Dear Entrepreneur,
Look,
I might not be able to promise, that you and your kazoo will be
featured
on the cover of the Rolling Stone, but I can
promise that you can
expect to see dramatic results from free publicity, through press
releases.
Almost
anything you do on the web can be spun into an interesting news piece
or human interest story which, if submitted correctly to a few good
press
release distributions sites, can reap overwhelming results.
Why It Works and What
has Changed:
News
papers are closing all over the country, T.V. stations are
consolidating and radio stations are falling one by one into automated
satellite feeds (robo-radio) from national syndications.
Why?
Budgets,
Competition you name it! The world has changed. No longer does America
line up on the couch every night to watch the local six
o'clock network news and dads no longer come home at five,
flop in
a recliner and read the local newspaper, front to back while
Mrs.
Cleaver makes them dinner.
With
so much competition and no one watching, reading or listening
to any one
single publication or news outlet anymore, high paying
advertisers
have pulled up and moved on.
Without big ad dollars news
organizations can no longer indulge in investigative reporting
anymore.
News rooms once bustling with
people and activity, now consist of a single cubicle and a frazzled
lonely editor.
How you can take
advantage of the way it works:
If
you send an overworked frazzled editor a well constructed, well written
"pseudo news" story that he or she can run in their news spot, without
having to
work hard on it, he or she will be extremely grateful and gladly run
it!
Don't believe it?
Go home tonight turn on your
local six o'clock news and write down the stories you see.
I guarantee, you'll see more fluff stories about new products,
kindergarten field trips and silly animal antics than about the
reasons water bills in your town have tripled last month.
Where do these stories come
from?
People like you, send in press
releases to the station with all the information the editor needs to
make a story.
Even
the investigative news stuff, you know the piece; a reporter standing
in front of a business in the rain with a microphone talking about how
fifty jobs have been added to the factory, came about because a PR
department of a business tipped off the news department about their
story so they could get some free publicity!
Whether we like it or not,
news is no longer news anymore, at least not the way we have been
taught
to think about it.
Understanding
the nature of the NEW "news" and learning to work in today's "new-news"
frame work will give you the jump you need to get your stories excepted
in today's "new- news" world.
How it works even
better on the web:
Press releases work on the
web, even when they don't make the traditional "news"!
As
mentioned, the traditional news services are struggling due to changes
in
the way people get their news. They still get a lot of eyeballs looking
at them but due to the changes in the way people find news it would be
silly to invest all of our time breaking into a declining outlet,
right?
Exactly!
Now, that everyone gets their
news on the fly; at lunch off the
computer or in bed with a laptop balancing on their knees and from
their phones we can now get
even more millage out of press releases than we could have even a few
years ago.
People now search
for the news they want to know about, when they
want to know about
it!
So,
even if we don't get our "news story" featured in the "traditional"
media
we still have many chances for our "news story" to make it to our
intended audience.
When we spin our story a
couple of different ways we have even a better chance of it getting to
more people.
For
example by taking a fact contained in our message and putting a "tech
spin" on it we can conceivably work our story into the tech scene by
being picked up by someone running a tech savvy website.
You see, It may be more
beneficial now-a-days to have your story on a couple of tech blogs
rather than in some soggy wet newspapers under cedar shrubs
hiding next to doorsteps all over America!
And the more ways
you spin your subject the more niches you can gather eyeballs
from!
.
