(Berlin, Germany) – July 10, 2009 – Twitter, the new Internet service that lets you speak your mind in 140 characters or less – has proven a communication boon for many. One of the newer trends that’s just emerging in Twitter, though, is a growing effort to use the social media tool for charity. While some people turn their twitter images different colors in support of a cause, or try to get their fellow “tweeple” to click on a link to raise funds, Christian Rubarth of Berlin Germany is looking to accomplish something that uses Twitter for charity more directly.

“I want to get 999,999 followers on my twitter account 999999Followers,” Christian says. “Once I’ve gotten that many, I will give my twitter account to a charity. Since Twitter lets you change your name, they won’t have to keep the 999999Followers name once I give the account away.”

Which charity will get the twitter account? Everyone who follows 999999Followers on Twitter will be given a chance to vote for which charity he or she feels is most deserving at 999999Followers.broken-monitor.com, and the charity with the most votes will receive it. Tying the reach and interactivity of social media with a desire to do good, this web designer is aiming high: he wants to get all 999,999 followers before Dec 31, 2009.

It may seem like an odd thing to do, giving a charity a twitter account with a giant following, but it makes a lot of sense in this new world of social media. Giving a charity a list of just under 1 million contacts all across the globe who are service-minded and web-savvy is a huge resource pool that any charitable organization could make good use of. Only a few Twitter users have followings in the millions, such as Ashton Kutcher and CNN News, and they’ve seen the power of Twitter to raise funds and awareness.

It’s a lofty goal that Christian has set for himself – and the Twitter community – but if other Twitter users like Ashton Kutcher can get a million users just for fun, he figures that he can accomplish the same thing for charity.

Want to help? Log in to twitter.com or sign up if you don’t have an account and tell your followers something like: “Chris from @999999Followers is looking to get 999,999 followers by Dec 31 & give his acct. to charity. Follow him & please RT!”

Contact:
Christian Rubarth
press@broken-monitor.com
http://twitter.com/999999followers

Skype: pr999999followers

About @999999followers
The 999999Followers Project is the brainchild of 40 year old web designer Christian Rubarth of Berlin, Germany. He wants to get 999,999 Twitter users following him by December 31 so that he can give his account to a charity at the start of 2010. Help him out by following him at http://twitter.com/999999followers and spreading the word through Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else you hang out online.

(13 July 2009) ORLANDO, FL – Doterati, (www.doterati.com) an Orlando-based organization dedicated to advancing the interactive media community, is hosting an event on Thursday, July 16 2009 that will help explain to advertising agencies and small businesses alike to benefit from the differences between online and traditional media marketing.

As budgets for advertising and marketing decrease, it is increasingly crucial that businesses make the most of their advertising dollar and use the natural advantages of interactive and offline advertising and marketing to mutual advantage. As more and more marketing and advertising move online where results are more measurable, everyone who advertises needs to learn how to use it effectively, and doterati’s luncheon is designed to help.

Featured speakers Bob Klomp and Lindsey Lawson are both digital marketers for WESH.COM/ CW18TV.COM. They will be presenting a keynote on core objectives they use to ensure client success with their traditional and online advertising packages ad services. This event will include lunch and offer a Q & A session for our speakers and audience.

Event Details:

Who: doterati
When: Thursday, July16th, 2008 11am – 1pm
Where: Crowne Plaza Orlando – Downtown
304 W Colonial Dr
Orlando, FL
Free Parking and Free WiFi at the Crowne Plaza
Register Here – http://interactivegap.eventbrite.com/

Event Pricing:

Pre-Registration: Members $20 (with Member Code); Non-Members $25
At Door: Members $25 (with ID), Non-Members $30

Contact Info

VP Marketing Greg Rollett
marketing@doterati.com
doterati.com
321.438.4442

About doterati

doterati is a 501(c)6 organization from Orlando, FL whose mission is to advance the interactive marketing, media and technology community by serving as an association for professional development, education, community networking and overall inspiration for our digital society.

Become a member and expand your personal and professional network, accelerate your knowledge and embed yourself in the layers of our growing interactive community. Volunteer and gain access to front-row action at events, planning and organizational think tanking. Our radar sweeps for digital brand marketers, Web developers, agencies, creatives, students, entrepreneurs, consultants, start-ups, big-thinkers and everyone in between. Learn more at doterati.com.

Image Credit: Follow The Leader by KaCey97007. Licensed through Creative Commons on flickr.com

If you’ve read my previous articles (How to Follow-Up in particular), you’ve seen the OvernightPR way to follow up on your press release. I’ve said this before a few times, but I’ll mention it here again: your press release is a tool for you to use to get PR coverage, not and end-goal of your PR efforts. In order to maximize your return on the investment of writing a release (or paying a writer to do it for you) and distributing it, you need to have your all your ducks in a row.

I’ve given dozens of tips away on how to line those little guys up to make sure that you don’t miss your opportunity with your press release, but I’ve also received a few requests from readers of past articles asking how exactly they should phrase their follow-up email. That’s largely a matter of personal taste, but I’ll share with you my template that I use when I’m doing follow-up emails.

The Template:

Subject Line: Pitch based upon your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] or
Subject Line: Your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] gave me the idea for this PR pitch or
Subject Line: I saw your article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] and thought that I’d pitch this idea by you

[[JOURNALIST NAME]],

I’ve been reading [[COLUMN, PUBLICATION, BLOG, ETC]] for a while because you write a lot about [[MY INDUSTRY, MY COMPANY, ETC]]  and your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] sparked an idea for a press release that I’ve distributed about [[MY COMPANY, NEW TOPIC, WHATEVER]].  Your [[ARTICLE/ POST]] discussed [[IDEA, TREND, LEGISLATION, NEW PRODUCT, MARKET CHANGE, ETC]], and [[MY COMPANY /  ORGANIZATION]] is [[DOING SOMETHING SIMILAR, TAKING THE TREND FUTHER, BUCKING THE TREND]].

In case you’re interested in hearing my story–and maybe writing about it, too!–I’m including the first bit of my new release below. If you want to know more about [[MY COMPANY / ORGANIZATION/ THIS NEWS]], go to [[LINK]] or [[EMAIL / CALL / WRITE / SEND SMOKE SIGNAL]] and I’ll be happy to help.

Thanks for your time!

[[INCLUDE HEADLINE OF RELEASE AND FIRST PARAGRAPH, WITH A CLEAR LINK TO THE REST OF IT]]

[[CLOSING SALUTATION OR NOTE & CONTACT INFO]]

Using the Template:

As I said, this template is largely a matter of personal taste and circumstance. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of text that I keep unchanged from follow-up to follow-up. That takes a decent amount of time, but it’s the only reliable way I’ve found of getting a release some attention. Do note: if you *haven’t* been reading that journalists’ column or blog and try to fake it in the letter, you will probably get caught out. They get a lot of pitches every day, and the main chance you have of standing out is to write a pitch that is truthfully related to what they write about.

Don’t try any linguistic gymnastics to explain how your story is related to a recent article. If you can’t pitch your release to a partricular blogger / journalist, let it slide. There will be other chances.

E*Releases.com states (and they’re not the first) that you can either look at your release as a shotgun or a rifle. I think that news releases are of more value to the company that they are released in behalf of when they’re targeted. Just blazing away at every journalist in sight gets you on black lists or–worse yet–mentioned somewhere like the Bad Pitch Blog.

There’s enough spam out there. You don’t need to add to it.

So what do you think of the template?  Got any questions? Leave a comment and let’s chat!

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the seventh of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Start Your Own: You know who some of the most powerful authorities in most market spaces are? The guys who write about it.

Journalist Stand on flickr by Glass Window licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

You know that post I put up earlier today? The previous one? Where I said that “reaching out” was the best way to get your story told. I lied a little bit.

Well, pretty much completely, actually. The absolute best way to get your story told is to be the source that tells that story. This is a lot of work, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. Providing quality content that gets shared and talked about is brutally hard. Talk to anyone who’s a leading blogger and they’ll tell you that it is a lot of work to become a market leader in information about a big topic.

But that’s not what you need to become. Don’t look to be the biggest blogger on marketing and public relations. Be the guy who tells everyone how to make the most of a press release, a little budget, and a few hours of precious time out of the day. (Actually, um, don’t. That’s what I”m going for.) Don’t be the leading resource on machinery, just the ‘Net’s best blog on automated printing and folding machines. Is that sexy? Not really. but it’s what will bring in business, if your company makes those folding and printing machines.

So start your own blog. Nurture it. Feed it for two or three or five years.  Once you get in the habit of writing about your market space, informing others about the new trends, and generally becoming a resource for anyone who wants to know about your market, you’ll look around one day and realize that every post you write gets linked to by 40 guys and discussed in depth by another 10. You’ve become a mover and a shaker, somehow, when you weren’t looking, and now you find that the reporters come to you.

Is this an easy way to get your story told? Well, no. But if there’s no one else out there who writes in quite the right area that your business works in, it’s definitely one of the most effective.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fifth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Reach Out: Send out good tips about items in your field that don’t relate to you to influential media.

Image Credit: Tippie Toes by Exquisitur licensed through Creative Commons

Sound counter-intuitive? Maybe a little. But it pays off, even if it does mean that the press runs a story that talks about a competitor or mentions a burgeoning trend without discussing you. How’s it pay off? In two ways:

1. Journalists are human, too: Make their job a little easier and they’ll remember you fondly. This means that you’ll have an easier time reaching them the next time that you want to get your own story covered, that they’ll be prone to call you for quotes when they need someone to weigh in on something they’re writing, and that they’ll feel (ever so slightly) like they owe you a good turn for the favor that you did them.
2. You’re keeping up with the trends: As I’ve covered earlier, there’s a number of ways that knowing what’s happening in your business pays off well for your ability to write news releases (and it’s a no-brainer from a general business perspective). It’s also something that you can legitimately budget a little time to each week as part of your media outreach and not feel like you’re a slacker for tooling around reading blogs or your RSS feed reader for two hours.

The best way–the very best way–to get a reporter or blogger to talk about you when you have news is to have already fed them news that they wanted to use before. So if you hear something that would interest one of those media contacts who you’ve been following around the Internet, send it on to them. Even if it’s not about your company. Especially if it’s not about your company.  Once a reporter or blogger knows who you are and that you care about getting good information out about your field, they’ll be more prone to open your pitches just to see what you’re talking about.

As always, a certain amount of restraint is necessary here. No, you don’t need to forward on to your blogger network the latest rumor about MacWorld’s next Developer’s Conference, or who’s going to win American Idol. But if you find a real tidbit of news that’s under-reported by a journalist that you read who might be interested in it? Go right ahead and pass it along.

90% of all press release story queries are form letters blasted to every reporter on the planet willy-nilly. It should not surprise you that this jades the media outlets quickly. It also means that they treasure the people who don’t randomly bombard them, but rather show some consideration for what it is that they write about and what interests them.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fourth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Provide Supporting Content: Post your release, photos, videos, diagrams, and anything else that you can think a reporter might possibly want on your website where it’s easy to get.

Image Credit: Didn't Shrug by Bitterjug licensed via Creative Commons 2.0

Yes, post a copy of the release on your website. But that’s the beginning. You also want photos, videos, company founder bios, product demonstrations, testimonials, and anything else that you can imagine a reporter could ever want from your company. Put it where it’s easy to get. A reporter on a 30 minute deadline isn’t going to email you for a quote, she’ll just find another source. You want it as easy as possible for a reporter who’s come to your website from your release to find the answers to any questions that she wants quickly and easily.

Good information design is tricky, but you can provide an easy option for a curious reporter by adding a search function on your press room and making sure your content is easily searchable. You may find that organizing your press room in a blog engine will make all this easier.

Traditional media press releases aren’t excellent at providing this kind of supplementary matierial right there in the release, which makes reporters go hunt for it. Social media release are great at giving a blogger or reporter a host of supplementary materials right there, but generally a social media press release gets a tiny fraction of the circulation that a traditional media release does. You’ve gotta take the good with the bad, I suppose, and play to the strengths of each.

PitchEngine (http://www.pitchengine.com) is one great example of a social media news release service. Upload additional images, embed video links, include supporting links and documents, all right there in the link of the release. If you’re subscribed to Help a Reporter Out, you’ll be receiving a coupon from OvernightPR in the next few days that will let you try out a social media release on me, because I think that they’re such a useful, if under-utilized, tool.

Not a member of HARO? Then go and sign up, for heaven’s sake. You’re missing out (and on a lot more than just a discount with OvernightPR)!

Do keep in mind though that, just like a wire release, a social media release is a tool; you need to use it to get media coverage. It won’t get you noticed all by itself. Read my article on “Following Up on Your Press Release” for tips on how to do that.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the third of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Keep Current: Make sure before you send out a release that you’ve been reading who’s been writing about similar topics  recently.

Image Credit: Run Stella Run by Laertes licensed by Creative Commons 2.0

Before you write that release (or before you talk to your writer about it) look at the twitter streams and RSS feeds of your media people.  What are they talking about right now?  Figure out how your story applies to the current news. Sometimes this is easy. Everyone’s talking about an expo or event, and you’re going to be there. Your headline just about writes itself, then: “ACME Inc. to showcase new widget at WIDGETCON Convention in San Diego.” Sometimes this is more of a stretch. Everyone’s talking about an expo or event in your industry, and you want to announce that you’ve just introduced a new product. “ACME Inc. debuts new widget that compares with/contrasts with/supersedes WIDGETCON theme,” for example.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the second of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Make a List: of the people who write about your industry or business.

Image Credit: To Do List by °Florian. Licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

Who talks about your industry? Your company? Keep track of blogs, journalists and commenters who seem especially influential or knowledgeable. They’ll come in handy later. Don’t get creepy about it, but take notice of what they’re talking about.

Unless you work in an incredibly niche market, you should be able to find at least a half a dozen good writers who cover your industry or something that is close enough to it that they might be interested in what it is you do. (If there *aren’t* a half-dozen people who write about your industry, then you definitely should take advantage of tip 7 on my list of making the most of your release, which will admittedly not appear for a few days.).

If your writer is a blogger, then subscribe to his or her blog. If your writer is solely a traditional journalist, buy his or her magazine or newspaper (or read it in your local library if your budget is too shoestring to afford a magazine subscription) and take notes.

The complication for many people is not going to be finding writers who cover their industry, but rather  how to determine which of the dozens of writers they find is “influential.” A blogger’s influence is relatively easy to discover through a combination of Technorati and Yahoo.  Look the blogger up on Technorati and see how the site ranks your blogger’s “authority.”  The helpful people at Technorati have devoted a lot of time and effort to making algorithms that search out inboud links, trackbacks, and other arcane signals that a blogger is an “authority” who influences the market. The closer the number is to 1, the more “authority” that blog has, so you’ll want to keep tabs on people with lower numbers.

If your resource isn’t a blogger, or if your target niche is small enough that Technoarti isn’t doing a good job accurately judging the authority of a writer, Yahoo! can provide you with a quick and dirty look at how well regarded someone is on the Internet, using that most precious resource: the inbound link. Type in a search on Yahoo! for the website that you want to evaluate with the following language:

linkdomain:yourdomain.com – site:yourdomain.com

By way of example, this would be the search for http://overnightpr.com:

linkdomain:overnightpr.com – site:overnightpr.com

When I wrote this article, Yahoo gives me credit for 11 links that point back to my main address of overnightpr.com–all of them from other pages on my site. Since I’ve just started this site, that makes sense, but there will soon be more. In this sace, the higher the number, the more authority the writer has.

With a combination of these two tools, you should be able to get a relatively objective measure of how well your writer is regarded by the marketplace in general.So once you’ve found your influential writer or reporter, read what he or she has to say, and then make a point of posting thoughtful commentary on his or her blog, if there is one  Post comments about the article on some other industry blog if you absolutely have to. If you regularly post good comments and provoke discussion, you’ll get noticed by the article’s author. As someone who wrote and maintained a corporate blog for over a year, take my word for it: I knew my 10 best commenters pretty well.

If you find any stories that you think may be interesting to the influential writers in your industry, pass them. Don’t spam them with things that you’ve found, of course, or you’ll irritate them more than you’ll advance your cause.

Keep tabs on what these influential writers routinely cover and what they usually don’t. This will be handy for you when you get ready to pitch your story to them. I use a spreadsheet when I’m reading up on people in an industry for a client, because it’s easier for me to keep track of details that way.

Once you’ve got that list and you know who you want to write about, you’re ready for the next item on Trevor’s 7 Tips for Making the Most of Your Release. But that post waits until Monday to get put up–sorry–so you’ll have to wait until then.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the first of 7 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up.

1: Listen: Find out who’s talking about your field now.

Image Credit: "Listen" by ky_olsen. Licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

Google has an incredible tool called “Google Alerts.” (http://www.google.com/alerts) If you are a web-savvy businessman or businesswoman, you will come to love it. Basically, you tell Google what you want to know about. Then, on a weekly, daily, or “as it happens” basis, Google will let you know when its search engine encounters a new web page with the terms that you’re interested in. Include your company name in these alerts, as well as some terms that are common in your business. “OvernightPR, Fast Press Release, Social Media News Release, and Fast PR” are some of my Google Alerts.

Be careful not to enter too many terms, or you’ll quickly find that Google will overwhelm you with dozens of alerts a day. The goal is to stay on top of trending news and what people are saying about you, not get so many emails that you just wash your hands of the whole affair.

You will likely find people talking about your industry, at least, if not your business in particular. So talk back. The new Internet is all about the dialogue, so spend an hour or so a day (but really no more!) keeping your name and your business name out there. As you post on blogs or forums, keep in mind that the Internet never forgets. Never post anything public or private that you wouldn’t want a potential client, customer, or business partner to read in a week, a month, or a year from now.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the intro article to my list of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up.

The reason for paying a service like Marketwire or PRWeb to distribute your press release for you is that they can get your story in front of people who you can’t—at least, not without difficulty. Depending on how much you pay, you can get your story released over the AP Wire and Reuters. This gives you an channel to communicate with that ties directly to reporters all across the globe, which is a great way to make sure your story is covered, right? Write a press release that’s full of good content, has clear links back to the source for the content, and you shouldn’t have any problem getting covered by the media, right? Sadly, not as much as you probably hoped.

It’s called the “Tragedy of the Commons.” If you make a resource freely available, it will become so overused that it will become useless. Now, press releases aren’t worthless—they’re not free, for one thing—but the ease with which anyone can release something across the wire means that there’s a lot of content that’s arriving on reporters’ desks every day, and almost all of it is content that reporter doesn’t care about. It can be lot of work for a reporter to filter the dross out and find the content that might interest them. Reporters are busy folks. Since looking through hundreds of press releases is yet another task that they’re burdened with in their increasingly crowded days, you can imagine how much attention is given to most of the releases that cross the wire.

“But wait a minute,” I can hear you saying. “OvernightPR writes press releases for a living!” Am I saying that they’re worthless and won’t get you covered in the news?

No. I’m not.

Aside from shooting my business model in the foot if I said that, I also know from experience that press releases can get you coverage in national media if you view them as a tool to help you get attention and not an end goal. Further, even if you don’t get picked up by the Wall Street Journal or The View, there are powerful, trackable benefits to a press release besides attracting the attention of a major news outlet.

But if you want to make the most use of those benefits, you need to understand what I just said: press releases are a tool that you use as part of getting your story noticed. They won’t do it all by themselves unless you’re lucky. Think of your press release as a pry bar that you can use to open a box that’s nailed shut: it’s designed for that job, and it does it well, but that doesn’t mean that opening up the box still doesn’t take effort.

With that knowledge in mind, I’ve come up with a few (okay, 7) tips that will help you get your story out.

These tips are ideally something that you do before you put out a press release. If you haven’t already done these, though, and want a release out now, don’t worry. Do them as you can, and you’ll find that you increase the power and return of not just your releases, but almost all of your PR and marketing.