Easier.com is a news site of press releases. A great place to read examples.

Want to learn how to write a press release?

Quick tip: visit Easier.com.

It’s a news site solely made up of press releases. Whilst each press release does go through a light editorial process, the team behind the website do not write anything themselves (as far as I’m aware).

However, this does not mean press releases on here are necessarily good! Best practice is to find one you think is interesting, and copy some text to see if it got picked up anywhere else.

Read more

• What makes a good story?
• How to find journalist contact details
• Goodbye SEO, Hello Content

What does Tyrion from Game of Thrones and small companies have in common? They’re, well, small. But what does Tyrion do extremely well that small companies ought to? He watches his enemies closely and employs spies to understand their relationships.

Duedil is a free tool you need to try. Type in a company name. Read their financials. Learn who owns what. Look at the relationships between companies:

Become Tyrion and understand exactly what’s going on in your market. Is your competitor hiring or firing? Does your investor have interests in other companies too? How big is your market? Who just bought who?

Use it for research, use it to inform strategies, use it to win.

After all, this is a game of thrones.

Media Coverage of Game of Thrones (May 2012 – Apr 2013)

Google is experimenting with the future of advertising. It’s created Art, Copy & Code, a series of experiments with brands such as Volkswagen and Adidas. It’s worth watching the videos below to get an insight:

Press Association is a press agency. They find, write, and sell stories. A good place to go to learn what makes a good one.

Do you want to anger a journalist and have them slag you off or worse, ignore you? No. So don’t send them a shabby email in desperate hope of getting coverage. Understand this: most journalists don’t want to know about your product or company. And they certainly don’t want to know about you. Most journalists want stories. And that’s what you give them.

How? Learn what makes a story. Surprisingly, to some, it isn’t their product, business, or personality. Good stories make people excited, angry or sad. Does your product, business, or personality do that? Probably not. But you can create a story and be attached to that.

I’m going to tell you a way to learn what makes a good story. Read news published by press agencies.

Press agencies are companies that find news, write them up, and then sell them to the major media outlets. Because they sell them, they are more picky than media outlets themselves. Stories published by press agencies are examples of what makes a particularly good story. Therefore, we can learn from them.

Normally, you have to be a registered journalist to see the stories written and shared by press agencies on what they call the ‘news wire’. But a little trick is to take a look at their Twitter feeds. Most of the links shared are their own articles that they have sold to media outlets.

Learn what makes a good story by reading articles from the Twitter feeds of some press agencies below:

Summly

Public Relations (PR) helps start-ups grow. But how much? I speak with many entrepreneurs and start-up businesses who say they are unsure what PR can do for them. It sounds wishy-washy. Social media is the fast track to success, right? Wrong.

I have written a case study showing the effects of successful PR. The company is Summly. Summly was an application launched in 2011, sold to Yahoo! 19 months later for £18 million. Summly has been downloaded over 500,000 times and this case study looks at the PR efforts which helped make that happen.

Download it, share it, and let me know your thoughts!

Fakers @ Status People is a tool to help. It lets you see how many fake Twitter followers someone has:

How to use Fakers to find out how many fake Twitter followers someone has

1. Sign in for free with your Twitter account

Click ‘Connect to Twitter’ to sign up for free

2. Click to authorise Fakers to login with your Twitter details

‘Authorise app’ to login to Fakers using your Twitter account. No Tweets shall be sent from your profile.

3. Wait as Fakers scans your own Twitter account to see how many fake followers you have

Watch a pretty blue spiral spin as Fakers calculates how many fake profiles you have following your Twitter account

4. Either sulk or celebrate your score

If you have a good score, share it to show off and boost credibility with your followers

5. Try someone else’s Twitter profile

Take a look at some other Twitter profiles – maybe people you follow or tend to recommend. Are they who they say they are?

Future of social media influence scores

Future social media influence scores such as Klout may take fake followers into account. There’s no reason why Fakers cannot share their APIs with third-party applications and make their fake-scanning technology available for all.

What does this mean?

Being found to have fake Twitter followers tinges your reputation. For example, Tim Ferriss above has 11% fake followers – that’s over 44,000 profiles.

Yet before rushing to judge, this does not mean he, or anyone else with a similar score, added these themselves. To look legitimate fake Twitter profiles follow real people. They also use computer bots to re-tweet real Twitter users. If a fake Twitter profile is trying to look like they’re interested in outsourcing, book publishing and lifestyle design, it’s only normal that they’d follow someone like Tim Ferriss who is an author on all those subjects.

Should I, or should I not buy fake Twitter followers?

Large Twitter followings do give instant credibility to onlookers, but not influence. You’ll be Tweeting to a wall. Best Twitter practice is to find real and relevant Twitter users and build your following slowly over time (read my eBook, Tom’s Twitter Blueprint).

I’ve bought thousands of fake followers, what should I do?

If you’ve already bought thousands of fake followers and want to reduce your risk of being caught out and receiving negative publicity, there are a number of options you can do:

1. Confess – Write a blog post outlining exactly what you did and why – you were experimenting with digital marketing to see what would happen. Describe the results (if they’re positive i.e. drove organic growth, then you were smart and it’s a win for you. If they’re negative and nothing happened, then say you’ve stopped and are sharing the insight to others – a win for you.) Now, if anyone does raise the fact, you can point them to your blog post and show them that it’s old news.

2. Reduce the proportion – Win real Twitter followers quickly by advertising on Twitter, engaging in popular #hashtag conversations and conducting large quantities of legitimate Twitter action.

3. Block your followers – You can block your fake followers (follow WikiHow instructions) one at a time. This might take a while.

4. Delete your account – Delete your Twitter account and start again.

The Guardian Witness is a new platform from The Guardian (monthly online visitors: 77,931,138) opening journalism to the world. News, photographs, videos and comments are submitted by the public, or ‘contributors’ to a dozen ‘assignments’.

Assignments are given on the home page, inviting contributors to respond to the brief. For example:

Guardian Witness invites London Marathon runners to talk about who they’re supporting

Contributions include photographs, one liners and videos:

You can see here that Adam in the video above is running for Children with Cancer UK – a cause for which he has gained free publicity and raised its awareness by creating this 30 second video and submitting it to Guardian Witness.

Whilst you cannot simply publish anything i.e. it’s not a PR free-for-all, and it does seem submissions are reviewed before they go live, Guardian Witness is an opportunity to get some press coverage.

Some PR associates of mine, for instance, submitted photos of The Shard in London to the assignment Views Of Tall Buildings (they manage the reputation of The Shard and try to increase footfall to the area).

Indirect contributions may also be beneficial to your business. You do not have to say the name of your company to raise awareness of it. For instance, say you’re a pharmacist commenting on national health service reforms, and you put forth the argument that pharmacists have a greater role to play – this could still drive awareness to your business without saying the company name.

Guardian Witness is an opportunity for startups, entrepreneurs, SMEs, sole traders and joe the plumber to be smart and get some free press coverage. It may even be possible to media hack it and submit an assignment idea that gets chosen for you to answer yourself.

And it’s more than likely that popular assignments with good contributors will make it into the main Guardian site and paper.

Doing only one thing each day increases productivity, satisfaction, self-awareness and lowers stress

Doing one thing at a time helps productivity and stress

For the last three months I’ve been measuring my productivity and stress levels against the number of goals and tasks set. The results showed an inverse relationship between them.

• Each new task or goal set increased stress by a factor of 1.4
• Productivity (the time taken to complete a task) decreased by 11% for each extra task added to the list

More goals equals more stress and less productivity. Interestingly, I also felt that I achieved less, despite doing more. Having multiple tasks to complete at once led to me feeling each was unsatisfactorily finished.

Self-awareness was also measured. After each day, my to-do list was destroyed. After seven days, I then had to re-count what I had achieved on that particular day. As tasks and goals increase, memories lapse and many times I could not remember at all what was completed.

The most satisfactory days with a 100% self-awareness score were those with only one goal or task

For example,

• Painted doors in flat
• Qatar market research (for work)
• Flew a plane
• Held PR workshop
• Made Banoffee Pie

Yes, on a Sunday my only goal was to make the best Banoffee Pie mankind had ever tasted.

Daily work tasks were also tested. As expected, longer todo lists increase stress – but they also decrease productivity and accuracy. As you work on one task, you’re thinking about the other and constantly switch between them, wasting time.

Furthermore, the more life goals I had outside of work led to less satisfaction and productivity all round. For instance, there was a particular week where I was especially busy at work, and I had set myself the goals of daily exercise, meetings with startups during and after work, consulting individuals with PR, writing blog posts and progressing things with a certain Italian girl.

This was simply too much, and results showed I only completed two-thirds of the goals, productivity fell by 18%, stress more than tripled and satisfaction fell into the pits.

How to measure goals, tasks, productivity, stress, satisfaction and self-awareness

• 42Goals –  Web-based task-tracker where you can also record scales i.e. from one-to-ten choose…
• Lift - iPhone application to help achieve goals, track progress and receive automated reminders
• RescueTime – Monitor productivity on the computer
• iHealth - Measure blood pressure and store health data on Evernote (indicator of stress)

Stress, satisfaction and self-awareness are qualitative measures (although blood pressure is one quantitative metric) and here are the questions I asked to measure them:

Stress

At 6pm each day, I asked the following questions to myself:

• Would I rather listen to: Dance music (0 stress points), Jazz music (1 stress point), no music (2 stress points)
• If I were invited out tonight, which would I prefer: Nightclub (0 stress points), Wine bar (1 stress point), no where (2 stress points)

Satisfaction

On a scale of 1-to-10, with 1 being not at all satisfied, and 10 being I’m bloody proud of myself, how do I rate each task completed?

Self-awareness

At the end of the day, I would destroy my to-do list but write down the number of goals completed. Seven days later, I’d try to remember as many as possible. If I didn’t remember the total number, it was a negative self-awareness score.

Learnings

Less is more. Do one thing at a time and do it well. Don’t delay tasks, delete them. Create another goal only when the first one is finished. If more tasks come in, finish them immediately so you can return to your main goal. Remove all distractions. Big life goals (like flying a plane) are more satisfactory than smaller daily routines e.g. exercising. Outsource chores. Always have one life goal and one work goal to keep moving. Monitoring productivity is not being productive. Make change where necessary. Ask others to do things.

Journalisted is a search engine for journalists

Search the name of the journalist and any matches are returned. Once you click through, it’ll show you profile information such as recent articles, biography and contact details (where possible).

You can see how many articles the journalist wrote across the year with other information such as word counts

Recent articles from the journalist is displayed, alongside a biography and contact information

Knowing how to contact journalists is important. What Journalisted won’t do however, is show you which journalists to contact – that’s for you to research.

You can decide which journalists to contact by reading relevant articles to your business. Whether it’s in the national papers, a weekly magazine or blog, note the journalist’s name and try finding their details on Journalisted.

Over time, you should create a ‘media list’; a top group of journalists that you know are relevant to you, and could potentially be people you can go to when you want to start achieving some press coverage.

1. Apple TV 2
2. AirParrot (works with Mac and Windows)
3. HippoRemote

Projectors are becoming a thing of the past and are now being replaced by 110-inch TVs. Presenting on these are a slightly different ball game, but with these tools, you can be a pro:

Apple TV 2

A little black box that plugs into the back of your TV, it costs between £50-£99 (second or first hand) and will enable you to wirelessly display whatever’s on your new Apple laptop, iPad (3+) or iPhone (5+) natively. If you don’t have any of those new and shiny devices, you can still use it in conjunction with the following:

AirParrot

AirParrot is a nifty bit of software ($9.99) for Windows or Mac that can allow you to wirelessly share your laptop display with Apple TV 2. It doesn’t matter what computer you have, as long as your operating system is fairly up-to-date.

It’s fantastic for wirelessly showing a Powerpoint, or doing a live demo, but not perfect for videos i.e. there’s a bit of lag time and  videos stutter. Audio is automatically played through the TV too.

HippoRemote

HippoRemote is a free app for the iPhone that makes it a wireless touchpad for your Mac. In other words, your iPhone becomes your mouse. Buy the pro-version and you can get a keyboard too.

When playing a Powerpoint presentation on your TV, you can walk around the room with just your iPhone and click it to go to the next slide – no more crouching over a keyboard or getting a real mouse to work on the glass table!

The future meeting room

I think not… but interesting to watch anyway!