Pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. That’s all I seem to do some days. I’m certain that many of my colleagues in PR will empathize with me. Not everyone loves to pitch stories, but it suits me just fine, thanks.

What I’m also positive of is the barriers to securing great coverage for our clients can be extremely daunting. Because even if your pitches are always spot-on, we all have days where even the best press release doesn’t get the type of coverage we hoped for. It’s always disappointing but that is the ebb and flow of PR.

Many in PR will agree that it’s standard procedure to issue press releases on Tuesdays through Thursdays. But while this strategy works sometimes, it also creates a glut of news and reporters are feeling the pain. This is a significant problem when agencies and corporate PR departments are jamming thousands of releases into a three day period.

I was recently confronted with this very scenario when pitching a release that was – you guessed it – issued on a Tuesday. In the course of my press outreach, I got into a conversation with one of my favorite technology contacts about how many releases he is receiving Tuesday through Friday.

Why not, he suggested, try something different and release announcements on Mondays or Fridays instead??

My first thought was, okay Monday makes perfect sense.

But announce news on a Friday?? What value would that bring to my client?

But after giving it some thought, I realized that I was initially thinking with my 2005 brain, before the advent of tools like Twitter and Paper.li.

Before these social tools were invented, a press release’s life was very limited. It would sit in an editor’s email in box for maybe a month or two before the article was written and published in the printed version of the magazine perhaps three or four months after that.

Today, once a story is out it goes viral on Twitter and on other sites, reaching more people than we could ever have imagined just five or six years ago.

This reminds me of an old story I first heard when I was selling TV spots in the 1990’s. It’s the “pan’s only this big” theory. The abridged version: Why do you keep doing the same thing, especially if it it’s not working?

In other words, maybe it’s time to try something new. Go wild and crazy. Issue a release on a Friday. Maybe not your client’s most important piece of news they’ve ever announced. But take a chance with a less sensitive piece of news and see what happens. You never know — you might end up finding many of your press and blogger contacts don’t have any big news to cover that day. And your client’s announce might just be exactly what they were looking for!!

Have you done something unconventional lately with your press release that’s garnered significant coverage? Please share your thoughts here!

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It’s a new year, which means our content pipelines and social media strategies are in full swing. Because it’s a new year, we’re also looking for inspiration. And if you are too, it might inspire you to try something you’ve never done in social media before. The two we like right now are Twitterchat and social media monitoring tools.

Twitterchats, Tweetathons, T-chats, Tweetups, whatever you want to call them, require a 100% team effort. If done right, they can greatly increase web traffic, improve organizational transparency, increase your Twitter followers, and build up or improve your community. It may be hard to convince your client this is a great thing for visibility, but all evidence points to success.

Since I’ve wanted to organize a Twitterchat for months now, I went searching for the best way to go about the task. I found a step-by-step blog from The Blue Key Campaign, which spent a week promoting and organizing its first one. The first step, of course, is that you need an established community. If there’s no one there to participate, where will your responses come from?

I mentioned before that this effort requires input and time from every team member. In our agency case, we’d need the PR team plus our clients, in order to answer questions in the format they arrive, whether it’s Twitter @reply, DM, or email. My hope is that once everyone gets on board, we’ll see results for our clients and as an agency. If you’re looking for a way to start a Twitterchat, check out Blue Key Campaign’s steps. They are as detailed as they come!

Have you ever tried a Twitterchat? What were the results? What would you do differently next time?

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Technorati Tags: community, PR, Social Media, Twitter chats

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In this episode of PRobecast, Renatta Siewert and Justin Martell join me in talking about Facebook pages for SMBs, Google’s Virtual Wallet Platform, Sony and Drunk Driving apps.

Facebook for small businesses – An article on USA Today talks about the reasons why small businesses should leverage Facebook when promoting their businesses. The article offered some great Q&As to help aide any business wondering what this “like” business is all about and how they can participate.

Google announces their virtual wallet platform – Google is announced near-field communication (NFC) to be added to their Android-based phones, allowing consumers to make payments, redeem coupons and earn loyalty points via their mobile device. Some though are saying not to hold your breath for this technology as Google tends to start small and slowly when it comes to rolling out products.

Sony has been hacked again – First Playstation, now Sony Ericsson’s Canadian version of their online eShop has been hacked – this time by a “Lebanese grey hat hacker” who accessed 2,000 records of customers, and posted almost 1,000 of the records online. While after the hackings, it was originally said to have cost the company $50 million, it is now being said to be costing them $170 million. Can they recoup?

Smartphone apps helping drunk drivers avoid checkpoints – Applications made for the iPhone, RIM and Andoid platforms are designed to alert drivers if there are sobriety checkpoints, then alerting them with alternate routes. Are these apps helping drivers stay off the road by alerting them of these checkpoints or are the making it OK to drive drunk on an alternative route?

Now it’s time for the PRobecast PR Power Ranking – which is when we go around the room and pick the story that we think ranks the highest PR-wise – meaning any aspects of PR could be the reasoning behind the pick. Is it the story itself, good data that was used, what’s getting the most pickup, was it a good PR move the company made, etc.

This week, the article talking about how small businesses can use Facebook to promote their businesses wins. First of all, if you are a small business owner, time is normally not something that you have a lot of. Articles like this that lay out the details clearly can be a huge asset to any small business owner looking to market their business through a new channel. With so many people on Facebook, if they aren’t participating they could be missing out on a big demographic of potential customers. So – jump in! It’s all about trial and error, however articles like this can at least jumpstart marketing efforts.

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Technorati Tags: Drunk Driving, Facebook, Google, Hacking, Small Business Marketing, smartphone applications, Sony, Virtual Wallet

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