Gini Dietrich Archives - Page 2 of 3

Always Publish An E-Book, Too

06/27/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Self-publishing a book in whichever format comes first is a wonderfully tedious, exciting, disturbing, and mind-boggling experience. I know this to be true because I just did it — with many trials, tribs and nail-biting.

Today, I’m so pleased to present:

If you download the e-book, and find you just can’t live without the soft-cover to hold in your hand, you can get this .

There’s an entire system of pricing you have to consider when setting yours. Because I used a hybrid publisher, they get a portion of every sale and so does Amazon. Hopefully, your first book is an experiment in the discovery of the process and not a get-rich-quick scheme (‘cuz I hate to break it to ya, that ain’t gonna happen).

My Biggest Mistake

I was so hell bent on publishing the manuscript for the soft cover to debut mid-April at the that I neglected the e-book.

I was exhausted after writing the book, proofing, fixing, proofing, seeing comps, building a presentation deck, traveling, and ohmygosh where did the time go…that I put aside that e-book.

When I went to tackle it, apparently, I couldn’t add the hyperlinks to the hard copy template. Something about InDesign vs. Mobi files…?

So, I created a spreadsheet with 40 hyperlinks that needed to go into the document on a respective page on a respective line and for a respective word phrase.

After two weeks, I got a file to proof and check those 40 links, and then I got another file and then I got another file to check those 40 links. So, if your analytics shows me pinging your blog for two seconds, you’ll know why — Jon Buscall, Danny Brown, Dino Dogan, Gini Dietrich, Adam Toporek, The Jack, New England Multimedia, Ralph Dopping, Kaarina Dillabough, Laura Click, Erica Allison, Fire Pole Marketing, 12Most.com., Steamfeed, and others.

My Best Move

Embarking on self-publishing is a mine field. Just hook into any thread on a LinkedIn Group or Google+ Community oriented to the topic, and your head will spin. There are about 24 gazillion pieces of software you can use to publish, and if you’re just an author/content marketer as I am, you’ll drown choosing the right fork in the river.

That’s why using was the best move I made. As a hybrid publisher, they help you with any aspect of the self-publishing journey from proofing/editing, designing the layout and cover, publishing the e-book, adding a QR code, and printing the hard copy. It even has a storefront on its website featuring a variety of little known authors writing on a breadth of topics.

Interested in working with a publisher like this? Try them; see my interview right here. David Braughler is top dog in my book.

And, speaking of “my book,” Thank you, world, for waiting patiently as I schooled myself in the self-publishing arena. A special shout out to who ALWAYS supports, shares and ‘raderies moi and Roho, aka , for that awesome review of this book.

I Am App Challenged

06/26/2013 By Jayme Soulati

via soulati

Really cool bloggers write about really cool apps. They talk about how they use Scrivener (Gini Dietrich) and MarsEdit (Geoff Livingston) and Evernote (Susan Silver) and Trendspottr (Danny Brown) to automate, improve productivity, enhance performance, and any number of other awesome results-driven tasks.

I cringe in shame when I read these lists and tools and apps, for I am app challenged. I can’t get beyond the manual jotting down of headlines for blog posts or tearing out stories from the 37 periodicals that come to my office monthly or putting everything into my brain to organize. I was never a great Day Planner or Steven Covey organizer, although I love those binders with all sorts of ways to organize and anticipate the date your hair needs coloring.

I am a manual sort of girl, and I really wish I could automate and graduate to the app world.

What’s wrong with me?

Wait, I think I know…it’s all about time. Taking the time to learn how to use another app better than scratching the surface means I have to spend hours doing so. Those hours are critical for me for writing content, working on billable deliverables for clients, and trying to keep the work flowing.

How do people find the time to be an app maven?

I need to learn video production, podcasting, how to install plug ins on my sidebar, manage my blog’s API, and read everyone’s books.

Would learning an app really enhance my productivity? Yesterday, in a frantic search for a new tweet chat tool, I turned to OneQube, a product of Internet Media Labs. While the tweets got sent, the stream never loaded so I had to resort to HootSuite for my 90-minutes as guest of #ConnectChat by @ProfNet, and there was a delay significant enough to cause me distress.

Which apps do you really love and use every day? Convince me to see the light!

Old PR Plus New PR Equals Hybrid PR

06/04/2013 By Jayme Soulati

You know those hybrid cars that are more expensive because they run on electricity and fuel? Think about public relations…our profession is like a hybrid car, too. We run on different platforms to deliver mileage for a campaign. We blend a variety of marketing disciplines, just like fuel and electricity to produce.

On Spin Sucks June 3, Gini Dietrich wrote about the PR firm of the future. She’s seeking hybrid PR professionals to work with her team, and here are the criteria she’d like to see in that person:

Media and blogger relations
Content development
Content marketing
Workflow development and email marketing
On-page search engine optimization
Issues management
Client service
WordPress coding (bonus)

Old PR

Recently, I wrote a post right here about the blending of PR being its demise. In that post, which turned a few heads, I had a list of traditional PR and it looked like this:

Media Relations
Spokesperson Training
Message Mapping
Thought Leadership
Blogger Relations
Writing
Industry Analyst Relations
Investor Relations/Stakeholder Communications
Corporate Communications
Internal/Employee Communications
Events Planning/Execution
Community Outreach

Hybrid PR

Like Gini says, public relations folks need to be a bit of this and a bit of that to succeed in the new and blended frontier. We have to adopt more than just adeptness on the social channels. We have to jump into new and uncomfortable areas to ensure we’re innovating all the time.

You know what the problem is with public relations professionals? Too many of them want to stay pure and not change.

Here’s the rub – WE GET TO CHANGE! We’re in a profession that provides us with the gifts to re-invent, adopt new methods and offer a powerful combination of skills, expertise, and knowledge from content marketing, media relations, digital marketing, social media marketing, thought leadership, message mapping, industry analyst relations, investor relations, employee communications, special events, and so very much more.

I appreciate the word hybrid to describe what I offer. No wonder I’ve had such a challenge sharing succinctly about my services.

Jayme Soulati offers a breadth of public relations services featuring content, social and digital marketing.

Would that begin to describe what hybrid public relations looks like from your vantage point?

Customers At The Core

Regardless of what you offer, it’s really the customer who dictates what you pull out of the hat. If you’re not familiar yet with The ArcCompany, the Canadian upstart making inroads into huge insight, then you need to read this blog post or go find the truly provoking comments of Amy Tobin especially in her Sunday social justice post.

As you’re thinking of your customers, just for the fun of it, I’m going to end with another Gini list that helps define PR and the tactics that ought to be in use today. This is a list from Arment Dietrich; it’s “Some of the things we do” taken directly from this post, and if that’s not hybrid PR, nothing is!

Develop integrated offline and online marketing plans
Content development (white papers, videos, podcasts, blogs, eBooks, webinars)
Marketing that content we develop
Email marketing
On-page search engine optimization
Social media
Google+ authorship and authority
Online reputation management
Crisis communications planning and management
Employee communications
Social media policies
Media relations
Blogger relations
Monitor online conversations
Develop online audits
Community development and growth
Influencer relations
Word-of-mouth campaigns
Analyze data and web analytics

Today We Reflect And Celebrate

02/13/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Every year on this day exactly (told you my lucky number is 13), reflection is in the air. About what you say? Let me share:

Being In Business. My years as a solopreneur, agency owner, freelancer, dog walker and kid/house sitter have been the most rewarding for healthy spirit. I was working for myself. It was and is up to me how much money I can make and how hard I can work. Being accountable to yourself and whom you hire in business is heady stuff. It requires constant attention, thinking and action. Along the way, there are peeps to meet and relationships to build; there are even folks to care for. That’s what drives me, this being in business stuff. It doesn’t matter how one defines me; if I’m the one determining how money rolls in the door and buying my own health insurance and dropping pennies into a retirement plan, then I’m in business; bona fide.

Being A Single Mom By Choice (In Business). The path I took to motherhood is unlike most other women. It is rewarding and stressful and puts perspective on money-making like you wouldn’t believe. I’m no longer able to squeak by on a dog-walker wage; I have to earn the beau coup bucks for the kidlet. She lends a wonderful purpose to why I get up every day and work to the bone to rinse and repeat. There’s no other way to select the single-mother-by-choice (not without nice $$ luggage, mind you) than to be in business for self. Yet, I have never defined myself as “mother of kidlet;” my identity remains “Jayme Soulati and this is my daughter.”

Social Media. In 2008, I was a single mom in business in a dreary basement not in Chicago with zero friends and negative zero ability to go find them. I was seriously depressed with my place and then along came Twitter where I began to meet some astonishing new friends who Mark W. Schaefer summarized nicely about in his 1000 post yesterday. He and Jon Buscall and Jenn Whinnem were the earliest of my social media friends, soon followed by Erica Allison, Gini Dietrich, Danny Brown, and a boatload of others from the early Twitter banter days. Yes, Twitter was a nightly festival; it rocked with banter and #RockHot snark. I did 140 with peeps around the world, and I was whole again. Last year on this day I sat for hours in the morning thanking well wishers on Facebook; this year (just 365 later), I’m having to do that on Google+, text messages, Twitter, LinkedIn AND Facebook. It’s heady, celebratory and so amazing how Twitter (and social) changed my life.

Values. Twice in business in the last five months I made the choice to walk away from a client and leave money on the table. Prior, that was unheard of; I would take it on the chin, buck up and carry forth to earn the almighty dollar. Today, not so much. If it feels bad; if I find a lack of respect (the value that has risen to the top of late to my surprise), then I need to move along and overturn the stone elsewhere for the buried treasure. I thank you Peg Fitzpatrick for your gift Monday. The smiles that created on this face were day-long.

Opportunity. I kid you not when I tell you I feel like a kid…in a candy store! From a lowly PR peep in Chicago who got a chance at Manning, Selvage & Lee because I had researched the name of the managing director, James O. Ahtes, and the hiring VP, Dutton Morehouse, had never met a corn detassler, to a marketer, social media upstart (I can’t be an expert), professional blogger, and now digital marketer and self-published author to be…OMGosh…may I tell you the sky is the limit, please? And, will you believe me? It takes gumption, passion, and a zest for learning to keep on. Some made fun of me when I wrote this post on 50 Shades of Wiser as I had used that darn book title everyone loves to hate. Had anyone stopped to really read it, the theme there was about aging gracefully in this social media sector where maturity is a benefit and seasoned doesn’t mean salt.

Celebration. Today, I celebrate you. Each of you in this community and beyond who take time to comment and let me know you’re not lurking every day push me to excel and strive for the next innovation. You can see it happening, I know, and your patience as I churned through the steps to get here today is appreciated. Never one to jump in first, it takes me time to look at all the angles and find a way to carpe diem (the one thing I took away from advertising class at the University of Wisconsin) and DIY (which I’m trying not to do as much!). For all of you here who have contributed to where I’m at today, thank you. My wish is for many more with you, right here.

Reflect AND Celebrate!

Streamlining Blogger Outreach With Inkybee

02/12/2013 By Jayme Soulati

It’s getting harder and harder for media relations practitioners to earn stories. There is a depletion of journos at print and broadcast outlets, and social media has altered forever the course of media relations.

Where are publicity hungry professionals turning to secure “ink” for their clients?

To Bloggers.

Blogger Outreach

There’s something agencies do called blogger outreach. It’s quite similar to media relations only it’s done with bloggers who may also have a background in public relations. When I get a pitch from a peer blogger, I typically find a way to work the content in to my blog IF it’s relevant.

Gini Dietrich went on a rant yesterday right here on Spin Sucks about how she hates PR people and provided seven tips on how to pitch bloggers better. She’s a PR pro (and I am, too), so that means she gets to say she hates her peers.

What Hugh Anderson of Forth Metrics in the U.K. has been doing is writing a few e-books and great blog posts about blogger relations/outreach. He and his team have made it a topic of choice; so much so that they made a huge announcement late last week about a new platform for blogger outreach two years in the making.

Inkybee

I jumped on the beta of Inkybee to see what his fuss was about, and I stuck around. You know a beta is great when you keep jumping from one section of the platform to the next to poke holes and try to break it. There wasn’t much broken, but I still had questions, so Hugh and I Skyped on Friday so I could get in his head a bit more.

Here’s the gist:

Inkybee is for PR pros doing blogger outreach. You enter in key words and wait for InkyBee to churn the blogs that include your key words in the category you’re seeking. I put in social media just to see if my peer group popped up; more than 1900 blogs were returned via a ranking algorithm to my email box. It wasn’t right away, but I was very impressed with the list.

When you open the home page, you’ll find great tutorials on how to navigate and use the site. The best personal touch is that InkyBee uses personalized sticky notes throughout navigation to share instruction. There are also links to both of the Inkybee blogger outreach ebooks; one of them I already downloaded, and it’s full of testimonials from the field’s leaders – one of them Ms. Dietrich herself.

The lists are awesome and really push you quickly into the task of identifying bloggers with keywords you want in your outreach and even those you’d like to look at for guest posting and business development.

When setting up a campaign, you can track and measure; this step I’ll reserve until I have an active campaign to test.

As with anything just entering beta, there are kinks to work out; I’d say, though, that Inkybee already looks polished, clean and impressive. I encourage each of you to take up the call and sign on to the free beta right now.

Anyone who has tested a product, service or online tool knows it can only get better with real-time feedback. Won’t you please lend yours?