Oh, the weather outside is frightful

But the shopping’s so delightful

So since we’ve got cash to blow

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

Okay, so I’m no Burt Bacharach, but you get the idea.

The fourth quarter – that holiday spending season between October and December – is still a month and a half away, so I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m riffing on a holiday classic. My point is that the holidays is when consumers and businesses make a disproportionate amount of purchases compared to the rest of the year, but just because they spend the money in Q4 doesn’t mean that’s when they also make the decisions on what to spend it on.Since the last recession, consumers have gotten smarter about budgeting their money in advance of the holidays. In fact, one of our own clients, Lou Scatigna – a financial planner who is known as the Financial Physician – offered tips to consumers on how to plan for the holidays around this same time last year.  That article became one of the highest circulated pieces we ever offered the news media, because they knew it would resonate with their audiences.  From that one article we booked a number of TV appearances and more than 100 million in combined circulation and visitors per month in print and online coverage. As you’re sitting around waiting for holiday sales, consumers are researching what they are going to spend their money on right now.

Moreover, businesses also spend a lot of money at the end of the year, as many of their fiscal years are winding down. Every corporate department is in the process of making projections for their budget needs for next year. The problem is, if they still have unspent money in this year’s budget, they need to spend it by the year’s end, or else they won’t be able to justify a similar budget level for next year. In other words, they have to use it or lose it. So, if you market products or services to businesses, many of them will also be looking to empty their budgets. Will they be spending that money on you or your competitors?

For PR firms, our main concern is that the media is also preparing for the holidays in a big way right now. August and September is when many publications prepare their holiday gift guides, end of year analyses, holiday retail predictions and lists of the hottest products they believe will fly off the shelves the day after Thanksgiving. So, if you want to be mentioned, you’d best get yourself in front of them now, because if you wait until November, all those sections will already be finished. And if you’re interested in doing some radio or TV interviews, now is the time to carve out space on the media’s calendar for when the holiday push begins. There is only so much airtime and space for articles, and if you’re late, you’ll be crowded out.

If you’ve ever read those holiday shopping guides in the major newspapers and Web sites and wondered how your competitors got in, but you didn’t, that’s why. They started as the summer was still smoldering and the autumn breeze was just waking up. If you wait for the cold, that’s where you’ll be left – out in the cold.

That’s why no matter if you market to corporations or consumers or both, you have to get the word out about yourselves right now. If you’re not on the radar screen as these people are planning how to spend their money, you won’t be the ones to make the sales when they are ready to spread that holiday cheer around.

Oh, and Lou wanted me to remind you – only about 12 more paychecks until the holidays. Will you have enough time to save up to make your shopping rounds? We’re getting that pitch for him out this week, so he’ll be on the air soon to tell you all about. Will you be watching him at home, or meeting him in the green room as you wait for your segment to be taped?

Writing a book can be one of the most difficult things in the world to do.  While each author’s experience is very different, the process is almost always the same.

Winston Churchill, the author of many books in addition to being one of the most significant world leaders in history, once summed it up by saying: “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”

That last part is the rub, though. You don’t just fling a book out to the public. It has to be presented in a way that is both representative of your message and that resonates with the public. In my 21-plus years in this business, I’ve encountered a wide variety of issues that have been problematic for authors and which could have been avoided if the author realized how it would hinder his or her marketing campaign.

So, whether you’re writing a non-fiction book that builds your credibility as an expert in your field, or a fiction author writing novel after novel, here are some things to keep in mind:

• The Book Cover – I have read some amazing books in my time that have been dragged down by covers that weren’t up to the task. The problem that led to those cover disasters was the lack of professional guidance, which caused some of the most basic rules to be violated. For instance, a general rule in cover design dictates that  the key graphic, title, photograph or illustration that represents your message has to be 2/3 the size of other elements, otherwise it creates tension in the design.

Just as most authors are considered experts on their topics, good book designers and graphic artists are experts in theirs. They are trained in the art of distilling your message and expertise through the filter of what is attractive to consumers in order to produce a cover image that is striking enough to get attention.

But, the sticky part are those authors who become emotionally attached to an image they envision would be the perfect cover for their books, while the image lacks the professionalism needed to carry their message.  That emotional attachment can become the biggest obstacle in marketing a book without the author even realizing it’s the reason why bookstores aren’t carrying it on their shelf, or producers aren’t booking them as a guest, or journalists aren’t following through on doing an interview.

My advice for authors who feel strongly about their creative choices, but are in conflict with the designer, is to survey people you trust.  Show the cover to your family, friends and business associates whose opinions you respect and who you know are people who won’t just tell you what you want to hear.

And, if you’re still unsure, take a trip to your local bookstore and look at the covers of books on the shelf – notice the trends in color, design, images and layout.  See how your cover matches up against the professionalism of those books that have made it to the bookshelf.

• Interior Design – This is also important and worthy to speak about. The interior layout and design should be aesthetically pleasing and the type and font size should be easy to read.  Some important references you can use for deciding the look you want comes from a study done many years ago by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.  They determined that most people like classic serif type styles like Bodoni, Bookman, Century, Garamond and even Times Roman for type in the 8 to 12 point ranges. When you get above 12 points, most people like Sans Serif typefaces such as Arial, Helvetica and Verdana. If you have graphics or illustrations in your book, ensure they are produced with high contrast if they are in black and white. Halftone reproduction in books can be spotty if the original image doesn’t have clear contrast and sharpness.

The guts of your book can and should be created in a way to enhance the readers’ experience.  If done poorly it can cost you book buyers.  If done right it can earn you customers and supporters.

• Pseudonyms – Over the years, I’ve encountered many authors who choose, for whatever reason, to use a pen name for their books. In a few cases, it’s absolutely necessary, while in others, it’s not. For instance, we recently represented a gentleman who went by the pseudonym of Reza Kahlili. He wrote a book about the true story of how he served as a double agent for the CIA, posing as a member of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard. The book exposed dozens of human rights abuses and peeled away the public face of the government of Iran. Clearly, this is someone whose true identity needed to be protected.

But, in too many other cases, some authors have used a pseudonym because they just didn’t like their real names or they thought it was hard to spell or pronounce. One of the funniest pseudonym examples was told to me by my Senior Campaign Strategist who worked for a legend in the comic book industry, Marvel Comics founder and co-creator of Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Hulk and more – Stan Lee. He said, “When Lee was a teenager just starting out in the comics business in the 1940s, it wasn’t big business. Comics were disposable cheap entertainment for kids, and Stan – whose real name was Stanley Martin Lieber – didn’t want to waste using his real name in comics. He was saving it for when he wrote the great American novel, which never happened.  So, by his own admission, he came up with the dumbest pen name in history, Stan Lee and the name stuck. To this day, he still contends it was the worst decision of his career.”

So, the moral of the story is – don’t use a pen name if you don’t really have to. It can reduce your credibility with the media and it may also come back to bite you someday.

And I hate to sound like Dear Abby, whose advice typically ends with “seek professional help,” but in this context, it’s really true. Your book is representative of you and particularly if it’s a marketing vehicle for your business, it’s even more critical that it looks as powerful as you and your message, and as professional as the products or services you’re selling.

I started with a quote from Churchill, so I’ll finish with a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “He who represents himself has a fool for a client.”

Michael has also written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and many other top outlets. Plus he is an eight-time national best-selling author and his books have received outstanding reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, People Magazine, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Examiner, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, Esquire, Booklist and other leading publications.

So relax and learn how you can become an author of a book in just 13 weeks and help propel your business to the next level. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed conducting the interview.

Marsha: Why do you recommend that people write books in order to promote their businesses?

Michael: That’s a great question. We live in an era where the Internet is turning practically every business, service, or consultant into a commodity judged primarily, if not only, on price. In other words, the only way a lot of people are able to get business is by competing on price, and the rule in business is that any business you get by competing on price, you’ll lose when someone undercuts your price. So the question becomes this: how do people stand out in an overcrowded marketplace, where consumers and prospects have access to more information about your competition than ever? How do you make people realize that you are the most trustworthy advisor and that you can solve their problems?

At the end of the day, every website pretty much looks like every other website. They’re all attractive. They’ve all got blogs. They all kind of look the same. So even spending a lot of money on a website, let alone on traditional stand-alone marketing material like brochures, just doesn’t cut it. There’s nothing as powerful as a book to get people’s attention.

With a book, you’re able to demonstrate that you understand like no one else the specific nature of the problems that your prospects face. I always recommend targeting a niche with a book instead of writing for the general public. Write exactly for the people you’re trying to sell to. Show them that you understand their problems and that you offer solutions. In a book, you can lay out everything that you do to solve these problems. The goal is that if your book is generous enough with information, they’ll say, “I could do this on my own, but I would be much better off hiring the author to solve this problem for me.” That’s the result we’re looking for. That’s why you want a book.

Marsha: What can a book do that a good website can’t?

Michael: It really comes down to what I said in the previous answer—help the author stand out from the crowd. Again, everybody’s got a website, but how many of your competitors have books? Probably none. A book is an outstanding “leave behind”—you can’t exactly print out your website and leave it on the prospect’s desk. You can send your book in ahead of you and it’s so impressive that you’ve written a book while everyone else just has a website. You can get radio and TV appearances, as an expert or as a guest, because you’re an author. If you want to be a speaker, you really have to have a book, because the first question people ask you if you want to speak is, “Where is your book?” You can get lucrative speaking engagements, media exposure, a presence on the Internet beyond your own website…all with a book. Not just with a website. Of course you’ve got to have an attractive website, but again, so does everybody else. What’s going to make you unique?

Marsha: Why should someone consider using a ghostwriter to write their book?

Michael: We’re all good at what we do and not everyone has the desire, inclination, or experience to write his or her own book. Typically, for my clients, even for those who could write their own book and might even desire to do so, it’s really not the highest and best use of their time. It might take them, say, a hundred hours over six months to write their book. I can get it done for them in about twelve hours over ninety days. So you’re saving time, because you’re bringing in the expertise of an experienced person—in our case, our company, BusinessGhost, has done more than a hundred books. Then you’re able to use the same time you would have used writing your own book doing things that create the most leverage in your business or practice. It sure isn’t hunching over a computer and typing paragraphs out.

On top of that, a ghostwriter does more than write. A really good one will help you determine exactly what the right book should be for you at this time. You could write a lot of different books and maybe you’ll write many books over the course of your career. But what’s the right, best book right now for you? That’s awfully hard to determine on your own. It really is worth bringing in the guidance of a professional to solve that problem. I’m not sure I would equate ghostwriting and brain surgery, but if I needed brain surgery, God forbid, I wouldn’t’ do it myself. The work of ghostwriters isn’t quite as dramatic as brain surgery, of course. But we do have our clients’ reputations on the line and we have to take that responsibility incredibly seriously.

Marsha: What if someone does a lot of letter writing and blog writing—can they just write their own book, or is a ghostwriter still a good idea?

Michael: In my experience, a book is just a different animal. How do you sustain the interest of a reader over a document that runs not just a few thousand words, but 150 or 200 pages? How do you know how to organize the thing? What goes where? How much of a “call to action” can you include without offending the reader? By the way, how are you going to publish it? These are issues that even people who enjoy the process of writing their own blog pieces, articles, and [why] papers may not have the experience to answer as effectively as if they had brought in someone with specific experience in that field. Books are just different. They’re not just bigger; they are orders of magnitude more complex. I don’t want to make what we do sound like it’s overly important. But it is important. A book has to be right. If it feels like a collection of blog pieces, people are going to say, “This isn’t really a book! If you’re not credible about this, why should I trust you on anything else?”

Marsha: What are some of the things someone should look for in choosing the best ghostwriter for them?

Michael: I had a client in the area of HR who said that the key to hiring anybody is not to focus on the usual things—resume, education, how many years of experience they have, prior job titles. The only really important question is this: “Where have you solved this same problem elsewhere?” In reality, anyone can call himself or herself a ghostwriter. There is no licensing structure. The state doesn’t regulate ghostwriting. You’re on your own if you’re hiring someone, because anyone can “hang out a shingle.”

The thing you’ve got to ask any potential ghostwriter is this: “Where have you solved this problem before?” In this case, the problem is translating the appropriate body of knowledge in the client’s head into a book that will convince a specific niche audience to take a specific action that the client desires that niche audience to take. We’ve done that a hundred times.

Marsha: What are some of the pitfalls people need to avoid in hiring a ghostwriter?

Michael: Lack of experience is one thing. Ironically, not charging enough. Books are a lot like cars, in that you get what you pay for, except that it’s easier to cut corners and get something good with cars than with writers. There really is no such thing as getting a bargain when it comes to hiring a professional writer. If you want a good book, be prepared to write a serious check. On the other hand, you’re going to make so much more money from the book than you ever could have imagined that it’ll be worth it, and sooner than later.

By the way, you don’t need to be a bestseller and you don’t even need to get a deal with a New York publisher to have your book succeed for you. The sole measures of a book are these: has it increased your stature and earned you money? If the writer you’re considering has not written books that have done these things for other people, keep looking. Ask to speak to past clients and learn not just about how the book came out, but how the experience was working with the writer. Some of my brethren are not as professional as they could be. They hold onto that “artiste” mentality and have disdain for anything to do with business. I don’t feel that way at all. Sometimes people say, “Michael, do you ever get writer’s block?” My answer is always the same: “No, because I have writer’s mortgage.”

What’s behind that little joke is the reality that we’re being judged not just by the quality of our product but by the customer service we provide. If people aren’t happy with the experience they have with BusinessGhost, it doesn’t matter how good their book is. So you’ve got to find somebody who can provide both quality service and a quality book. And the only way you’ll know is by checking the writer’s references.

Marsha: How important is it to find a ghostwriter educated in their field of business?

Michael: It’s not as important as you’d think. It’s the writer’s job, essentially, to stand in the shoes of the reader of the book and ask the kinds of questions the reader would ask, if the reader had access to the author. So it’s the client’s job to educate the writer as to who the audience is. That’s my starting point when I work with a new client—we determine exactly who the audience is for the book, what their needs are, what their problems are, what their concerns are and what their fears are. Who are these people? It’s a little like method acting. If I know who I’m representing when I’m doing the interviewing, I can ask the right questions.

I would never take a book on that has a scientific or medical bent, simply because I don’t have a background in those areas. We don’t do technical writing in any form at BusinessGhost. It’s just not our strength. But we’ve worked with business people in so many different fields, including healthcare, real estate, consulting, finance, investing, event planning, sports, broadcasting, coaching, body/mind/spirit—at this point, we’ve done a book in just about every field you can think of.

The one thing you don’t really want to ask your writer is, “Have you done a book exactly like mine?” Chances are no one has. What you want is an individual who has enough of a business background to grasp the core of what you are trying to get across in the book. I have a law degree from Columbia Law School and I’ve been running my own business now for more than seventeen years. So I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it takes to run a successful business and that helps me understand where my clients are coming from as they run theirs.

Marsha: How does the process typically work for a busy executive or professional?

Michael: My role as ghostwriter is to have the smallest possible footprint on my client’s schedule. I learned the hard way that busy people just don’t have time to spend hour after hour chatting over a glass of wine on their private jet with their writer. That’s not the real world. In fact, I like to say, “If you’ve got enough time to talk with me, you probably aren’t busy enough to need a book.”

To best answer your question I can tell you how I work, which is unique, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect how other ghostwriters work. First, I personally work with the client in order to come up with the table of contents for the book. This involves us discussing the audience for the book, the action we want that audience to take, the body of knowledge in the author’s head that would convince that group of individuals to take that specific action, if only they knew the author knew that stuff! That body of knowledge then becomes chunked down into the table of contents. We can typically work through this process in an hour on the phone. Indeed, there are many clients of mine I’ve never met face to face and we’ve done all our work on the phone.

After that initial hour, all we need is an hour a week. In an hour a week, we can do an interview that would serve as the raw material for each successive chapter. So you know that Tuesdays at 9:00, you’re talking to your ghostwriter about chapter one this week, chapter two next week and so on. Our schedules are flexible so that when our clients need to move meetings, which often happens, we can accommodate them. As long as we keep up that basic pace of an hour a week, we can generate a chapter within ten to twelve days of that hour-long conversation. So you’ve got chapter one in your inbox ten to twelve days after the interview on chapter one. You can give us guidance, which we can apply as the writing goes forward, even with chapters two and three—so that by the time you’re getting those chapters, the book is already essentially in the second-draft phase instead of you getting a big pile of papers that doesn’t sound anything like you when the manuscript is delivered, which often happens with other writers.

So what’s nice about our process is that in an hour a week, you can just do a “file dump” of everything you’ve ever known, thought, believed, expected, case histories, war stories, whatever, about a given topic and you don’t even have to organize it in your head to deliver it to us. That’s our job. You give us the hour and we can give you a twelve to seventeen-page chapter within ten to twelve days. And since most of the books we do are under 200 pages, because people like shorter books today, we can have the whole writing and editing process done within about four months… and it only takes a client an hour a week. It’s a lot of work for us, but not for the client. And that’s how it should be.

Marsha: What final product should someone expect when hiring a ghostwriter?

Michael: It shouldn’t be a pile of pages! The final deliverable should be a beautiful book that celebrates you, your business, your service, your product, your ideas, or whatever you are bringing to the marketplace. The book has to be brilliantly written and extremely attractive. As they used to say on that old commercial, anything less… would be uncivilized!

Marsha: Michael, thank you so much for your time and for sharing this valuable information for our readers!

But, I am profoundly proud to say that I am not the only expert. At EMSI we have a team of experts and quite frankly, this team is one of the best I have had in my 21 years of running this business.  The work they do on a daily basis is phenomenal.

I thought I would introduce you to them, one by one, over the summer months, and allow them to tell you about what they do every day to book interviews on radio and TV and obtain print coverage. I believe it can be truly enlightening and helpful for you to learn how they overcome obstacles and meet challenges in order to consistently arrange media day in, day out, week in and week out.

The first person I interviewed for this project was Lisa Hess, who joined EMSI more than six years ago.  She’s our TV Campaign Manager and her job is to book our clients as guests and expert news commentators on local and national TV programs. She books an average of about 20 TV interviews a month on national and local shows all over the country.  She has placed guests on shows like Fox & Friends, Live with Regis and Kelly, CBS Early Show, CNN and The 700 Club to name a few, as well as many top local and regional shows.

Lisa is smart, savvy and as relentless as they come. She knows what makes producers tick and as a result is one of the most prolific media bookers I have ever seen.

I asked her about her job, her daily routines and some of the challenges she faces on a regular basis. These are her answers.

Walk us through a typical day in the life in your job.

I usually get in by 8:25 a.m. and go through my emails and answer anything urgent.  Then, I go into our staff meeting where I have a chance to discuss my plan for the day, based on the campaigns I have in the works, and review new pitches that have to get written in order to have a successful week.

Right after the meeting, I check out news headlines to see if any of our national TV clients match what is going on in the news. If they do, I contact the client immediately, asking for their comments, so that we can put together a pitch and get it out by noon at the latest. Any later than noon and I’ll miss the window to get it in front of producers.

Next I follow up on any media responses that might have come in overnight and answer any urgent client emails. After that, I choose which clients to work on for local TV appearances, based on the time zone and the dates the client is to be in that town. If I’m pitching them to a city I have not previously worked with, I create a list of producers and shows and then email blast the pitch. In this way, I balance the incoming responses for the day with new pitches flowing out to producers and making phone calls as needed.

When you’re pursuing local TV appearances for clients in specific city’s, how do you approach it?

When pursuing local TV appearances in the top 100 markets, you can expect there to be about 200 contacts per city. Now, this takes into account everyone in the production food chain, including hosts, anchors, reporters, producers, executive producers, assignment editors and more. The reason I reach out to all these different people is because just about anyone in that chain can recommend a guest for a segment. Also, you never know what the different producers and reporters are working on, and you could get lucky and pitch them on exactly the right guest at the right time. For instance, if a reporter is working on a story about new methods for job hunting, and you’re a job coach who contacts that reporter, you might be a perfect fit for that segment.

Is there a difference between pitching local TV producers and national TV producers?

Absolutely. Local producers look for things that are light and fluffy and guests that provide information or tips that their viewers can make use of in their daily lives. For example, an expert who can offer unique ways to save money on your food bill is more attractive to a local TV producer than an expert who wants to comment on the breaking economic news of the day.

On the other hand, most of the national producers we deal with are interested in general commentary on the economy, politics, a wide range of consumer trends and top national news story’s. Celebrities, when we have a story related to them, are also good for national producers. They also love experts who can comment on breaking news. In the past, we had a former military pilot who had written a book on crisis management as a client and he happened to come on board right when “Sully” Sullenberg made his famous landing on the Hudson River. We booked him consistently for about two weeks to comment on that story.

Another recent example is a gentleman who came to us with a memoir about being kidnapped by his estranged father as a young child and who was terribly abused during six months in captivity. His expertise was unique and we had great success with booking him on shows that were running stories on both the Elizabeth Smart case and the Jaycee Dugard case. When you have those opportunities, it’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. It hits hard, but lasts for a short period of time, depending on the developments in the news cycle.

Tell us your favorite recent placement and how you got it.

I would have to say it was scoring a two-part interview for one of our clients with Regis and Kelly, only it wasn’t actually Regis and Kelly who wound up doing the interview. As it turned out, Neil Patrick Harris was subbing for Regis that week, which worked out fine because he conducted a wonderful interview.

After a nice little wave of coverage based on an earlier pitch that garnered us bookings on CNN International, Fox Business and a few other national shows, we decided to switch gears and come up with a new angle. We decided on a “job makeover” pitch and fleshed out the idea with new and unique tips for scoring a new job combined with some fashion and style tips on how to dress for the big interview. Our client had a friend who was a stylist and she was going to take part in the segment. So we sent it out to the larger national shows, including Regis and Kelly. Regis’ producer responded and asked if our client could do the segment alone, just on tips for jobs – how to find them, how to get them. But she needed a better plan for the segment to present to her boss, the executive producer. So I came up with the idea while driving home from work that day about a segment that revolved around the do’s and don’ts of getting a new job. The client and I brainstormed a bit the next morning with our strategist and we came up with a really great segment, complete with tips, statistics and graphics – everything the producer would need to not only sell the segment, but produce it, as well.

The way the segment aired really made use of all our work. Harris and Kelly sat on chairs to the right and our client sat facing them.  On the back wall of the set was a giant screen, where they projected our bullet-pointed tips as they interviewed our client. It was a little bizarre watching all the work we had done in our office being broadcast on national TV, with very little editing from the Regis and Kelly production team. It proved to us that the best way we can serve our clients is to be of service to the media. When we can make their jobs easier by presenting them with good material and a good segment that’s going to be interesting to their viewers, the producers will keep coming back to us for more.

(Here’s a link to that interview: www.emsincorporated.com/live-regis-kelly-january-7-2011-dr-michael-woody-woodward/.)

What’s your advice for someone looking to do a TV PR campaign?

Keep in mind a few key concepts. First, doing one or two local or national interviews is not going to instantly catapult you into the spotlight. It is a process, a ladder that has to be climbed one rung at a time. Second, it’s not just about the booking. It’s about the execution. Getting booked on TV is only half the solution. You have to be really good when you get on the air. So, regardless whether you’ve done dozens or TV interviews before or you’re a total novice, you should be open to the idea of media training. We do that with all our TV clients, including you, Marsha, if I recall correctly.

Finally, when you get on TV, don’t sell. Educate. People fast-forward through commercials because they hate being sold all the time. If you try to sell in your segment, they’ll fast-forward through you, too. If you educate and provide the viewers with information that can help them in their lives, they’ll be far more inclined to buy what you’re selling. The TV camera does more than put a few extra pounds on you. It can spot a fake and it can also make someone who is genuine look truly sincere. Just be yourself and let your expertise be your main tool on the air.

It’s true. She doesn’t talk to reporters at all. Outside of her commentary stints on Fox News, she has no direct contact with any journalists in print, on radio or on TV. So how is it she constantly stays in the headlines? One word: Twitter.

Palin lets the world know what she thinks through Twitter feeds and then comments on them through other social networks, like her Facebook page. She is still mentioned as a potential presidential candidate and her name appears in the news almost every week.

Is there any better evidence that social networking is not a fad?

But don’t take my word or even Palin’s word for it. Just look at the stats:

Twitter

• Since April, Twitter has gained 40 million users and a 62 percent increase in mobile use of the platform. (Source: ClickZ)
• Now, there are more than 175 million registered Twitter users. It is unclear as to how many of these are regular, but the number of Tweets per day has rocketed to 95 million – an increase of 250 percent. (Econsultancy)

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn has grown by an impressive 100 percent from last year; it now has more than 100 million users across the globe. Interestingly, 56% of these users are from outside of the US. (Econsultancy)

Facebook

• Back in January 2010, the site had 350 million active users across the globe. It now has in excess of 640 million – half of which log in daily. Based on this figure, Facebook has seen a 40 percent increase in daily usage over the past 12 months. (Econsultancy)
• People are sharing more content on Facebook now too. On average, there are more than 7 billion pieces of content shared on the site weekly. This figure has risen from last year, when it was 3.5 billion. (Econsultancy)
• 75 percent of brand “Likes” on Facebook come from advertisements. (Mashable)
• More than 250 million people use Facebook Connect every month. (Facebook)

General

• The average American Internet user watches 30 minutes of video online per day (comScore) compared to 5 hours of television per day.
• Social networking site usage grew 88 percent among Internet users aged 55-64 between April 2009 and May 2010. (Pew Research)
• In 2009, social gamers bought $2.2 billion in virtual goods, predicted to increase to $6 billion by 2013. (NPD Group).
• 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have a public-facing blog that has at least one post in the past 12 months. (comScore)

From the stats, a few key trends are quite clear:

• Corporations are using social networking to extend their branding efforts.
• Real commerce is taking place through social networking sites.
• Social networks are no longer a trend. They are a fact of life for millions of Americans.

This all stands to figure as Americans are being forced to do more with less. They have to make ends meet with less money, get more work done in less time and take care of their families despite the growing demands of earning money through more than one job. Social networking allows Americans to get news, stay in touch with friends and promote their business interests.

I use social networking as a key way of reaching out to my potential clients as well as those in the marketing community who want to use my columns for their Web sites, invite me on their shows as a guest, and even hire me as an expert speaker – all of which drives my business. As a marketing communications professional, I would never dream of eliminating social networking from my outreach arsenal. Each day it grows more important and even helps to drive my revenue, so when I recommend social networking to my clients, it’s not because I am trying to follow all the media hype. I’m living it daily and I see how it helps my bottom line.

But here’s probably the most compelling reason for you to dive into the world of social networking. Based on the stats, your competitors are already using it.

Now, forgive me. I have to go place this piece on my Twitter feed.

The success or failure of those engagements relies a great deal on a company’s ability to manage those vendors. Being in the client service business myself, I live in both worlds. My agency is hired to consult with other businesses, and as a business owner I sometimes have to bring in professionals to service my company. While most of my experiences on both sides of the fence have been mutually beneficial, I find myself learning from those few that have not. That’s why I thought it might be helpful to offer a few tips on how to make your vendor engagements successful ones.

• Vet Them – Before you hire anyone from outside your firm to work for you – whether it’s a plumber or an accountant – vet them well. Don’t accept braggadocio; instead, look at their past experiences. Do all that you can to ensure, to the best of your ability, that these people are everything they say they are. Find people you can trust to do what they say they will do. If you’re not reasonably sure, don’t hire them. It’s that simple.
• Trust Them – Now that you’ve made the decision to hire them, give them everything they need to do their job, including your confidence in their expertise. Allow them to do their job and perform as promised. If they don’t perform, it will be readily apparent to you and that would be the time for questioning, not before. Until then, treat them with confidence and trust.
• Respect Their Expertise – The irony about this tip for me is that every so often a potential client will come along because he heard from someone else that my team and I are experts in our field. But soon after, we’ll get questioned on the strategy and tactic we recommend to the point of disagreement. As you would never dream of ignoring an attorney’s, surgeon’s or accountant’s advice, similarly once you’ve made a decision to hire a vendor, respect their professional expertise and the counsel they provide.
• Keep Out of Their Way – If your pipes burst, you call a plumber, but if you stand over him with a wrench in one hand and a length of pipe in the other and insist on directing him on how to fix your pipes, you’ll only wind up with pipes that were not expertly repaired. Some people actually do that, and when the pipes break again, they complain to the plumber that he did a bad job. Don’t create artificial roadblocks to your vendor getting the job done because you want to micromanage a project. Hire them, give them some direction based on the goals you want them to meet, and then keep out of their way and let them do their magic.
• Play Ball – When you choose a vendor to work with, be it your ad agency, web designer, marketing consultant or PR specialist, recognize that you’ve hired that expert to help solve a problem or achieve a business goal. Therefore, you need to play ball with them and be ready to change your direction if their expert opinion is that you’re headed down the wrong road.That said, you are fully within your rights to reject that expert’s recommendations. If you do, however, you lose the right to complain that you didn’t get your money’s worth. When you hire an expert, you aren’t paying for what they do as much as you’re paying for what they know. If you discount it, then it’s as if you’re taking half of the fee you’re paying them and throwing it away.

  Remember, you hired them for a reason. Let’s face it, if you could have done it yourself, you’d have done it by now.

Hiring good vendors is a key to business success. You’ll get the most out of your money by hiring smart, and then managing them even smarter.

Keeping in mind there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers on the Internet today, there are some who drive opinions far better than even celebrity endorsements. According to the 2011 Social Media Matters study by BlogHer.com, women who read blogs routinely trust implicitly the advice and recommendations they receive, especially if it is from a blogger they follow on a regular basis.

“We find this is true in every study conducted over the past four years and the effect never diminishes,” according to the study’s report to the media. “In this year’s Social Media study, 88 percent of the active blog readers in the U.S. general population trust the information they get from familiar blogs. Asked why they have this level of trust, nearly half (48 percent) say it’s because they had made purchases in the past based on blog recommendations and were satisfied with the results. More than 50 percent of the active blog readers in the general U.S. online population have made a purchase based on a blog recommendation. That number jumps to 80 percent in the BlogHer network community.

Moreover, familiar bloggers are preferred over celebrities, a finding that will certainly find some ad agencies cringing.

This information is key in the book marketplace, especially because 48 percent of all books sold in North America are sold online (44 percent through Amazon and 4 percent through BN.com). With consumer trust in familiar bloggers at such high levels, it’s a fair assumption that bloggers are influencing more of those sales than in the past. Circulations on key book review publications like Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews – which drive opinions with book buyers for the major retailers – are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as more consumers choose to buy online instead of the brick-and-mortar stores serviced by those buyers. Before Amazon was a force in the book industry, those buyers had a lot more influence over what consumers bought by deciding to stock certain books at higher levels. Today, much of that influence has been transferred to Amazon and the reviews posted on that site. And, many of Amazon’s regular reviewers also have their own book blogs, doubling the influence those bloggers have over readers.

It’s a trend we’ve followed, and to which we’ve responded, by including more than 650 of those key bloggers in our media databases for our print campaign clients. It’s something every author and publisher should also consider when approaching any book PR campaign. In the past, bloggers weren’t recognized as thought leaders; they were sparsely read voices in the wilderness. But, today’s crop of book bloggers serve millions of readers who trust them and are opinion leaders in a marketplace that is more Web-based. In fact, Examiner.com hosts one of the most popular book blogs on the Internet with a recorded 7 million visitors per month. That’s 2 million more sets of eyeballs than sees the Sunday New York Times. That’s why we treat bloggers with the same importance that we treat any other print or online journalist from the mainstream.

Think back 10 years ago when a PR campaign yielded an online article. Many agencies wouldn’t even report it to the client thinking, “Oh, it’s only a Web hit.” Today, those Web hits place consumers one click away from making a purchase. So if you’re planning a PR campaign to promote a book – and you don’t include a heaping helping of book bloggers in your outreach – you’re missing a boat the size of a few of the larger states in the Union.

The Internet is changing the way we do just about everything, including selling books. Smart authors and publishers will change with those trends if they want to stay relevant to the only audience that matters – their readers.

“So why did you write your book?”

They won’t ask it, not because they don’t know you’re an author nor because they’re being rude. They won’t ask because the media doesn’t exist to help authors sell books. The media exists to create content that informs and entertains its audience, so that their audience stays tuned in. The more audience they have, the more advertising dollars they can charge for their print space and air time. Audiences are what make them money.

This is one of the most common disconnects we usually see with those who are new to the game of PR. Authors expect they can use the media as a venue to talk about their books, while the media is only interested in them for their expertise and the information or entertainment they can offer their audiences.

But, there is a wide gulf between using an interview to wax philosophic about why you wrote a book and giving an information-packed or fun-filled interview aimed at holding the interest of the audience. So here are a few things to remember when preparing for media interviews:

1. “What’s In It For Me?” – The success of your interview, whether your audience stays tuned into you or tunes out, will depend largely on whether or not you tell them how your information will help them. No one knows this formula better than producers, hosts, editors and journalists whose livelihoods depend on keeping their audiences tuned in. They’re slaves to the audience – they know if they can’t hold them, they’ll lose them. And, if the audience goes, so does the advertising revenue and possibly their job.
2. Make it Fast– Today, the media has far less time and space than it ever has in its history. Ratings and readership figures are transmitted electronically, tracking not only what media you are consuming, but how much, for how long and when. They have it down to the minute. That doesn’t mean that we are reading less or have shorter attention spans. It means there is a lot more competition for our attention than ever before.We have radio and TV shows, movies, the Internet as well as content for our smartphones and PDAs. Media is delivered to us on plasma screens in the checkout line at Wal-Mart, in the airport as we wait for our flights and even at the pump as we gas up our cars. As a result of the competition for our attention, the media gives us much more information, in a variety of ways, faster than ever before. For the media, it’s as much about how much content as it is about how fast they can give it to us. Most TV interviews are in the 3-5 minute range, and radio interviews are in the 5-10 minute range. In print, a 500-word article is about the medium length most people will find. In USA Today, only a handful of stories ever break the 500 word mark. They want to give you more, faster. So when an author is offered an interview with the media, they better be able to provide helpful information that will leave an impression and be able to do it quickly, because their air time is so limited.
3. Walk the Tightrope– The media knows the dance. You are offering your time and expertise to their audience in exchange for exposure of your book. But if during the interview you say things like, “In my book, I wrote…,” it will be a short interview. However, if your interview fills the host’s need for delivering an entertaining and informative interview, they will do the promotion for you by mentioning your book and even your Web site on the air.But, even more important than the media’s perception of being overly promotional when interviewed on the air, is the consumer’s perception. It is a universal truth that consumers don’t like being sold. They don’t like commercials (which is why they fast forward past them on their DVRs), or shopping for cars at a dealership. They don’t like banner ads, spam, or a landscape cluttered with billboards. So the clue here is – don’t sell! Instead, inform, entertain and, in doing so, you’ll build the audience’s trust. And, one thing is for sure – no one puts their money on the counter without there being some level of trust that they are getting something of value in exchange for whatever it is they are purchasing.

The bottom line is that in order to get value from your media exposure, you have to offer value to the media first. Otherwise, you will forever be on the outside, looking in, as your competitors get the air time and media exposure you want for yourself.

In the age of the Internet, everyone has a blog.

According to BlogPulse, there were 152 million blogs on the Internet at the end of 2010 and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Many of these bloggers have become opinion leaders in their particular areas of expertise, while others have next to no following at all and blog just to let off steam. So how do you know which bloggers to target when you’re promoting yourself or your company and which ones to ignore? I have a few tips that might help you weed out the followers from the leaders:

• Check Their Bios – Many of the top independent bloggers didn’t start out as bloggers. They came from the ranks of the traditional media. Over the last 10 years, as advertising revenues have dwindled for newspapers and some broadcast outlets, veteran journalists and media personalities have either been laid off or they took the early retirement that was offered to them as part of the downsizing. These guys are the top dogs of bloggers, so check their bios on their blog pages. If it reveals that they once wrote a column on finance for the Dallas Morning News, then they probably have a pretty good following and they are influencers in their area of expertise.
• Check the Web – If you’re unsure about a blogger’s credentials, Google them. If your search turns up old articles they may have written in print publications, then you’re probably on solid ground adding them to your list. If your search turns up nothing, chances are they are one of the voices in the wilderness who isn’t a high percentage target for your media list.
• Check Their Traffic – There are plenty of Web sites like www.statsaholic.com that will tell you the traffic a particular Web site is receiving. You simply go to the home page and type the URL for the Web site you’re curious about into the search field and you’ll get the stats for that page for the last few months. When I look up a site to see if it’s viable, I’ll rate the traffic against the circulation typically associated with an enthusiast publication in the same field.

  For instance, when I searched paulocoelhoblog.com, a popular book blog, I discovered the site averaged around 60,000 unique visitors per month. That’s a healthy range and worthy of being on my media list. Then, I searched artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com, the New York Times portal for entertainment reviews in general, and I saw they averaged around 400,000 unique visitors per month, which I thought was a little low for a NYT branded site. Considering that site isn’t just about books, but about the whole range of entertainment topics, the smaller book site compared nicely against it.

• Check Their Other Media – Readership of the blog isn’t the only benchmark. For instance, John C. Dvorak is the dean of consumer technology reporters. He reviews products, comments on the industry and has been a contributing editor for PC Magazine for the better part of two decades. His blog at www.channeldvorak.com only receives about 8,000 unique visitors per month, according to the stats I saw. However, he is everywhere.

  Based on a Google search, he also has another blog called www.dvorak.org, which receives an average of 70,000 unique visitors per month. Plus, he has a radio show at www.crankygeeks.com and an online TV show, tech5.mevio.com, that received 7 million unique visitors in March of this year. Plus, he still writes for PC Magazine, a top newsstand publication with several million in circulation. So, don’t discount a blog just because it may have low traffic. Using the blog as a way to contact a key guy like Dvorak is not a bad bet for consumer technology companies.

Of course, there is a little legwork involved to find the top bloggers. But, as bloggers are here to stay, the key is to use the information available and make sure to include them in our PR plans.

One of the things I love about my business is I get to meet the most interesting people who are luminaries in their industries. One person who fits that bill to a “T” is Pen Densham. You may not recognize his name, but I guarantee you’ve seen his work.

I talk about passion a lot with regard to PR and Pen is a guy whose entire life was based on his passion for movies. He quit school at age 15 and then spent his formative years doing everything he could to conjure himself a career in film and television. With no formal education and the odds against him (almost sounds like a movie plot in itself), he forged a career writing, producing, consulting on and directing some of the most-loved movies and television shows from the last 20-plus years. His string of projects included Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Backdraft, Moll Flanders, Rocky II, Blown Away, as well as the TNT movie Houdini and the successful reboots of the classic TV series The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. He has worked with Oscar-winning talents like Ron Howard, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Costner and Jeff Bridges, and some of his projects have also won Academy Awards. And just for irony, the high school dropout now teaches courses at the University of Southern California’s film school.

He recently released his definitive guide to screenwriting, Riding the Alligator (www.pendensham.com), one of the most honest and inspiring books for writers that I’ve read in a long time. While Pen’s primary discipline is writing for the screen, his process is to filter it through an individual’s passion. That is such a match with my philosophy and I felt that much of his advice is applicable for all writers, regardless of whether they are book authors, screenwriters, speakers or business people in general.

I asked Pen if he’d consent to do a Q & A with me, with the idea that there isn’t a field, profession or discipline that doesn’t require some level of skill with the written word. I had hoped Pen could help shed a little light on the writing process in general, starting with the blank page and going from there. Well, not only did he say yes, but he also didn’t disappoint me with his message. Just read on below and I think you’ll see why I was so happy with what he had to say.

MF: Pen, let’s start with talking about the blank page, which is the scariest thing to many writers, myself included. What’s your advice on slaying that dragon?

Pen: One of the most vital things any creative person can do for starting their work is to commit a murder. The victim will pose as your best friend, but in reality, he’s your worst enemy when it comes to initiation anything artistic. It’s your own inner voice, the critic that we each seem to have, who so helpfully tells us that our work is probably a waste of time, that someone else has already done something better than this, that people will line up on the streets and point at your car as you drive by, laughing at you for even attempting to do something original.

This inner critic thoroughly deserves to be assassinated, because its opinions are patently wrong, destructively useless and seem to be part of every human being’s psychological equipment. It has many names. I call my personal one “The Golem” but it can also be called “Perfectionism” or “The Voice of Writers Block.” We don’t invite this character into our lives. He or she seems to have slipped in through some evil side door and taken up an obnoxiously self-confident residence in our brain, sitting in judgment of us.

In order to eliminate this parasite, one has a gigantically potent weapon…don’t try to make your work perfect. In fact, deny this character any power by choosing a mindset that says you are just writing a piece of crap. Yep. Crap. This decision frees your true soul from the clutches of Mr. Vanity (Golem), because there is no power to criticize crap, and the strange thing is, as you write without self-criticism, letting whatever comes out of your head fall onto the page, you are probably writing something of superb quality that, with a few tweaks and tucks in a rewrite, will surprise you with what you accomplish and thoroughly route it around our creator of procrastination, our internal critic.

MF: I can’t agree more about the effects of self-criticism and where it can take us and I love your solution!

Many authors feel insecure about writing, because they may not have been formally trained as one. You dropped out of high school at age 15 to move to Hollywood with an aim of getting into the movie business. How did you overcome your lack of education to become an award-winning screenwriter?

Pen: When I was at school, I was always fed that the real writers—the Shakespeares, the Dickens, the Steinbecks—were beyond my ability. They were saints of literature and I was unlikely to ever accomplish any thing of consequence because I had terrible grammar, awful handwriting and, from my teachers’ perspective, a wildly uncontrollable desire to use my imagination rather than their formulas.

While my teachers thought they were doing their best for me, I felt they were clipping off parts of my personality, so I fled the education system at 15. Their feeling was it was my funeral and, to be honest, it was my father’s feeling too. He tried to force his untamable son into a job at an electric blanket factory, so at least I would have a future. Luckily the owner of that establishment saw through my feigned interest in thermal bedding and rejected me, probably saving several of his customers from electrocution.

Since the age of 4, literally from when I was a little child riding on an alligator in my parents’ theatrical short films about people who kept strange pets, I knew I had to be in the creative arts… preferably film. This dream completely impassioned me. I lived to use cameras. I loved to read trashy stuff like adventure stories, science fiction and strangely had a giant fascination about human nature, along with a lust to take photographs.

Freed from the academic world’s choices, I blossomed as a reader, literally constructing my own way of thinking and learning that, even after leaving school at 15, there were outlets that would buy my photographs and articles. As I learned from the “school of hard knocks,” I kept discovering that my imagination could create things that, with some effort and adjustment, there was a market for. It took years for me to trust that I was an artist and to value what I had to say, but my passion never left me and the search for my creative destiny felt so sacred and so special that I frequently took on impossible odds, and won enough times to feed myself and my family.

MF: Great story Pen. I admire the insight you had at 15 to recognize how stifled you were by the school system and mostly I admire the “courage” you had to leave it!
Tell us, what do you consider to be the role of passion in writing?

Pen: What has amazed me, as I came to discover, was that working in Hollywood, the studios paid me lavish amounts to write screenplays that seldom seemed to get to the screen. And yet, when I stole time from that effort to write something for myself, some story that my gut instincts wanted me to write, these screenplays got made much more frequently. I created the story for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves after three studios rejected the idea, because my soul wanted to tell that story in a new way, and my partner, John Watson, supported me by co-writing the screenplay. My movie about Moll Flanders, which Robin Wright and Morgan Freeman starred in, was a script that poured out of me in a fascinating torrent of words that I could barely write down fast enough to capture. My love for the unique character of Harry Houdini turned into another self-inspired screenplay that also got made.

These made me think that writing the stories that come naturally to you may well mean those stories are more powerful, that you will fight for them longer, and that others recognize their uniqueness and depth, and are attracted to them. I’ve come to call these “Life Scripts” because they are so much a part of me.

MF: What advice can you give aspiring authors who want to turn their stories into screenplays?

Pen: In Hollywood, I describe screenplays as the enemies of people’s weekends. Frequently decision-makers go home with five or even ten screenplays. The first thing they look at is the last page to check the number and see how much they are going to have to read. Shakespeare once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Brevity is certainly the secret to screenplay writing. Screenplays are condensed passion.

Books and novels are the complete reverse, an opportunity to luxuriate in a warm bath of words, day after day, as one explores the complex, thematic storytelling that only books allow. To translate a novel into a screenplay, one must bear in mind that if you took out all the white space in a script and combined all the words together, there’s probably only 40-50 pages of text. Essentially, a movie running an hour and a half or two hours is a short story and seems to follow an almost invariable rule of beginning, middle and end.

So to translate a novel to the screen, one must find the essential bones that give the story strength and structure, and compact only what you need to keep the audience knowledgeable of your characters, the tone and the plot’s goals, and streamline it so that it fits the structure of a feature film. The great thing about working from a novel is one has already established the entire canvass and you are now picking out the strongest points of the composition, which is in many ways an easier task than imagining something brand new.

MF: You’ve sold a number of screenplays and concepts to studios over the years. Is there a formula to selling something you’ve written?

Pen: There is a terrible, but possibly highly accurate, perception that Hollywood executives have the attention span of a gnat. Not wanting to insult gnats, one might explain that both have much shorter life spans and deserve to live in this way. Actually, Hollywood buyers are this way because there is so much material being pushed at them, and original and different material is very hard for them to trust. Thus we frequently see sequels and remakes instead of new and original material, even though the marketing analysis people tell us that audiences desire fresh and different stories.

The tools to capture the attention of your film buyer are to explain your material to them in terms of successful previous hits, thus Jaws in outer space = Alien. North by Northwest meets James Bond = The Bourne Identity. The Haunting meets The Blair Witch Project = Paranormal Activity.

Every executive is looking for a hit. That is their goal in life. So by defining what you are selling in terms that have already succeeded, you give yourself a large advantage. When a movie is being sold, frequently it comes down to a poster or a selling line like “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” that must motivate tens of millions to go to the theater. It’s unfair, yet rational, that our art has to come down to a catch phrase; we are asking the studio to invest an enormous quantity of money and maybe we have to hold their hand a little to help them through the scary parts.

MF: Pen, as you know, your book was such an inspiration to me as a writer and I can’t recommend it highly enough. But this interview inspired me again and I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to share your insights, counsel and advice with our readers!