined MyPRGenie for a session on the tips and techniques that marketers can use to help content “go viral” – even without a video. It was a huge success, attended by a wide range of PR people, marketers and bloggers who want to be heard and draw traffic without spending a lot. Usually, the phrase going viral brings to mind videos that score millions of hits overnight. But the word “viral” just means content that is so contagious that it gets shared far beyond its original audience. Any kind of content can go Read More
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouse
We often promote this blog through press releases and advance copy sent to other bloggers and journalists. Last week, Forbes.com columnist David Coursey surprised us by a draft blog post that quoted him and submitting it to Forbes.com as a guest post. “I had planned to write something about the topic myself, and link back to your blog as the source for some of the information, but I couldn’t think of anything to write except what you’d already put together,” Coursey said. Before we knew it, our blog post was featured on the top “promo bar” on Forbes.com. And instead Read More
Blogging Success Webinar – Join Us Nov. 15!
The Distributed Marketing Blog launched in late March. As anyone who’s ever started a new blog knows, it’s not easy to build traffic, SEO rank, and credibility – but we had a plan, and the plan worked. With help from our friends at MyPRGenie and a lot of Twitter and Facebook friends who shared links to posts, we topped 117,000 readers for a post just 12 weeks after our launch (June 10, 2011), and we’ve held down a spot on the first page of Google’s page 1 results for our primary keywords since April (three weeks after launch). On November 15, Read More
Writing Guaranteed Press Releases
by Deb McAlister-Holland Long ago, in an office less than three miles from the one I am in today, I wrote my first press release on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The goal was simple: to persuade a reporter (radio, TV, or print) to take one or more of the sentences in the press release and include it in a story they were creating, or to get them to arrange an interview with my client. The release was ephemeral and disposable. We hoped that the small number of journalists who got it (via fax, postal mail, hand-delivered as part of a printed press kit, Read More
Why Distributed Marketing Needs Naked Conversations
Technology industry journalist Tom Foremski wrote recently that social media is not corporate media, and that the current gold rush among consultants and social media experts who are exhorting corporate marketers to turn social media into a powerful sales channel will ruin social media. The trend, he said, is inevitable and sad because as the corporate presence becomes more pronounced, social media will cease being a valuable source of naked conversations about companies and brands and become simply another channel for multi-channel marketers to use to deliver a message. When that happens, consumers will find another less accessible place to Read More
