Without question it must be really nice to be Oprah Winfrey. After all who truly reach the heights to have an annual show appearance that becomes the holiday season biggest rave and be able to give away millions of dollars in prizes to the audience? This year’s Oprah’s Favorite Things show for 2007 give away over 2 million dollars in prizes to the audience, awarding over 300 audience members prizes worth over $7,247.33 a person.

Oprah typically selects 20 companies and products to feature during her favorite things show. What about the other hundreds of millions of other companies and products out there? They can generally wait another hundred million years to make the list or turn the hype from Oprah’s Favorite Things show into their own publicity campaign. This theory proves to be a sure bet for success as Oprah even selected her very own book to appear on Oprah’s Favorite Things as her #19 pick – O’s Guide To Life. No wonders how this will impact her book sales?

The first thing is to understand the hype surrounding Oprah and the power her name carries in the media. Oprah’s Favorite Things show is an instant boost to the economy and for the lucky 20 companies selected a mega revenue surge. Just knowing this information you would think that most companies would kick down doors to be apart of this publicity. However, few take advantage of this golden opportunity to increase brand awareness or revenue earnings.

Publicity tips to capitalize from the hype of Oprah’s Favorite Things:

1. Item Category – Review Oprah’s Favorite Things and search for a product that is in your same category. Highlight features and benefits that make your product standout.

2. Promote Category Selection – Prepare a media release about Oprah’s Favorite Things selecting your product category. Tell what makes your product’s features and benefits standout. If possible reveal customer testimonials, experiences etc.

Here is how a good sample header would appear:

Oprah’s Favorite Things Wows Audience With Body Butter

XYZ Company offers a wide selection of body butter including the same scent selected on Oprah’s Favorite Things list with all 100% pure and natural elements.

3. Next Year’s Campaign – Now is an excellent time to start campaigning to make Oprah’s Favorite Things list for 2008. Pitch Oprah’s producers on how you started your business, if you borrowed a loan from your father-in-law or took on a second job stress those points. Let them know about your struggles to success. Tell them why your product should be featured on Oprah’s Favorite Things for 2008. Don’t forget to include product samples and customer testimonials.

4. Target Similar Lists – There are thousands of other media resources that are searching for holiday products to highlight. Often many of them trend themselves after Oprah’s Favorite Things and looking for similar products or bigger better ideas to top Oprah’s list. A good start would be to target holiday gift guides, magazines, newspapers, etc. Contact your local area newspapers, radio stations, talk shows etc. Often times you can create a local buzz and turn it into national news.

5. Christmas In July – July is the ultimate time to target publications for December, which Christmas features most often need six months plus. Present your pitch why your product is a favorite things holiday gift idea.

Utilizing the publicity power of Oprah’s Favorite Things is a great strategy to increase brand awareness. This is the golden opportunity to take rejection and turn it into something positive. The power of the O factor is limitless.

“CR” Cataunya Ransom is the Co-founder of Mosnar Communications, INC. She developed a niche for Luxury PR & Global Marketing. Guiding clients on how to brand, market, and promote luxury products, events, and services. Highly respected as a luxury public relations expert! “CR” consults clients and speaks to audiences about luxury public relations and global marketing practices. Visit “CR” at this site

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It is an obvious truth that 90 percent of consumers make use of search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN etc to find what they are looking for. This means that when they enter the name of a particular product, service or brand, you hope that your company website or a positive review about your company ranks at least on the top search results page. In more ways than one, the search engine page is a barometer of the success of your enterprise. It is not just about a company but about an individual too. Everyone likes good things to be written about them, don’t they?

The flip side to this whole thing is that is not possible to have a control on what people write in various blogs and article directories. Apart from the consumers, what appears about the company on the search engine listing can affect your potential clients, employees and even prospective candidates who are on the look-out for a job. In order to thwart or stop the negative information, you need to exercise Online Reputation Management (ORM).

Online Reputation Management or ORM is a healthy amalgamation of PR skills with search engine optimization. Smart PR skills meet with technical prowess to form Online Reputation Management. When you get top rankings on a search engine page thanks to smart optimization and good informative content and publicity, you will be able to push the negative publicity and negative review down and away from the first two page listings of the search engine. Soon, they will go away from public view and people will focus on the good news It is important to know that an online surfer on search for information will not look more than the first two pages of search engine results.

Things like positive reviews, case studies, testimonials, and press releases are not optimized properly in the company website page. This is the main reason why they fail to come on the top search results page. Thus it is important to write more of product or service friendly content and also answer all kinds of queries, doubts and negative information spread by people. The more search engine friendly content you have, the higher is the probability of getting a high ranking on the search engine results page. Pay special emphasis to keyword rich content, but at the same time make the content interesting, informative and relevant. When you optimize your pages well, the search engine pick them up easily and are picked up quickly by search engines. When you have a dominating web presence, and knock down all the negative clutter about your company from the first two search engine results page, you are said to be efficient and effective in your online reputation management expertise.

V.S.ARUNRAJ believes that blogs can make or mar a brand. Read more about the importance of corporate blogging

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Tags: pr, communications, online, skill, information

Many entrepreneurs suffer from inability to grasp the importance of publicity. If you aren’t letting people know about your accomplishments, especially the media, you’re making a big mistake. The good news is, you can change the way you approach publicity and it can actually be fun. To increase your business success, you want to be in the public eye.

Publicity comes in many forms and it has been said that free publicity is the most valuable. Free publicity is valuable because it is often more convincing than advertising. People believe a news story more readily than they believe an advertisement. The perception is that you must be doing something right if your products or services are featured in the news.

Free publicity is generated by newsworthy business activities your business is associated with, the type of activities that great news stories are born from.

Paid publicity is advertising where you’ve paid a price to get your message out and have full control of the message. This generally occurs through traditional media placement and sponsorship opportunities.

Publicity — especially free publicity — is subjective because we really have no concrete way of knowing what will be deemed newsworthy. There is no clear cut answer as to what will spark definite interest. But, your information must be newsworthy. So, it’s important to understand the meaning of news.

News, by definition, is previously unknown information.

Oftentimes businesses do some really great things and they either don’t believe they’re newsworthy or they haven’t looked at operations from an objective view to determine if there could be a story to tell.

Joan Stewart, also known internationally as The Publicity Hound, shares some advice. “The most important thing that a small business person can do if they want publicity is to make the media’s job easy. That means writing short, compelling, newsworthy press releases. It means giving them story ideas relevant to their target audience. It means inviting them to call on you for story ideas, background, commentary and anything else they need.”

You’ll want to get some exposure in the local, if not national, media.

Remember, it’s your job to tell the media what you’re doing. They are not going to seek you out unless they know you’re doing something interesting. On the other hand, you don’t want to contact the media about something that really is of interest to only you and few select family members. Remember, news is subjective but it needs to have a broad appeal.

I have observed many businesses over the years who feel like it’s the media or reporters job to seek them out. While reporters do deliver the news and they sometimes do investigative research to find that news, you’ll have better odds of coverage if you do your part.

Are you telling your story? Is it newsworthy?

This article may be reproduced in it’s entirety with the following inclusion: Lisa Manyon specializes in POWERFULLY communicating business messages to get results. Her work has been featured by the National Association of Women Writers and her article Nine Ways to Network More Effectively is slated to appear in Bob Bly’s upcoming networking guide. Manyon acted as a team leader for Lorrie Morgan – Ferrero’s Red Hot Copywriting Bootcamp. Manyon’s eBook is now available and you can learn more here.

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Tags: publicity, news, newsworthy, information, pr