Publicity Queen

So have you set-up a Google Alert yet? It’s a great way to keep up-to-date with your industry on the internet.

You simply go to www.google.com/alerts and start tracking any topic, product, person, competitor, sector etc etc that you’re interested in and relevant links will be delivered directly into your Inbox – it’s just fantastic.

To stay competitive you need to be adding to your intellectual capital on a regular basis and I find that Google Alerts is a very nifty way of doing this.  You can set up one alert or one hundred (eeeeek – information overload!) and you can have them highly specific or leave your search terms quite broad – your in control (and you’ve gotta love that!)

Go on, be alert not alarmed!

Yours in publicity

As you know I’ve been advocating for a while that you should stop focusing on getting publicity only in the traditional media (newspapers, magazines, radio & tv) ’cause it’s no longer the be all and end all.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that you ignore the traditional media, far from it, but what I am saying is that you need to broaden your perspective of what publicity is, how you can get it and how you can use it.

Publicity in the traditional media is the most difficult to secure and often the most generalist in approach. Using new media for publicity is becoming increasingly powerful and is gaining more and more market credibility and traction.  What this means is, that you can now drive branding and bottom-line results by getting publicity through blogs, epublishing, enewsletters and the like.

These channels can offer you two powerful advantages over traditional media…

1. Directness – because of the specificity of the content it increases the likelihood of ‘warm targets’ reading and being engaged by your messages and content
2. Interaction – in using digital channels, potential customers can engage with you more readily (eg. leave a comment on your blog) which builds their trust and increases the likelihood of purchase

So to give you a great overview of what’s going on and how the media in Australia is changing, check out this blog entry on the Slice Media blog “The Changing Face of the Media“.  The info is supplied by Jim McNamara who is a doyen of Australian public relations.

(It’s a bit long, but it’s worth a read)

   Yours in publicity