Hats off to this week’s marketer of the week – BJ Gallagher!
First, she was quoted in an article on Boeing’s CEO getting canned for having an affair with an employee.
Her sound bite from the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
In late 2003, racked by scandal, The Boeing Co. brought Chief Executive Harry Stonecipher out of retirement to be its knight in shining armor.
“Instead, it seems they got a knight in shining amour,” observed ethicist B.J. Gallagher after Boeing’s board Sunday fired Stonecipher in connection with an intraoffice affair.
If you look at this article closely, BJ’s quote inspired the writer to write his lead paragraph as a lead in to her quote!
That’s power.
Also, don’t overlook the fact that Boeing is based in Seattle. The reporter could have had his choice of any local expert. He went with the best quote!
BJ’s antics didn’t end there. She sent me an envelope with a very interesting stamp . It looked like her book cover! Her book is called “Who Are They, Anyway?”
Yes, it is legal. Why not put your book cover, or your company logo, or your face on a “stamp”?
She made the stamp at www.photostamps.com. Read about it. It is very hot!
Save time
Awww, shucks, it makes me blush when Dan says all those nice things about me. I owe a lot of my PR success to Dan, who trained me how to use his service effectively and how to repond to reporters’ queries. With practice, I got it down to an art form.
Then I took it one step further. I often send reporters an additional “sidebar” — a small anecdote or a short list of tips and how to’s that can be featured in a box along side the main story. The reporters love it! My primary goal is to make their jobs easier, in fact, maybe even to do their jobs for them! They just pull stuff right out of my emails and 90% of the time they don’t even need to talk to me. Saves my time and theirs too.
Learning to give them sound bites and quotable quotes is what made the difference with the Seattle paper last week. I had already sent the reporter my three bullet point thoughts on the Boeing sex scandal, and afterwards I thought of a funny punch line. (Don’t you always think of those funny things after the fact?) So I sent him another email — a quick one — that simply said: “Boeing brought Harry Stonecipher out of retirement to be their knight in shining armor; looks like what they got instead is a knight in shining amour.” The reporter took it like a fish takes bait. He loved it. And he used it as his lead for the story.
So my advice to everyone who uses Dan’s wonderful service is to think creatively, be funny, be quotable, be succinct, speak and write in sound bites, and do everything you can to make the reporter’s job easy. They’ll love ya for it!
Dan, in case you’re checking your blog but not your e-mail while traveling: teleseminar date is wrong in the newsletter. You can read your mail at mail2web.com