Horrifying Media Relations

Posted: October 29th, 2008 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Media Relations News, Media Relations Opinion | No Comments

I’m appalled, but unfortunately I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. PR Guru Peter Shankman posted a link yesterday on Facebook to a release with the following copy:

COULD A BEDSIDE SHOTGUN RACK HAVE SAVED JENNIFER HUDSON’S FAMILY FROM TRAGIC DEATH?

Chicago, IL (MMD Newswire) October 28, 2008 — Tragedy strikes in a Chicago home leaving 3 people dead and an Oscar winner forced to identify the bodies of her family.

Jennifer Hudson’s mother and brother were gunned down in their home Friday. Could an invaluable device have saved their lives? It’s called The BackUp and it is a bedside shotgun rack.

Nevermind that the murders took place at the front door and a shotgun in the bedroom wouldn’t have done any good at all. The pitch is horrifically offensive. If you’re a PR person reading this blog — please don’t do this.

Tags: media relations

Beware Secondary News Interview Postings

Posted: October 28th, 2008 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Media Relations Opinion | No Comments

I was talking to a PR friend of mine today who has been a friend since we both worked in local radio news. He contacted me to give me “heads up” about a new practice by a local radio station. I won’t mention his name or the name of the station, but he was recently interviewed by the station for a story about his employer. The interview was over the telephone and was completely on the record. He assumed his answers would be cut into soundbites and used in the station’s twice hourly newscasts, and he assumed correctly.

My friend was bothered, however, to find that the entire interview was *also* posted on the station’s website as part of their “news on demand” offering. He was happy for the extra exposure and felt he sounded okay in the long form version (and he did sound just fine) but the problem was that he was never told about that secondary use.

>>Continue reading…

Tags: media relations

The SEO Value of Press Releases

Posted: October 24th, 2008 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: SEO PR Tactics | 1 Comment

Jiyan Wei, a product manager from PRWeb, posted this week on his blog a great overview of press releases and SEO. He runs through the history of SEO as it relates to release distribution, and gives a number of recommendations on how to write a release that will help your site’s search rankings.

Jiyan mentioned that he’d been getting a lot of questions about the SEO value of news release distribution. I suspect that many of the questions came from attendees of the PRWeb webinar in which I presented on Wednesday. I know we got a lot of them during the session. I told Jiyan through Twitter that his blog post was a wonderful overview on the topic and is one that I’ve been meaning to write. Now I don’t have to!

Tags: news release distribution, seo, seo pr

News Release Distribution Review UPDATED

Posted: October 23rd, 2008 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: SEO PR Tactics, Social Media Tactics | 58 Comments

NOTICE: This review is now out of date! Please check out my updated review for 2010:

News Release Distribution Review 2010

One of the most popular blog posts on this site is my April, 2007 review of online news release distribution services. Because this review is so popular, I feel a responsibility to keep it updated. I last updated the original post in September, and since then I’ve been promising a complete overhaul. Now … here it is!

>>Continue reading…

Tags: media relations, news release distribution, seo, seo pr

Recorded Archive of Recent PRWeb Webinar

Posted: October 22nd, 2008 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Social Media Tactics | No Comments

A couple of posts ago I mentioned presenting at two PRWeb webinars in consecutive weeks. One was on October 14 and the other was earlier today. The topic for each was the same — using PR to promote your small business. My portion of the presentation in each covered using SEO, SEO PR, and social media strategies such as blogging. In all, there were approximately 1,600 attendees for the two webinars! The reviews from attendees on both were very good. If you missed the first one, I now have a link for you to listen to the audio and see the slides. I’ll post the link on a future date for the webinar that happened today.

Click here to view/hear the October 14 PRWeb webinar.

***UPDATED October 29, 2008:

Rather than writing an entirely new post, I thought I’d add the recording from the October 22 webinar here as well. This one had a similar topic, but my co-presenter this time was the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine!

Click here to view/hear the October 22 PRWeb webinar.

Tags: small business advice, social media, Speaking Engagements, webinars