It is truly incredible what a professional public relations firm can do for you. I have worked with several in the past and the good ones can really make things happen. It is dream of mine someday to have my own publicist, but I suppose I should strive to be a bit more accomplished first (although that might be unnecessary if the publicist was good enough).

To the extent that you are your own publicist as well, I ran across a free press release distribution service today that might be of use to us. i-Newswire will distribute your news on a variety of news bureaus and the like for free (or you can pay, of course, for more and better services).

This site was featured in a strange news story about a 15 year old boy who wrote up a fake press release about being hired at Google ("the company's youngest employee ever" the press release reported). He did it as a joke and it was picked up by thousands of outlets and caused quite a stink. So, I figure if it will work for bad news, it might work for us, too!

When you are writing your release, keep in mind a fun technique that my friend Tamara Greenleaf used in a release for a Web conference whose headline boldly announced that "Steve Jobs will not be the keynote at this year's event." The completely true headline sent all the web spiders and Apple-afficianios into a tizzy and got them a lot of great publicity. Brilliant!

If these releases should teach us anything it is that we should pepper our news releases with key words that will broaden its appeal. You can test out some words by looking at search trends at Google Trends (look at me peppering this blog post with several mentions of Google...oops, I did it again!)

Some body please try this and let the rest of us know how it worked. In the meantime, I'll be working on doing something newsworthy!