• The 60-Second PR Pitch
• Upgraded Media Calendars Service
• Corporate Blogging: Lessons, Opportunities & Pitfalls
• Searching Video Clips on Video Sharing Websites
• Favorite YouTube Videos
• PR Bashing and Why Not to Hate PR People
• New Rules for Creating Publicity
• Search Engines Beyond Google: 119 Research & Placement Resources
• 2008 PR Grants for Not-for-Profit Organizations
• PR Job Openings / Marketing Positions
• End of Year Promotion: Save Now on Media Monitoring Services
• Best of Previous Issues

What's the best way to structure the so-called 60-second pitch?

In an article for PR Crossing, Jeff Cannon of TheCannonGroup contends it's not hard generating story ideas to pitch to the press. What's hard is figuring out how to shape the story so that reporters and editors will want to publish it. He offers a five-part formula for making a successful 60-second pitch.

Michael Hauge offers The Eight Steps to Powerful Pitches for writers trying to sell screenplays and novels. Most of the principles are applicable to PR pitches to editors. And if you want even more, here's 18 pages worth of Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds.

A Business Week article entitled The 60-Second Pitch, targeted at entrepreneurs looking for venture capital, contains insights that can be applied equally well by PR professionals pitching story ideas.

Inc.com tells how a medical supply sales person promises a 60-Second Sales Pitch, places his watch in front of the prospect to prove it, and closes the deal 90% of the time.

Finally, here's a creative 60-Second Video Pitch on YouTube by a business coach.

A F.R.E.E. Trial of a new editorial calendars service is available to PR and marketing professionals.

The new CyberAlert Edcals is a comprehensive, up-to-date, easy-to-use, and low cost editorial calendars service for use by public relations (PR) professionals and media planners in researching media placement opportunities.

The CyberAlert EdCals online database includes the media calendars of over 6,000 media sources in the U.S. and Canada including newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, and online publishers. As a upgrade of the established media calendars service, the CyberAlert EdCals editorial calendar database contains over 300,000 media opportunities for story placement for the remainder of 2007 and into the first half of 2008.

Marc Andreessen, creator of the Netscape browser, admits he was late to the blogging party and writes about Eleven Lessons Learned about Blogging, So Far.

A lengthy report (that takes forever to download) from the IBM Center for the Business of Government and Southeastern Louisiana University entitled The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 analyzes the impact of blogs in the public sector with ten tips that are equally applicable to private sector (e.g. corporate) blogs.

Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere: Advice From Established Bloggers, a lengthy analysis from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, extols on the opportunities and benefits of corporate blogging.

An earlier edition of Media Monitoring News offered 8 Tips for Planning a Successful Business Blog and 9 Tips for Implementing a Successful Business Blog.

Katie Paine, the queen bee of PR measurement, writes a Quick & Easy Guide to Measuring Social Media, (a.k.a. blogs, Facebook) including 17 metrics you can use to gauge your success in corporations and other organizations.

If you want to monitor, track and clip blogs for mentions of your corporate or brand names, you might be interested in the BlogSquirrel Blog Monitoring Service which automatically "reads" 5 million blog postings each day in 25+ million blogs worldwide - and each day delivers clips of all new mentions of your key words.

Is Your Blog Leaking Secrets? analyzes how employee-created blogs and social networking by employees can reveal confidential, sensitive, or private personal information - and offers suggestions on how to prevent data leaks through a combination of policy, training and technology.

Blogging has become a veritable landmine of legal issues and Aviva Directory presents 12 Important Laws Every U.S. Blogger Needs to Know.

Finally, here's a Linked List of Blogs on PR and Marketing.

CyberAlert this week announced the launch of CyberAlert VDO, the first subscription service that searches and monitors consumer-generated videos posted on video sharing websites. The new video monitoring service also tracks news videos posted to online news sources.

The new CyberAlert VDO services automatically monitors 200+ online video sharing and news sites for mentions of key words in video clips, searching and tracking over 500,000 new video posts each day including video news clips, TV clips, movie clips, music videos and consumer-generated videos. The service provides same day or next day delivery of newly-posted video clips.

With the rapid growth of video sharing sites, the new service is expected to be used by corporate communications and business intelligence professionals to gather market intelligence about companies and brands, to protect corporate and brand reputation and to measure public relations and viral marketing programs.

Corporations, government agencies and not-for-profit organizations can order a 14-Day No-Risk F.r.e.e. Trial of CyberAlert VDO and other CyberAlert media monitoring services.

If you like both classical & rock music, you'll love this virtuoso electric guitar performance of Pacibel Canon on YouTube.

Video sharing sites like YouTube provide high-viewership outlets for "how to" videos such as the slick Google Maps or the basic How to Power a TV Using a AAA Battery or the commercial How to Remove Permanent Marker.

In a rant combining a bit of PR bashing with helpful advice, Lou Taverna of 1st Hospitality magazine offers Ten Commandments of Media/Press/News Release Submittals for the Online World.

Denny Hatch of Business Common Sense rips the "PR Valley Girl" in Specifics Sell. Generalities Don't. And People Love to Be Sold, offering an example of the wrong "generalities pitch" for a media placement that omitted the "specifics that sell."

To counter the recent PR bashing from Chris Anderson and Robert Scoble, Linda VandeVrede in the PR Valley Blog, wrote the Top 10 Reasons Not to Hate PR People - the best of which is that they're not lawyers — who get thoroughly bashed by the venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki in The Top Ten (Sixteen) Lies of Lawyers to their corporate clients.

The Internet has changed the rules for creating publicity and distributing news releases. David Meerman Scott expounds on The New Rules of PR: How to Create a Press Release Strategy for Reaching Buyers Directly. (Of course, if you're distributing news directly to consumers, then the document you create is more properly termed a "news release", not a "press release.") One of the now invalid "old rules": issue a news release only when you have real news. Many other "old rules" likewise no longer apply in the new world of online content distribution. A PR must read!

Need to fact check an article? Or dig out some market intelligence? Google and Wikipedia not producing the information you need? The Online Education Data Base has a list of 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources to help you search like an expert research librarian on virtually any topic in specialized and government databases.

For the fifth consecutive year, CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com) the online media monitoring company, will award a minimum of 10 public relations grants to not-for-profit organizations. Each grant consists of one full year of free news monitoring / press clipping services, ranging in value from $2,700 to $3,900. In the previous four years, CyberAlert has awarded 73 grants, including 24 grants in 2007, with a cumulative value of over $225,000.

All not-for-profit, educational and charitable organizations in the United States and Canada are eligible to apply for the grants, except previous grant recipients. CyberAlert is accepting grant applications until December 31 and will announce the grant recipients in January. More information and a simple and secure grant application is available online at https://secure.cyberalert.com/grantsX.html.

The listing for this issue includes 14 PR job openings and 14 marketing positions - with detailed job descriptions for each. Readers are invited to submit job postings to jobpostings@cyberalert.com.

Public Relations Positions
Manager of Public Relations - Structural Graphics
Senior Account Executive - Off Madison Ave
Communications Trainer - Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
Account Executive - Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
Account Director - Mindshare Interactive Campaign
Associate Developer - Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
Engineer - Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
Head, Global Public Relations - CFA Institute
VP Media - Stowe Company
PR Manager - Working Assets
SVP, Account Director, Public Relations - ARS
PR Supervisor - R&R Partners
PR Manager - KidsPeace
Junior Account Executive - Bragman Nyman Cafarelli

Marketing Positions
Customer Marketing Manager - Susan Harris & Associates
Manager E-marketing - March of Dimes
Web Marketing Manager - Harvard Business School Publishing
Manager, Media Program - The National Campaign
Account Supervisor, Corporate Communications - Edelman Public Relations
Operations/Production Manager - Weber Shandwick WCTV
Online Marketing Manager - DomainIT Inc
Marketing Specialist - SumTotalSystems
Director Marketing Communications - Symmetricom
Web Developer - Brown Shoe Company
Marketing Visiting Program Coordinator - University of Illinois at Chicago
Marketing Manager - Bomgar
Vertical Market Manager - Belden
Director of Network Marketing - Madison Square Garden

CyberAlert is offering new and existing customers a special end of year discount: buy one and get 50% off any other media monitoring service. Anyone ordering CyberAlert 4.0 online news monitoring service will receive 50% off any additional media monitoring service including CyberAlert TV, Netpinions, BlogSquirrel, and CyberAlert VDO. There are additional discounts when ordering three or more services together. Try all the services for 14-Days at absolutely no cost or call 800-461-7353 for more information and a price quote.

The Biggest Mistakes in Crisis Communications
Low Cost / No Cost PR News Release Distribution Services
Press Releases to Drive Web Site Traffic