by on March 4, 2011 Leave a Comment

10 steps to instant publicity

Hit top gear with this guide to instant publicity

“Dave – our MD is on BBC Radio 4 in 90 minutes. We need to get as much publicity as possible about the show. Over to you!”

The home base for all activities was the company’s website. It was important to retain some ownership of the situation and ultimately have enquiries directed squarely at the Contact page on the site.

In an hour-and-a-half we garnered thousands of hits across the website and its outposts. We were ReTweeted, Liked, and Answered. It was a perfect storm of publicity, and it all boiled down to 10 super-quick tasks…

  1. Create a blog post flagging up the radio show, featuring links to further information including – in this case – the BBC Radio 4 programme and ‘Listen Live’ tool on BBC iPlayer. A contact point at the company for more information about the subject matter was also clearly in evidence here.
  2. Tweet time. Hitting Hootsuite and scheduling a different, captivating message every 15 minutes. Somehow we managed to squeeze 5 in. On each occasion, Tweets were ReTweeted at least four times.
  3. Facebook. Relative to the industry in which my client operated I popped in to all the Facebook Pages I know and posted a snappy update using the profile of my business Page. This is a win-win you should always use in situations like this, since the Facebook changes of last week: Not only does the client get the news across, but I get some recognition by sharing the news on their behalf. It looks less salesy that way – as we all know, having a third party endorse your stuff is a lot more powerful.
  4. LinkedIn. I’m a member of various Groups related to this industry, and again, I posted up some news – different and customised for the audiences of each Group, and inviting comments on the show afterwards. I could have stopped there – but instead, since immediacy is becoming more and more important in business, I decided to post this scenario in LinkedIn Answers for folks to cogitate over. I’ve already had some great responses to this question, incidentally, including the link at the bottom of this post to promoting your event on LinkedIn.
  5. Social bookmarking. Linking back from Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon to the home base was important. This was also a great opportunity to see which bookmarking site works quickest. Whether it’s because I’m on UK time and US traffic was rather sparse, I learned that Reddit was giving me a serious number of visitors pretty quickly.
  6. Partner sites. You have to understand that I was kinda multi-tasking throughout this exercise. While social bookmarking, I was sending emails and IMs to people I work with across the media. I worked with editors on other sites to get some quick stories up flagging people back to our site and to iPlayer. The immediacy was such we just wanted to get people listening and create some excitement. Good relationships are a crucial component of generating instant publicity. This was without doubt an invaluable asset to us.
  7. eNewsletter and press releases. I use MailChimp. For speed – to see how many people we could get to listen to the show, live, we shot out a plain text email to the company’s subscriber list with a compelling headline intimating urgency. Easy and engaging. We tracked the clicks using Google Analytics – an essential feature of the MailChimp service offering. Then we gathered important information from the main article we put out on the company’s website and shifted it without hesitation to the likes of PR Log, and PRFire (UK only) – free press release distribution services that work magically well on gathering impetus across search engines. The PR possibly wasn’t moving as quickly as we wanted it to in this respect, but it contained critically-useful links that would work well for SEO purposes.
  8. CoverItLive. Since many people out and about can’t access the radio or iPlayer – anyone outside of the UK, for example, and those in transit – it was important to offer an interface that would deliver excerpts of the show in real time. CoverItLive works on smartphones, and I manned the console to spit out tracts of the show as it aired. We had up to 15 readers of the live feed alone. Not bad considering this feature was knee-jerk and gave people just 5 minutes’ notice of it existing via Tweet.
  9. Aftermath: Updated the blog. We used comments garnered from the CoverItLive event interspersed with our own commentary and linked to the show’s archive page which allowed people to ‘listen again’ at their leisure. Comments were invited to form a permanent fixture on the company’s website. The story will later be added to a press release and a credibility tool.
  10. Gather feedback on the experience. Did people find it useful? How should we go about it again? What do the stats say at Google Analytics? So far, the signs are exceptionally good mindful of just 2 hours being spent altogether on the planning, presenting, and reactive efforts for this instant publicity strategy.

Further resources for instant publicity

If you’re still looking for inspiration on how to quickly promote your next event, check out this guide from my LinkedIn pal Wayne Breitbarth on eZine Articles called 10 Ways to Effectively Promote your Event using LinkedIn.

90 minutes, 10 steps - thousands of engaged consumers. What would we have done 10 years ago? Got on the blower, called a few people. Today, our potential audience was in the millions.

Flash publicity is precisely what the internet is made for.

Learnings?

So the first thing I didn’t do, which I should have done, was write down exactly what I wanted to achieve, how I could demonstrate I achieved it, and how I could actually achieve it! I don’t think that was in any semblance of logical order whatsoever, but I think we got there in the end…

Thrills

A happy client is everything. Endorsement:

“With such a short time before Sean Lowe, RCI’s Managing Director for the EMEAI region, was set to go on air to discuss the importance of the new Timeshare Directive on Radio 4’s You And Yours consumer programme, Word And Mouth was quick with a dynamic response to our request for instant PR.

Within the first 30 minutes Dave had used a whole platform of social media – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmarking – to spread the word that Sean was about to go on air. Add to that a newsletter distributed to the www.rciventures.com subscribers, a PR going out through a distribution service and blog syndication, and we were happy that word was well and truly out about our BBC debut! The WAM follow up was equally impressive, with a CoverItLive blog on our web site enabling those outside the UK to access the interview, an update of the blog with a ‘listen now’ link and analytics which showed a tremendous spike in site visitors around the radio broadcast – proving that WAM’s social media magic did the trick for us.

A big thank you to Dave and WAM. Helen Foster, marketing manager, RCI.

What have you done to achieve killer publicity in moments?

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by on October 20, 2010 4 Comments

Why I do conferences

Dave Thackeray's ear and Professor Mark Sharp

That's my ear, a microphone, and Professor Mark Sharp of the Association of International Property Professionals. At OPP Live last week.

Quite aside from the obvious benefits of finding guests for my radio shows, conferences are a great way to discover new ideas and inspirations to boost your business.

They are not a great place to exhibit, unless you know precisely what you’re doing and you have an exact objective in mind.

Which is irrelevant if you’re attending as a delegate. Even better, if the convention comes packed with sessions and chances to meet other people from your areas of expertise.

Having covered two big conferences in the past two weeks, I realise the value of mixing with such a diverse and incredibly intelligent bunch of people.

Aside from the incessant business card swappage, the peering at things in perspex boxes (this is especially pertinent at property conferences, believe me) and perspiring under the artifical heat of halogen lamps, these talking shops are exactly that – a chance to talk ideas that you haven’t really had chance to form properly, and to hear those of others.

This meeting of minds – this essentially anthropological Venn diagram of cogitations and ruminations – is guaranteed to put pep back in your size 12 shoes and get you running down the road to success, rather than ambling randomly as we all do when we drop the ball and lose focus from time to time.

Conferences make it easy to meet people, and easy to learn. The organiser makes a mint, you make endless amounts of great connections (providing you put yourself about a bit, which is hugely simple when exhibitors are desperate to meet you) and the guys who pay for the stands sometimes win, too.

Take a look at Google. Type in “conference” or “networking” together with your specialism, and see what crops up. Chances are there’s something massively interesting coming to a place near you, soon.

So jump on it.

Tell me about the last conference you attended. What did you get out of it – and looking back, what will you do differently at your next event?

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by on September 17, 2009 Leave a Comment

Welcome to Word And Mouth

For every million dandelion seeds blown through the air, one finds a warm and nourishing place. A space to grow, to thrive.

Just like Edison and his quest for artificial light.

While Word And Mouth doesn’t quite attain the same sort of Herculean success (yet) as Tom and his bulb, it’s been a long and winding road to get here.

And now we’re here, we ain’t going anywhere. Apart from up.

Candidly: Word And Mouth was conceived on Tuesday. That’s the ‘other day’, as in 10am on 15/09/09.

A mini whoop, a small investment in a virtual letterbox and WordAndMouth.com was born.

Word And Mouth is the product of a multimedia-trained consumer journalist’s dream to relinquish the corporate environment in pursuit of a goal: to discover his talents.

Working for The Man finished in October 2008. What followed was a prolonged bout of travelling, introspection and indulgence in the company of many, many inspirational people.

And finally that lightbulb moment. To harness the disciplines of writing and broadcasting to offer Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) the opportunity to reach out to their customer bases using dynamic, exciting and passionate communications.

We delight clients with incisive marketing content, product promotion, podcasting and social media tools. Wrapped up in sincerity and charm, as you’d expect from a company based in the cultural paradise of Liverpool.

Success used to be measured in the three Ps of persistence, patience and purpose.

As consumers we are losing the will to exert ourselves. We’ll snatch up the most convenient products, often snubbing the best. We’re time poor. And we don’t really know what we want, apart from conspicuous consumption.

Scratch that last sentence. We do know what we want: we want to be loved, we want to be pampered and preened. And we won’t – under any circumstances – settle for anything but immaculate customer service.

So business owners have to be smarter than ever. To be prepared, passionate and principled. For these are the three Ps that drive business today.

Word And Mouth lives and breathes Three Ps 2.0 in pursuit of achieving the modern SMEs goal of customer service, loyalty, delight and referrals.

And we think we’ve cracked it.

We leave clever communications to the big advertising agencies. We do straightforward, because no-one has time to rationalise confusing messages.

Word And Mouth is all about:

  • Clarity
  • Conviction
  • Simplicity
  • Measurability

To surmise – we reach out to your customers with your messages in their language.

As this site evolves, we’ll introduce case studies to help you figure out how Word And Mouth can work best for you.

Til then, look around. And don’t hesitate to contact us. Anytime. About anything.

Because communication starts with the heart. Like Word And Mouth, it’s a miraculous organ that never stops beating.

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