Successful Blog

Be Ready for Your 15 Minutes of Fame!

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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“Um, Rosemary, Fox & Friends is on line one??”

It’s every entrepreneur and every small business owner’s dream, right? That phone call is awe-inspiring and exciting. But be careful what you wish for. Being in the center of a media scrum, even a friendly one, is stressful and demanding if you’re not ready for it.

Bottom line, if you’re sending out any sort of media communications (formal or informal press releases, or even company information on your website), you need to be ready in case lightning strikes.

Here are some tips for surviving your first bit of media attention.

  • Be camera ready before you do a PR campaign – you never know if your release is going to click with a TV outlet, radio, or online. If you are due for a hair coloring, go do that before you send out the release.
  • Get your talking points ready – you need to have a coherent message across numerous interviews. The best thing is to come up with two sentences that you absolutely want to get into the conversation; don’t bog yourself down, but know what you want to say to the world.

    What to say if they ask “is there anything you’d like to add” – without fail, you will be asked at the end of the interview if you have anything else to say. Make sure you do have something to add, especially if there’s something you wanted to get across that the interviewer didn’t ask you about. Sometimes this tidbit will lead to further coverage or a whole new angle for the story.

  • Be flexible – life on a media schedule is weird. With time zones, deadlines, and breaking news stories, you need to be ready to get up early (the morning shows in NYC are brutal if you’re on the West Coast), give interviews outside your son’s basketball game, or get cancelled at the last minute. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
  • Follow up with a thank you note – this is a place where I fell down, and I wish someone had shared it with me beforehand. I was thinking that there was some taboo about thanking a journalist, because they are supposed to be impartial. Not true, they appreciate being thanked just like everyone else. You can stand out from the crowd by using your best manners.
  • Press releases are (almost) dead – the two times we received major coverage stemmed from non-press release situations. Like any other small business, we’ve been diligently putting out formal releases for years, with minimal return. Then, a dashed off, two-sentence note to a local blogger turns into two years of media attention, including NPR, Fox & Friends, CNN Headline news, etc.
  • Media coverage has long legs – a year after the initial media scrum, I was contacted by NPR to do a followup radio story. That update sparked a renewed interest by a few new outlets. The internet makes your story live forever.
  • Promote your media on your website – once you’ve gotten some media attention, you should highlight it on your own web presence. You can ask the journalist for a DVD or audio clip of the interview, and you can often find it on the web as well. Putting these on your website gives you instant credibility.
  • Find out topic and setting in advance – if you can do some advance homework for the interview, it will help. What is the topic and format? What color is the set? Who exactly will be conducting the interview?
  • Get media training if you can – we were hit out of the blue, and had no thought of becoming “media ready.” Many of our staff members bravely spoke with the journalists who visited our office, but it would have been nice to have some minimal training beforehand. If you can afford it, and you plan a major PR blitz, it would be good to invest in some basic training. At the very least, do some Googling for tips.
  • Be ready to wait – the journalists you are contacting are on their own crazy schedule. They will leave you a message saying they absolutely, must must must speak with you in the next 10 minutes, and then wait a day before returning your voice mail message. You need to be at peace with this fact, and you do need to return their call as quickly as possible.

    • These are some of the things I wish someone had told me before we got our 15 minutes. Good luck with your own media journeys, and if you have tips to add, please share in the comments!
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    Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee
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    Thank you, Rosemary!

    You’re irresistible!

    ME “Liz” Strauss

What IS Most Crucial to Influence? What Moves People to Action?

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Redux: I wrote this post in Dec. 2010. Based on recent conversation, it seems even more relevant now and so I choose to pick it up, add some clarity and publish a newer version this week.

The Outcomes We Achieve

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Every person has influence. What what we say, and how we act has an effect on how others think, feel, and behave. As a writer, an observer, and manager, I’ve watched and studied how people respond to what we do, what we say, and what they see.

As every parent and pet owner knows, sometimes the outcome we’re going for — a change in belief or behavior — isn’t the outcome we achieve. Our intent, our feelings toward an audience are only one side of the equation. How that audience interprets our words and deeds determines the change in belief or behavior that might result.

Our influence is highly affected by context.

  • The world view of the people we might influence. An individual’s emotional associations and beliefs can filter how people interpret our intentions, our words, and actions. A person who believes all learning must be their own experience will ignore a warning to avoid a dangerous part of town. A person who has only had bad experiences with people from our “group” may fight against any message we offer.
  • The value those people put on their relationship with us. Filters such as the halo effect and other cognitive biases, such as wishful thinking, can change how our message is processes and received.

We don’t control how other people think, what they feel, or how they interpret what they hear and see.

Though we may carefully consider and choose the most generous way to communicate and interact within those those contexts, the audience will choose their interpretation of that interaction. The same authentic, highly influential, collaborative message to one audience will be a disingenuous, controversial, alienating rebuff to another audience. We see that all of the time in the world of politics.

The most crucial element of influence is understanding what the audience already knows and already believes. If we want to influence people, to move them to an important action, to change their core beliefs, we need to know the audience, listen to their world view, champion their cause, and honor their reality.

Do likes, follows, impressions, site visits, retweets and the similar quick expressions of attention really qualify as actions. Have they influenced anything?

Don’t fool yourself by the game of numbers — don’t start thinking that 1 in X000 of those likes, follows, impressions, site visits, retweets and the similar quick expressions of attention will buy!!

The kind of influence that gets me to buy a product isn’t a result of a frivolous passing gesture on the Internet. Talk to the people who buy your products and ask …. what moved them to action? what got them to believe?

I know it’s a novel idea, but the people you want to influence know what will get and keep their attention and most of us would be relieved if you’d just ask.

How do you decide what will move people to action?

Be irresistible … and ask them.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

What Twitter Talk Is Good for and What It’s Not

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Twitter Talk is great for a fast moving volley around a narrow idea or collecting the opinions of a crowd. But the very speed and compactness keeps the rich and telling details out — the details that explain why and how. If an idea or a problem takes exploring or discussion, Twitter doesn’t measure up.

If I’ve made assumptions about you, the message I get won’t be the one that you sent. If we use language differently our communication can go woefully wrong.

Sometimes whole conversations are important

  • to get something done.
  • to clearly state a position.
  • to define a project and outline expectations.
  • to participate in a negotiation.
  • to coax, cajole, or romance.

and in many other situations.

Twitter doesn’t do whole conversations well. Nuance, clarification, details all require more than 140 characters. Such interactions require fuller conversation. Fuller conversation needs other tools.

Where do you go when Twitter needs to change to a fuller conversation?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I’ve spent a couple of days on Twitter. Actually too many to count. My first tweet was March 16, 2007 and

You’re Not Alone …

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about what we think about ourselves.

You’re not alone.
We’re all afraid.
How often I tell people that — wherever I go.
It seems to be my calling.

And our biggest fear, the one we live with daily doesn’t really sound big enough.
It’s not nuclear war, or terrorists, or even being homeless.
… though we have deep and sincere respect for dangers implied by those and more.

But our biggest fear is more dear and much closer.
We’re afraid of the ideas of ourselves we carry in our heads.
We’re afraid of not being seen, not being heard, not being understood.
We’re afraid of being lost without someone to show us how to find our way home again.

It’s not so crazy when the state of the economy has led us to question everything we’ve learned about authority and trust in leadership. It’s not crazy when we’ve learned to follow paved roads to everywhere we go. It’s not so crazy when we’ve learned what behaviors get us the right kind of attention … or they did when companies still cared about employees more than the bottom line.

The skies might be gray and you should know that.
But that’s a fact … not a mood-setting necessity.
Grey doesn’t have to mean bad times or things to fear.
Face the fear. Acknowledge the reality. And move on.

Put a new idea of yourself in your head.
Decide that people will see, hear. and understand — value the people who do and move away from those who don’t.
Move in the direction you would show your best friend or your child to go.

You’re bigger than the biggest fear.
Let yourself know.
Let the fear pass over you.
Move forward.

Be irresistible.

Liz's Signature

Be Still

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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“Still, still, still…one can hear the falling snow…” That’s the opening of my favorite Christmas carol.

It speaks to something buried deep inside us that craves absolute quiet and solitude. Picture a midnight snowfall, before the footprints. Picture being alone on the beach in the early morning. It doesn’t matter what your spiritual beliefs are, or your religious tradition, we all need to withdraw occasionally from the heat of battle and restore ourselves.

How does this relate to our online selves?

Here are some ideas:

  • White space on the website
  • Pause between questions in the conversation
  • Room to breathe
  • Remove one popup window
  • Say no to animated gifs
  • Clear every single thing off your desk
  • Offer a single button
  • Don’t pitch in every communication
  • Stop keyword stuffing
  • Think for a moment before typing a response
  • Don’t hold yourself to a 5 minute turnaround on all emails
  • Turn off the social alerts for part of the day
  • Cut back on the multitasking

And now that you’ve read this, sit up straight in your chair, close your eyes, and breathe in and out slowly five times. Be still for a moment.
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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee