HARO: Help a reporter, help yourself
Speaking of P.R. opportunities, Peter Shankman, one of your cooler P.R. people on the planet (he sky-dives! he runs marathons! he's not a tool!), runs one of your cooler mailing lists around.
It's called "Help a Reporter Out"--or, "HARO", for short--and quite simply, it exists to match journalists with the people they need to help tell their stories. Originally developed as a more efficient way to help out his many reporter friends who were always emailing him for sources, HARO moved from its original home on Facebook when the group (quickly) reached the service's 500-person limit.
Now he's approaching a membership of 10,000 with his free, thrice-daily mailings. They're brief, well-organized and the intros are almost always amusing.
You can sign up for the list here (or, if you're a journalist, you can sign up here). The only rules are that you ONLY reply to stories you are absolutely qualified for. Failure to do so will get you banned, no questions asked.
I've already submitted one item that may run in SELF magazine; even when there's nothing there for me (which is most of the time), I sometimes see something that a friend or colleague may be able to answer, and forward it (along with the warning, of course!)
I just discovered that through Biznik this morning, and I love it! Haven't found anything I'd be a good fit for yet, but found two separate opportunities that I forwarded to friends. I'm looking at it as a good networking opportunity as much as it is PR opportunity. Rather than hogging them all for myself, I keep an eye out for opps that might fit some of my prospects and pop them along.
Posted by: Dani Nordin | May 28, 2008 at 11:30 PM
Colleen, this is great. Thank you for posting it. This sounds similar to a group I just heard about on Google or Yahoo Groups. They are art directors and art buyers who refer artists to each other when they cannot find anyone in their personal files. What the name of the group is or how they are operating is still unknown to me. But it's a great way to network and help out trusted colleagues.
Posted by: Melissa Kojima | May 29, 2008 at 11:31 AM
Dani - It's great, isn't it? Kinda genius. And yeah, I like it as much for the "pass-along karma" as anything.
Melissa - My pleasure! One of Peter's goals is to get 10,000 people on the list (b/c with these things definitely, the more, the better.) He's going to post a video of him dancing a jig once he hits the number!
Hadn't heard about that particular art director/buyer group, but we do a lot of that on KERNSPIRACY (http://kernspiracy.com), a designer's email list run by L.A. designer Spencer Cross. Lots of locals on the list, but also more & more out-of-towners--feel free to check that out and pass along.
Posted by: Colleen Wainwright | May 29, 2008 at 12:41 PM
Pretty clever stuff!
My only drawback is this PR stuff is labor intensive for a small biz owner like myself, so I'd compromise and go with a pay-per-placement agency like Publicity Guaranteed
Posted by: Dan | February 05, 2009 at 05:22 PM