The Wright Rule: Go Where the Eyeballs Already ARE!

 

First I want to give thanks to Responsible Marketing Blog for giving me the idea for this post. You can read the entire post here, its a good post!
http://responsiblemarketing.com/blog/?p=652

This is a scene from the movie The Jerk starring Steve Martin:

Navin Johnson: The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!

Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.

Navin Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

 This is the kind of thing we do when we mistake being busy for creating results. We all want to be ‘out there’ however, what does out there really mean? Do you want to see you name on the internet? Just because you SEO a media release and see it listed on Google doesnt mean anyone is reading it. Just because you blast it out to 50,000 outlets doesnt mean they will read or use it.

The Wright Rule is ‘Go where the eyeballs Already ARE” I need to make a t shirt or something. I have one sponsor who can afford to be everywhere. The rest of you have to pick and choose. So if you have to choose, be where the eyeballs already are.

What is your plan for 2009? Yes, you need to plan for media, it doesn’t fall out of the sky on you. You plan it and work your plan. If your plan includeds Oprah or Larry King and you haven’t even been on your local are TV Shows, your plan is not only faulty but foolish.

I watch people completely waste their opportunity on Fox News, or CNN because they were not media trained. Get yourself ready for the media opportunities.

More about that later……

Tell me, whats on your media plan for this year?

The Sarah Palin/Gabrielle Gifford’s Publicity Connection

A lot of people were horrified to hear of Gifford being shot. Social media was buzzing with questions and updates and quickly came to the conclusion that Sarah Palin has somehow induced it. Many journalist wrote about her style of interview and how she had Democrats in ‘Crosshairs’ on her website. They felt it might be dangerous and many said so. Regardless of which side you fall on, Sarah Palin now has some bad publicity to deal with. Here are some of the things she could think about doing.

300px-Gov._Sarah_Palin_in_Dover_cropped_2,_NHIf you are in business long enough you will have to deal with some bad publicity. Everyone has unhappy customers. Some unhappy customers go to the press or put it on a website to complain. I personally have complained via the web about a company I was unhappy with.  You have to realize it is part of business. You can choose to let the bad publicity sit there. What will happen? Well, you cannot control the consequences. You might have a lot of potential customers turn away from you. You could open yourself up for other type of lawsuits because people see vulnerability. If you never clear it up, you will never know when it will come back. I never recommend ignoring bad publicity, especially in an emergency.

I do recommend being ready for these emergencies. You can do a lot of things to help mitigate the backlash. You can make sure only one spokes person from the company talks to media. Right now, as I write this article, Sarah Palin is advocating that people pray. Will it answer all her detractors? No, but it will make some people feel that she is concerned about the trend that is happening and her contribution to it. For a lot of people that is enough. After all, she did not force the man to pull the trigger.  Palin did have the courage to speak for herself and not allow a spokes person to speak for her during this tragic time. Having a spokes person speak for you when bad things are happening makes you look guilty. No matter how great the spokesperson is, the public will feel you are avoiding their gaze because of guilt.

In the face of bad publicity you can do a good deed. When the founder of Facebook realized that he seemed like a jerk, he made a huge philanthropic donation on Oprah so that people could see he was a good guy. After that he was named Time’s Man of the Year. Of course, it was not just because he gave the donation, but that helped!

Dr. Wright is the founder of PR Fairy HQ, a publicity site for business owners to learn how to get the publicity they deserve. You can get a free Los Angeles Media List when you visit www.prfairyhq.com

PR and the Super bowl XLV

The Super bowl is so well known, it doesn’t need publicity right? Wrong! The Super bowl continues to grab publicity along with its advertising for the event. The Super bowl is one of Americas most watched events. There is lots of advertising for it. Then there is a lot of publicity. There is publicity around players. Even the players that are not well known have the Super bowl publicity machines working for them. There is publicity around the ads. Betty White made a huge impression on people in her commercial. No one leaked that she would be in the commercial. There is some speculation of what kind of commercials will be on.300px-Betty_White_2010

They systematically leak who is booked for the half time show. Very few people watch it. The last half time show I remember watching is PRINCE. We are all going to the bathroom or heating food. No one is really watching the show. There is a lot of publicity around the half time show. Then you will see the build up of the two teams. All controversy is brought back out and chewed over endlessly. Even things that happened at the beginning of the year are used for publicity.   All of these things are used up until the day of the game.

Then you have post game publicity. Any players who stood out will get extra recognition, be invited to talk shows and others places you would not normally see them. There are so many angles of publicity on the Super bowl that no one could name them all. Some of them work well, some do not. Because they have a large budget, they can afford to try different things and see what works. Check out all the silly stories around the next Super bowl and think about how these same angles might work for your business. You could end up with enough ideas to last you all year. The publicity stretches all the money spent on advertising because you are constantly hearing about it. The publicity helps other companies understand that they need to advertise on this particular game in order to get new customers. One company even had a 10 second commercial because it’s all they could afford. The publicity around that short commercial was valued at more than 10 times the cost of the commercial. It only ran once during the game. If you were watching, you barely saw it.  Yet, here I am talking about it today!