Thousands of businesses, organizations and even individuals want to bring attention to their products, services, causes, etc. This happens every day. However, only big corporations and rich individuals can afford to advertise. So, most entrepreneurs go the alternative route – they issue press releases by means of various forms of media. This may seem simple but it is a little more complicated than it sounds.

First of all, editors, publishers, producers and reporters receive at least hundreds of press releases daily along with other letters and requests. So, it is not surprising that as much as 97% of these releases never have any results.

You have to get the media’s attention if you want your press release to be published at all. How do you do that? Following are some steps that will help you:

1. Target your press release to specific publications
   
   Build a media outlet list. Don’t send out your press release to every publication you can think of. Make sure that the publications that you will choose are related to your press release (e.g. if you are marketing a new vitamin supplement, you shouldn’t send your press release to a publication about the latest technology.)
   
2. Target specific people
   
   Once you have a list of media outlets, find out who the key people are in these outlets. By checking their website, you can find out who deals with what your press release talks about (e.g. if your press release talks about easy DIY projects, you have to find out who is responsible for such a topic). If you cannot find a person who handles topics related to your press release, move on to another media outlet.
   
   An easier way to build this list of people would be to utilize Google News. Just type in keywords into the search box and you will find stories that are similar to your press release. Usually, the reporters’ names are published along with the story. Just list down the names and contact them through phone or you can check their email address from the publication’s website.
   
3. Build a database of all your contacts
   
   Once you’ve collected the names of the media outlets and the key people that you will contact, build a database with complete details such as first name, last name, publication, address, phone number and whether or not they have published a press release/story for you already.
   
4. Find out which tool you should use
   
   Once you’ve established your contacts, find out if you should send a complete press release, send a tips sheet or media alert. Different media outlets have different preferences. When you have that information, make sure that your press release will stand out. Make sure that your headline contains a compelling piece of information such as a statistic or fact.
   
5. Email key people
   
   Once you have the list of names of key people that you will contact, send them an email. But at this point you should make sure that you won’t trigger their SPAM filters. There are several words that set off SPAM filters such as:  free, “click here,” “click below,” text written in capital letters, etc. To help you find out if your press release contains words that will trigger these filters, you can use software like Aweber which will indicate which words you need to change or remove from your release.
   
6. Grab the editor’s attention at the start of your email
   
   With hundreds of email coming in, most editors, publishers, producers and reporters do not read everything all the way through. As stated earlier, your headline should contain compelling information – use statistics and/or facts.  Your email should be interesting enough to catch the editor’s attention after reading the first ten words. You should also address the person that you are sending the email to, by his/her full name.
   
7. Follow Up
   
   Within 48 hours of sending your press release, you have to call up every editor, publisher, producer or journalist that you sent your press release to. Determine whether your press release was received and whether the media has any interest in it.
   
   If your release gets little or no attention at all, do not be discouraged. Treat it as a learning experience. Ask them what kind of stories they want so that you will know how to tailor your next press release.

Just like any business relationship, if you establish a working rapport with people in media in addition to coming up with a great product (press release), it will not take long for media to choose you over other businesses or individuals vying for the same spot in the limelight.

These days, if somebody said, “I don’t have a blog, do you blog?” – he or she would probably be laughed at. Having a blog is practically having your online diary. A blog reflects the personality of its author – as this is usually the writer’s personal life experiences being published for all to see. In the beginning, blogging was seen by many of the older generation as a creative way of spending idle time by the younger generation. In fact, some see it as an inane activity.

Lately, however, blogging has proven to be a powerful tool for marketing. Bloggers generally talk about their personal experience and most of the time they mention products or services that they’ve used. They use their blogs to tell other people whether they’re happy with the product or not. This is why blogs are so attractive to search engines. When consumers want to know about a product or service, they look it up in the Internet.  Commentaries or reviews from different blogs are usually listed first.

Gone are the days when only the big corporations (having budgets for advertising) had exposure in media. According to Buzz Bruggeman, blogs have levelled the playing field between big and small companies. Today, many small companies get the word out about their product or service through reviews and commentaries of personal experiences of the consumers. Perhaps bloggers can be considered as small scale journalists. Because of the noise that these blogs are generating, bloggers, like editors and publishers, are now getting a lot of spam.

So, how can you generate a buzz on the blogosphere using your press release?

You can send your press release to these blogs but always keep in mind that these blogs are usually just hobbies of their writers. So, your release has to be more personal. How?

1. Communicate with the bloggers. Get to know them. Treat them as well as you would editors, publishers, producers and journalists.
2. Send a short email announcement instead of a full blown press release.
3. Attach pictures to your email to make your release more interesting.
4. If your story is interesting, you do not need to ask the bloggers to allow you to do the blogging on their blogs. After all, they blog because of something that they find interesting.
5. Give something exclusive to the bloggers – something that their readers can only get through their blog (e.g. freebies of the product, or free testing of an online service for the first 100 testers, etc.)
6. You don’t pay anything to send your emails. So, don’t limit yourself to the top 10 blogs. Go for the top 100 or top 500 blogs on the web.

Businesses today have a much better chance of being known. The Internet has made it easier to reach millions of people worldwide. Still, you have to establish a good working relationship with people like the bloggers who are almost always online.
Remember that the Internet can also be easily accessed by determined detractors of your company or product. But even if this happens, blogging can still come in handy since you can ask other consumers to share negative experiences that they might have had and you can solve all issues through discussions and suggestions to improve your product or service.

Press releases continue to be an area where marketers make many mistakes, when they could be a powerful publicity tool. That's we decided to revisit our post 7 Rules for Writing Powerful Press Releases in this video. Kate does a much better job of presenting the information than I could in print.

A Comcast customer sits down to watch 30 Rock and finds that her cable service is down. She tweets about her frustration, and within minutes gets a response from a Comcast representative who helps her fix the problem. A United Airlines passenger blogs about a horrendous customer service experience and 48 hours later is approached by the company to make amends. This is reputation management in the 21st Century, my friend.

Real time response (or close to it) is quickly becoming the de facto standard among businesses trying to maintain their image. To stay in the game, it's imperative you stay on top of your customers' needs and issues. But how do you handle the fire hydrant of information being almost constantly spewed out online? Enter our Sentiment Analysis tool rundown. This array of free tools will give you a competitive edge in your pursuit of successful online reputation management (ORM):

1. Technorati.com - Technorati is a blog search engine that indexes millions (according to them) blog post in real time. Search for keywords related to your business or brand to find out what people are saying about you in the blogosphere.
2. MonitorThis – Sparse and unpretentious, MonitorThis allows you to search for keywords and see the resulting feeds from 20 plus different search engines.
3. Monitter.com - Monitter is an aptly named, well, real-time monitor of Twitter, following up to three keywords at a time. Part of what makes this program so powerful is the ability to track keywords by zipcode. Maybe not so important for large corporations, but for small businesses, finding out what locals are saying about them on Twitter could revolutionize customer service.
4. Twitter Search - Another Twitter tool, this one from Twitter itself. Twitter Search allows you to see in real time everything being said about a keyword, link or user activity.
5. Twilert.com - If you don't have time to actively monitor Twitter, here's something a little less time intensive. Twilert sends you regular e-mail updates about the keywords you're following. You can choose the frequencies of these e-mails, with options ranging from daily to monthly.
6. Wholinkstome.com - Do you know who is linking to you? Well, this handy application will tell you. Wholinkstome provides backlink analysis and, according to them, doesn't rely on third-party data, but instead independently crawls the web checking out links. The program also provides anchor text reports, domain reports, and anchor URL reports.
7. Boardtracker.com - What kind of mention does your brand get amongst the discussion board chatter? Boardtracker will let you know! People like to vent in these types of settings, so staying abreast of forum threads is a handy tool indeed.
8. Socialmention.com – You’re keeping on top of Twitter, blogs and discussion boards. Now what about Facebook? Social Mention is there for you. It is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across social media applications, such as Facebook, FriendFeed, Digg, Flickr and YouTube. Great for getting a quick feel for the pulse of things.

These free online reputation management tools will help you sort through the buzz, chatter and general clamor of the Internet to focus in on your product, brand or business. And with that kind of price tag, even the smallest business can be more proactive about handling customer perceptions.