But once Internet access became commonplace, once people became comfortable with e-mail and the instantaneous transmission of information, the world of public relations exploded into zillions of pieces, and there was a publicist flying in every direction. Speed was no longer simply important; it was now a necessity. Without it, there was no point in trying to attract attention to your project at all.
But that’s not all that has complicated the process in the past fifteen years. Consider this: when Guerrilla P.R. was first published, nobody had ever heard of Fox News, not even the people at Fox. The channel launched in 1996.
In 1993, Ellen DeGeneres was a stand-up comedian about to get her own network sitcom. Movies were being rented on VHS tapes in local video stores. Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings were the anchors of the network newscasts. Johnny Carson had been retired for less than a year.
Things haven’t just changed; they’ve changed at light speed.
In order to get your message to a thousand media outlets in 1993, you’d have had to compile lists on paper, print out (on your dot matrix printer) a thousand mailing labels (or address a thousand envelopes by hand), print out a thousand letters, stuff a thousand envelopes, and use a thousand postage stamps (at 29 cents each) and cart them off to the Post Office, then wait several days, if not weeks, for about ten or fifteen positive responses.
Today, you’ll have to amass a thousand names on a list in your online address book, write a killer e-mail, and push a button. Not counting the time it takes to compile the list and write the e-mail, you’re looking at roughly a thousandth of a second there. So you can see that things have accelerated a bit.
I’ve made it a mantra in this book: the two speeds of Guerrilla P.R. are fast, and dead. But sometimes, fast isn’t fast enough. You have to be amazingly fast, and that means you need to have a strong technological edge in your planning.
No, that doesn’t mean you need to buy the best, most expensive state-of-the-art equipment and hire an entire squad of information technology specialists to run your P.R. plan for you. It does mean that you need to be thinking ahead, strategizing as to your e-mail blasts, Web site introduction, and information gathering in order to make a true twenty-first-century Guerrilla P.R. campaign work.
In 1993, it would have been impossible for me to contact 229,000 people (and climbing) every day with up-to-the-minute news updates. I’d have had to buy my own television network, or at least a local station, to reach that many people on such short notice. Today, it’s almost too easy. And I don’t reach 229,000 random names; they’re handpicked, high-powered decision makers in business, politics, and entertainment whom I might not have been able to reach at all before, given the gatekeepers in place fifteen years ago. Now, e-mail addresses aren’t always incredibly easy to get, but they are available to those who want to do a little digging.
I have a friend who writes mystery novels and wanted to get a “blurb” (one of those quotes on the back of the book from a famous person who says the book is wonderful) from the well-respected television journalist and producer Linda Ellerbee. He did a little online searching, found her e-mail address, and sent a very well-written e-mail asking Ms. Ellerbee to read his book and decide if she’d like to say something positive about it. Within an hour, he had his response: she would read the book. Weeks later, the blurb arrived (she’d loved the book), and it appeared prominently featured on the cover of the book when it was published.
For Guerrilla P.R. purposes, the Internet is a dream come true. Access to the media has never been more available, and communication with reporters, producers, and influencers couldn’t possibly be faster, even if they were in the same room with you. With all that advantage, what could possibly go wrong?
Everything. Those who take technology for granted are doomed to misuse it. If you send too many e-mails in your sincere enthusiasm for your project, you will be thought of as a pest—or worse, a spammer. If you overreach and send e-mails to the wrong people, you’ll be discarded as irrelevant and forgotten. If you write a bad letter, you can be thought of as an amateur or a fool.
E-mail is a wonderful tool. But like any tool, it needs to be used properly to be effective. An e-mail blast is a good way to make an initial announcement to get people familiar with your product, service, or project. It’s a concentrated e-mail sent to a large list of potential clients, but not to the media. An e-mail blast is meant to be more a marketing tool than a P.R. tool. That doesn’t mean an enterprising Guerrilla can’t use it to advantage.
Compile a mailing list of local and national media persons who might be interested in your announcement. Then, send off the cleanest, most persuasive message you can write (or ask someone else to write one, if your literary skills are a little lacking). Make sure the message is to the point, clear, and compelling. And don’t put in a heading that makes it sound too commercial: terms like “buy now” or “product” could very well land you in the spam filter of most of your targeted recipients, and that will do you no good at all.
After the initial announcement, though, an e-mail newsletter will be a strong way to keep developments current and your name in the minds of the media you’re targeting. But it’s extremely important to allow recipients to unsubscribe to your updates at any time, and to be scrupulous about removing a name from the list when it is requested. You don’t want to develop a reputation as a pest.
At this point, it probably goes without saying that it’s essential for a business or a person seeking attention to have a Web site, and it should be a professionally designed one. Doing it yourself, unless you are a Web whiz, is a very risky proposition, as your site is the first face a reporter will connect with your name. If it looks shabby, cheap, or amateurish, you might not get the phone call you would have gotten otherwise.
Your Web site is the place almost everyone—clients, reporters, producers, and consumers—will look first to get an idea of what you’re about. If you are promoting a product or service, those who might have a need for that product or service will look at your Web site before calling you for more information. If a reporter finds your initial e-mail even slightly interesting, the Web site will be the first place the reporter will look before deciding whether or not to invest more time in your story.
A Web site should be easy to navigate, contain clear and understandable information, and be interesting. There’s nothing deadlier than a bland, uninteresting Web site. Why even bother to post one if you aren’t going to put in the effort to keep your guests engaged?
Have some fun with the site, but don’t make it so frivolous that guests won’t understand it’s about your business or project. Make sure the message—the information you’re trying to get across—is imparted. If not, you’re inviting people in for a party but forgetting to remind them whose birthday you’re celebrating.
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GUERRILLA P.R. COMMANDOS:
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
When done extraordinarily well, a Web site can become a story in its own right. When the makers of the ultra-low-budget film The Blair Witch Project established their Web site, they made a bold choice—the film was never actually mentioned, at least not in the form it actually took.
The idea was that Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez would make a horror film for the absurdly low budget of about $35,000—most of which was raised by friends and on the filmmakers’ credit cards—and then create a mythology around the film that would attract enough of an audience that maybe—just maybe—the filmmakers could expect it to be released on home video.
In 1999, when The Blair Witch Project was completed and making the rounds at festivals, Myrick and Sanchez put together a Web site that tied in with the movie and enticed people into finding out more about it.
The film was supposed to be what had been left behind after a group of young film students went into the Maryland woods to investigate the myth of the Blair Witch, a sorceress who supposedly didn’t take kindly to people encroaching on “her” wo
ods. The film, in documentary style, chronicles the trip and leads to the inevitable not-so-happy ending for the young protagonists, who were supposedly never heard from again.
Myrick and Sanchez, the real filmmakers, knew that their film, free of special effects and on-screen gore, would benefit from the audience’s belief in the story they told. So their Web site did exactly that: it told the story of the Blair Witch, mentioned the recently “recovered” film of the young students who ventured too far into the woods, and never pointed out that the whole thing was fictional and the subject of a horror movie soon to be seen at a theater near you. In fact, when the site was posted, the filmmakers didn’t even know whether the film would be available to anyone or not.
When people stumbled onto the Web site, without the knowledge that they were looking at fictional footage shot for an upcoming film, they accepted the information at face value: they believed in the Blair Witch. Even when the film was purchased for distribution by a studio, and released with every disclosure that it was in fact a fictional story, some fans continued to believe in the mythology the site was presenting.
By the time the $35,000 film had grossed over $135 million and had become by default the most profitable film ever made, it didn’t matter whether you believed in the Blair Witch or not—you certainly knew about the film.
With an initial investment that was extremely low (luckily Sanchez had some experience with Web design) and an operating expense of about $40 a month (which would be lower now), the publicity generated by the Guerrilla effort online was without question an unprecedented success.
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More Is More
Online Guerrilla P.R. is only one aspect of the technological advances that are available to enterprising Commandos. With the advances in satellite technology and the introduction of fiber-optic cable in most areas of the country and the world, it became possible for television consumers to have hundreds more channels—and therefore more media outlets—available to them during the 1990s and 2000s.
That means there are hundreds, if not thousands, more opportunities for enterprising Guerrillas. Television has become at once infinitely more vast, but also infinitely more specific. There weren’t always the Travel Channel, the Food Network, Discovery Kids, and a separate network just for reruns of shows baby boomers grew up watching. It wasn’t always possible for every town to have its own cable access station that looks slick and professional and probably has a news hole to fill.
In short, Guerrillas didn’t always have the choices they have now. They didn’t have the chance to promote a product, service, or project on television or radio no matter where they lived.
Scour your area. If you don’t have access to every cable station available there, find someone who does. Look over the lineup. See which outlets you can approach with your message. Then add those to your media list, and begin the hunt!
Podcasts and Blogs
It’s already being said that blogs are on their way out. When Guerrilla P.R. was first published, they had barely been invented, and almost no one had heard of them, let alone started one. That’s how fast things are moving these days.
For the time being, though, blogs (Web logs) are still a cheap, effective way to publicize. You can either set one up for yourself or try to get mentioned on blogs run by other people; the more credibility in your industry, the better. Either way, the success of a blog placement will fall somewhere between nothing at all and a mention on Good Morning America. It’s not a huge home run, but it’s a solid single.
What’s the power of a blog? Consider this: TMZ.com, a celebrity gossip site that posts short items (i.e., a blog) about entertainers and the famous, broke the famous Mel Gibson drunk-driving episode first, and the story immediately became a worldwide topic of conversation. In previous generations, the story would have been reported on television, on radio, in newspapers, or in magazines, but now we’re looking to the Web more and more often for news and information than to anywhere else.
As a Guerrilla you can take advantage of that idea. Target your message to appeal to Web users: those who start their day with a look at their favorite blogs and Web sites. Make your message short and to the point, easy to digest and dramatic. Make sure that it’s told in as little time as possible, to make it more likely your press release (when it’s written) might be quoted verbatim on interested blogs. Then, compile your list of bloggers who are influential in your business or with your clientele.
Start by thinking about the blogs you read first. What attracts your attention? Which ones won’t you ever miss, and why? Which ones are talked about when colleagues discuss the business? Which ones are most likely to be talked about among your clients?
It’s pretty easy to contact a blogger—the vast majority of them have “contact” links on their sites—but some of the bigger, more influential ones are a little less open to the public. It’s still not hard to get e-mail addresses on most; just Google (or use any other search engine) them, find links to the site elsewhere, and work your way backward through the chain of command. You’ll see: you should have a pretty comprehensive list in very little time.
At that point, you can make contact the same way you would with a newspaper or TV station. Simply e-mail the appropriate person with a pitch. But a pitch for a blog should probably be shorter than a one-page letter (single-spaced) would be; it should be a couple of paragraphs, tops. That way, the blogger in question, trying to decide what to write about today, can see clearly if your news will fit into the format he or she has established. Is this a good fit? If so, you might find your words duplicated exactly on the screen.
The success rate with blogs and Web sites is somewhat higher than with more traditional media, mostly because there are so many more online outlets that more are looking for news to report. So don’t hesitate. Make your list and get pitching!
Another avenue is to establish your own blog. This has the obvious advantage of being a non-competitive medium. You can always feature news about your project if you wish. It also eliminates the step of pitching the blog and trying to convince the blogger that your message is worthy of mention. It’s like owning your own newspaper, radio station, or TV network—but on a somewhat smaller scale, of course.
In this case, the trickier part of the task is attracting readers to your blog. You’ve already gotten the medium to accept your message—you are the medium. Now, you have to ensure that people will read the message and, more than that, make certain that the people you need for your business will make it a habit to read your information every day.
One of the ways I’ve skirted this particular issue with my business is to establish the Levine Breaking News (LBN) e-lert, which I’ll discuss shortly. This is an attempt (and I think a pretty successful one) to reach the people I’m trying to reach online, but in a targeted fashion. Sending the news as an e-mail means the people I’m reaching get the message whether they look for it or not, because I cut out their responsibility to look for it by delivering it directly. It’s fast and efficient, but it also runs the risk of being seen as an annoying e-mail that gets trashed on first sight if I don’t deliver the goods. It keeps me on my toes every day, finding news items that my subscribers will find interesting and relevant.
You might try that tactic, or you might be more interested in placing your information with an existing blog. But if you want to start your own blog, it’s simple enough: just follow the instructions at Blogspot.com or Typepad.com or one of the many other blog sites, pay the annual fee (which varies), and you can be up and running in no time.
This is advisable for an ongoing business concern or a person who is going to be seeking public attention on a regular basis, like an actor, author, business owner, or candidate for office. But for those who are using Guerrilla P.R. for a onetime event, a finite project and only that, it is not advisable to start a blog of your own. By the time you’ve established a readership that could help you, your reason for blogging will be past, and you will probabl
y shut down the site. It’s counterproductive.
If you are an ongoing concern and decide to start a blog, try it out for a while before you “go live” to the Web. See if you have enough news on a regular (preferably daily) basis to keep the site refreshed and the information current. Once readers start visiting a blog, they want to see something new on a frequent basis, or they’ll conclude you’ve moved on, or aren’t a very astute reporter to begin with.
See how you like it. If finding something to write about every day is difficult, think about inviting others to blog with you. Split the responsibility with one or more people who might have interesting things to say that won’t negate your message. You don’t want to ask someone with whom you violently disagree to share your blog—unless that’s the point/counterpoint.
Then, you have to publicize the blog in addition to your business or project. It won’t do you any good if you report news daily and nobody is reading it. Join listservs that have interest in your business or area. Mention your blog (but join the discussion as well—nothing annoys list members more than people who are there only to promote themselves) and what is being discussed there. Include the Web address, so people can find it with one click.
Also, send out e-mails to your regular list announcing the launch of the blog and explaining what you plan to discuss. Again, include the URL. In fact, make it part of the standard signature you use for all e-mails, so anyone who’s interested can find your blog very, very easily.
Keep your blog current. Update it as often as you can (as often as you have something new to say). Don’t always make it about you; add newsy items that have something to do with your field in general—things that people who read your blog would find enlightening or amusing. And then, there’s the concept of links.
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