Expert Marketing Blog - Marketing - Page 36

While a sex tape is a good way to get media exposure for some; Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and alike - it's not the right way to get the type of media exposure to escalate your business's chance of being written about.

When I first started doing PR, I used to write a media release and fax it to a media outlet - all with varying results. The headline, like it is today, is worth it's weight in gold, and if you have a strong first paragraph, you may get that call back you have been waiting for.

That was soon followed up with 'pitching' on the telephone and depending on what mood the journalist was in or your ability to 'sell' a story to them, you either walked away with a published article or your press release was thrown in the trash can.

In 1998, the faxing part changed to emailing which was fantastic because it was a much faster and less tedious way of getting a media release out to journalists. It also was a much more environmentally friendly way to operate and allowed for changes to be made to ensure that each email sent out to a journalist was a one-to-one marketing piece rather than an everything to everyone, hit and miss style approach.

The lines blurred sometime in the last 10 years, but I don't know exactly when it happened.

Having started my first business at 25 years of age, specializing in technology marketing, I thought I had it all. A marketer who understood technology marketing and who could talk the talk which at that time seemed to be, the height of the dot com boom, the most lucrative marketing position one could hold.

Then of course, someone came along and started talking about company culture, and marketers took a turn to start embellishing the on-boarding process of new recruits, with a mixture of "people marketing" with "technology marketing" - and for a time, that was all the rage. It seemed to be the only thing people were talking about and marketers starting play a role in human resources, giving recruiters and in-house HR managers the tools to "sell their brands" like they were a front line sales executive needing to close the deal in order to reach their quotas.

There have been many lessons I have learned this year; some the easy way and some the hard way.

The past six months have been exhausting. It has tested me in ways that I never imagined possible and at the same time, made me realize a few things about myself that will help shape the person I am moving forward.

I have learned:

Everyone at some time in their lives has felt that their world has curved in. Things become heavy, dark and almost impossible to keep afloat - but there is light at the end of the tunnel, if only we all can see it.

It's how we handle these experiences of difficulties that show our real character and ability to be resilient in the face of adversity now and in the future.

The Wolf of Wall Street was in many people's opinions a celebration of the bad life - drugs, sex, expensive toys, opulent homes and super expensive suits.

As we watched on as Leonardo DiCaprio spruiked, "The way I look at it, their money was better off in my pocket," many of us couldn't believe that world existed quite like that. But it does. And it's right here on our doorstep too.