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Profiles in PR — MarketingScoop

August 6, 2012
Your Name: Michael H. Fleischner Your Business: MarketingScoop Your Position: CEO Services You Offer We offer marketing consulting services and training. Your Niche Area of Expertise Search engine optimization and marketing strategy. How Did You Get Started in this Business? When I launched my first website nearly 10 years ago, I was excited to get into the game of online business. After six months of development and thousands of dollars spent on "the next big thing," my website was nowhere to be found on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. It wasn't long before I was reading every article, following SEO's, and experimenting with different SEO techniques to improve my website's ranking.

PR Tips — How to Run Your Own PR Campaign

July 31, 2012
One of the dirty little secrets about public relations is that you don’t need to hire an outside firm to do it effectively. If you have the time and desire, you can easily run an effective PR campaign yourself – and save a lot of money. In fact, when companies hire us to run an earned media campaign, these are some of the most critical steps we take.

  1. Establish a spokesperson. Someone at your organization needs to be able to field calls and answer questions from the media. Choose someone who is a clear writer, knowledgeable about your organization, and comfortable speaking to reporters on the phone.

  2. Refine your message. If a reporter from the Wall Street Journal calls you, what will you say? Your talking points should be clearly defined on paper, so you don’t fumble when the big moment comes.

  3. Build a list of journalists (and this should include influential bloggers). Chances are, there are only a limited number of journalists who really care about your industry and would be likely to write about your organization. In fact, there are probably fewer than 200 of these reporters. So make a list of them and keep it up-to-date.

  4. Embrace Twitter. Follow your list of journalists on Twitter – and, if you have a good Twitter feed, invite them to follow you.

  5. Establish yourself as a source. When appropriate, let those journalists know about your areas of expertise. When interesting stories break, offer yourself as a source of information for their articles.

Profiles in PR – Evolving Strategies

July 30, 2012
Your Name: Adam Schaeffer Your Business: Evolving Strategies Your Position: Partner & Director of Research Services Offered Public Opinion Research Your Niche Area of Expertise My area of expertise is the design, execution and analysis of message experiments. But I’m a generalist at heart; intellectual cross-pollination and creativity are essential to sustained success.

Embrace the Uncomfortable Silence

July 3, 2012
In 1996, I landed my first newspaper job in DC. One of my neighbors at the time was the Washington bureau chief of Forbes Magazine, and a really top-notch reporter. We became friends and one day I told him that I was having difficulty getting people to open up during interviews. I wanted them to give me their real opinions, but all I was getting were prefabricated talking points. So my friend gave me one of the most helpful pieces of journalistic advice I've ever received. "Embrace