Page 207 - Duct Tape Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing

insert your brand, product, or expertise into the conversation quickly
through on-topic blog posts or related videos. Journalists may be asked
to cover a particularly hot story and often turn to search engines to find
a source. If your keyword-rich blog post pops to the top of the list, your
chances of being quoted go up dramatically.

Tools: Google Alerts, PopScreen, Collecta

Rule 2: Build Relationships
The days of garnering media coverage by buying a media list or

hiring a PR firm with a media list to send out press releases are forever
over. In the old days the PR firms and journalists held all the cards
because, to a large degree, they determined what got covered and who
got access. Now everyone is a publisher, and companies can more eas-
ily create their own news, forcing journalists to pay closer attention or
miss a big story. Access to journalists through social media and their
publications’ online blogs has never been greater.

The key to tapping these two dynamics is to work at using this
access to create relationships instead of posting press releases. Go to
Google Alerts and create alerts for the names of the top five journalists
who could impact your business with coverage. Find and subscribe to
their blogs (Bloglines) and follow them on Twitter and other social
networks (Flowtown). If you like, you can even set up a dashboard in a
tool such as NetVibes and pull all the data on each journalist to a tab,
giving you an easy way to join and create conversations with your key
journalists.

Tools: Google Reader (reader.google.com), Bloglines (www
.bloglines.com), NetVibes (www.netvibes.com)

Rule 3: Expand the Base
These days it’s not uncommon for a popular niche blog to have a

larger and more active readership than a daily newspaper.
It’s become very important to add key industry or local bloggers

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