HOW TO GET ON NATIONAL TV, BY STEVE HARRISON

I just finished listening to a telephone/Internet seminar given by public relations specialist Steve Harrison, “How to Become a Guest on National TV.” To some degree an infomercial, it was filled with much useful information.

One of Harrison’s goals was to recruit nine more students for his three-day National Publicity Summit to be held in New York City, where 100 students would be interacting with a similar number of communications professionals, primarily producers and bookers.

Harrison noted that publicity is better than advertising. First, it’s free. Secondly, it gives you more credibility. And third, it multiplies: appearing in one venue often leads to appearing in others.

There are six ways that publicity could put more money into your pocket. It can create more orders, more buzz, get you past various gatekeepers, increase the fees others would be willing to pay you, differentiate you from your competition, and increase your marketing effectiveness.

Harrison gave the tele-seminar with the help of four producers, one from the Rachel Ray program another from Wendy Williams, and two others. They all agreed that your first step is to watch one or more days of the show on which you hope to get booked. Next, you must steer your pitch to the format and topics of interest of the show. You must find out to whom to make the pitch, and when you do, spell that person’s name right and identify that person correctly by title. You may need to pitch for a particular segment of the show. At best, you would have a clever idea that would be both informative and interesting, perhaps even fun, with some idea about the “hook” that can be used to promote it.

When you do identify the right person to contact, keep your e-mail to a paragraph or two and a link, making sure that it is timely. If you’re going to leave a voicemail message, make it a short message, a paragraph or two equivalent, with the phone number on which to call you back. Although you are almost certainly interested in promoting a book or product, your pitch idea has got to go beyond that. Especially important for television are visuals, where you stand up and do something, or show a video in which something is occurring, rather than just being another static “talking head.”

Some examples of successful guests included Dr. Gadget, who demonstrated/investigated commercial products while in a doctor’s outfit; Dave Barrow, “the Memory Guy”, who did some memory stunts and showed a great deal of enthusiasm; a woman private detective, who emphasized the importance of checking on your nanny. You’ve got to know the audience, and you’ve got to have an outgoing personality on camera.

Producers get hundreds of pitches per day in their e-mail inboxes, as well as numerous telephone calls, and they are often busy during that same day making sure that the program that they produce will go off without a hitch. Get to the point quickly.

Harrison gave several case studies of individuals who attended his Publicity Summit program: Barry Spilchuk was interviewed on the Fox News Channel, morphing his “Let’s Talk” relationship program into “what to say before you say goodbye” to troops going overseas at that time. In other words, he showed how you could solve a problem.

Lisa and Ron Beres of greenest.com used as their hook “is your home killing you?” They appeared on national TV with a program segment that showed them going to a volunteer’s home and testing the water, line voltages, and indoor air quality, and then discussing the degree to which what they found represented hazardous conditions. They got onto several national TV programs and dozens of radio programs, using much the same approach.

Another one of Harrison’s students was a dream interpreter who got on to “The View.” She appeared near Halloween and discussed not only regular dreams, but also nightmares. She knew how to speak in sound bites, with a set of talking points.

The fourth Harrison student, psych expert Ish Major, a medical doctor, had written a book called Little White Whys. When he found the right hook, “decoding the language of men,” he got on the “Today Show,” several other national shows, and a lot of local shows. Note the similarity to the theme of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus, another success partially due to Harrison‘s training programs.

The final example was from airline Captain Mary Getline, author of The World at My Feet, which she self-published. Using what she learned from Harrison’s program, she got scores of interviews and a large advance for a second book, this one published by a conventional publisher. One of her hooks was the question of turbulence. More generally, she found success with “10 things you wish you could ask an airline pilot.” She ended up with a regular weekly column for USA Today. Still a full-time airline pilot, she has had to turn down some offers to speak, even at $20,000 per speech. She maintains that Harrison’s publicity summit was the best investment she ever made.

　

　

Harrison pointed out the importance of face-to-face contact, which one would get by attending his three-day National Publicity Summit, and those who have more interest in possibly attending this should go to www.meetthemedia.com. They offer a money-back guarantee for the program.

NEWMAN'S SPECIAL SOCIAL MEDIA SAUCE: WEBINARS

This Newman is Bruce Newman, not Paul Newman, and his special sauce for social media is: the three-minute webinar. On the Ides of March this year, I listened to a stimulating talk given by Bruce Newman, president of wwWebevents.com, the company that specializes in helping you make short videos that focus your message for your potential customers.

Newman said that studies indicate often you have only 5 seconds to catch the favorable attention of those visiting your website.

A three-minute web video, a short webinar, can be added to your website to give visitors your message and your call to action.

Your 3-min. video represents your company, tells what you do, and brands you as an expert. Remember that it must also tell the customers the benefits; what’s in it for them.

The process of making such a video requires the company to focus more clearly on itself and its mission and ON how to target, “laser target,” the message to its customer niche.

I found particularly interesting a test that was done using short, four-line advertisements through Google. The first version of the four-line advertisement had as its opening a description of the product followed by the benefits, followed by the call to action and contact information. By putting the benefits before the description, the advertisers achieved three times as many responses to the same text ad.

Bruce Newman’s talk was given at the Orange County [NY] Business Accelerator on March 15, 2011, to almost two dozen attendees, who were shown an example of a 3-min. video, this one done for Will Rodman’s “Letters to Daddy” organization, 4e Productions. The video helped explain to potential supporters how Will Rodman’s organization’s activities will help reduce bullying in schools.

Another Accelerator member, Kay Rubacek, who heads sugarwebsites.com, described how the three-minute video Newman made for her organization helped explain to potential customers the benefits of her web design company.

Newman described his seven-step procedure for working with clients in developing such short videos: a questionnaire, followed by a 30-min. phone call, development of the script, a confirmation meeting, recording, reviewing, and finalizing. Although the total package usually costs $2500, Newman was offering it for a limited time for $1500 to Orange County Business Accelerator members, with a free website evaluation and social media marketing analysis.

Those who are interested in more information about Bruce Newman’s organization can contact Newman at 845-228-1301. You can e-mail him at bnewman@wwWebevents.com

Those interested in joining the Orange County Business Accelerator can contact that organization through constantcontact@OCaccelerator.com.

TING AND I - THE MOVIE

An interracial couple is forced apart but reunite twenty years later to handle her increasing disability due to multiple sclerosis. Who will make this film? Write douglas@tingandi.com .

The power of love and the value of human life, even when disabled, would be the themes. A beautiful young Asian American actress would play Tina Han Su, falling in love at Cornell University with a witty young Caucasian, Douglas Winslow Cooper. They meet in a Chinese language class, quickly go from friends to lovers, spend eighteen months together whenever possible, then separate when he graduates. Too young, unwilling to oppose their parents and society at large, they decide not to marry each other, but they never forget.

Tina has a career, marriage, children, under the thumb of a dominating Chinese American husband. Birth of her second son induces a temporary partial paralysis, diagnosed as due to multiple sclerosis, an incurable auto-immune disorder, often leading to paraplegia, quadriplegia, sometimes premature death.

Doug has a career as a scientist, a marriage and a divorce, when he finds his rich American wife has had an affair with her flying instructor. Dating afterwards highlights the inadequacies of these women in comparison with Tina, whom he has never forgotten.

On a business trip through Chicago, where she lives, he calls her, tells her he still loves her. She replies that she still loves him, “Nothing has changed for me in twenty years.” She tells him about her MS, having minimal symptoms then, but quite possibly disabling in the future. Doug ponders this, then asks her to marry him, and she replies, “Yes, yes, yes.”

Tina’s divorce estranges her from her elder son, Ted, nine at the time. The younger son, Phil, almost two, comes with her.

Tina and Doug marry, with parental blessing. Ten years of suburban living go pleasantly: Phil grows up; Ted reconciles with his mother; Doug and Tina’s love deepens.

Tina’s MS symptoms increase. Doug accepts an early retirement package from IBM to ensure medical coverage. Breast cancer and paraplegia due to MS strike Tina in the tenth year. They move to an upper-middle-class town in New Jersey and face a new set of circumstances. When Phil, smart, popular and athletic, graduates from high school and goes off to college, Tina and Doug move to the exurbs, a lovely country home.

Four years later, Tina nearly dies from an MS attack, ending up quadriplegic, ventilator-dependent, fed through a gastric tube. This has continued through eight years of critical nursing care at home, surprising medical experts, whose expectations were that she would live for months, but not years, after the near-fatal attack.

Doug and Tina remain in love, their motto: “together forever.”

Their book, Ting and I, rockets to the top of the best-seller lists [this is the only fictional part].

NYC JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL 152, MANHATTAN, 1954-55

FROM TING AND I: A MEMOIR...
After Hunter College Elementary School, Junior High School 152 was my next rung on the academic ladder.

Another year, another couple of fights, winning one and losing one.

Girls? I can’t recall. I do recall one teacher, Miss Kupersmith, however; she had a set of low-cut dresses that made big impressions. I doubt she remained “Miss” Kupersmith for long.

As I write, some incidents are coming back to me. We moved to Payson Avenue, across the street from Inwood Park, near Dyckman Street, a mile north of the Riverside Drive apartment. Mom’s friend let us rent her lovely apartment. It must have had a third bedroom, because I got one of my own, instead of sharing with the other sibs.

I also got a dog, a Siberian Husky-Golden Retriever mix, about one year old. Handsome, smart, brave, tough, that was Duke. That same friend of my mother had him but couldn’t keep him. They had called him Pericles, after the Athenian general of ancient Greece. This was too ritzy for us, so I changed his name to Hercules, thinking it sounded close enough that he would respond. Then he became Herky, and finally Duke. He took it in stride.

One evening early in our relationship, when Duke became thirsty while in my bedroom, and seeing that I was not responding to his banging his aluminum dish with his paw, he picked the dish up in his mouth, placed it on the pillow in front of my face, and licked it to demonstrate it was empty. I told you he was smart.

Sometimes Duke was smarter than his master. I took him with me to the grocery store one afternoon and tied him to a pole by the curb. I bought the groceries and came home ... without him. He never said a word. Hours later, I scoured Inwood Park trying to find him. “He came home, didn’t he?” I asked my puzzled parents. Only then did I realize I had left him behind. I’d like to think I was just focused, but those who thought me forgetful can be excused. My mother is now in her mid-90s and an invalid. Just recently, I took great pains to attach her calling button to her bed, to prevent its falling, as had happened several times before. Having secured it, I forgot to plug it in to the wall outlet. Operator error.

A kid from Inwood Park demanded a quarter from me. I refused. A fight ensued. He won. He demanded the quarter. I refused again. He moved on. With a different kid, I won a one-punch fight: faked with my left, smashed with my right. Done.

Yes, I had a crush on a lovely, tall, slender black-haired girl. Vivian. If she had been interested, she would have gotten more space here. What does not go around does not come around.

******

WRITE YOUR BOOK WITH MY HELP?  douglas@tingandi.com

THE POWER OF NOW

“Do it now” urged Chicago billionaire W. Clement Stone, author of, among others, The Success System That Never Fails. Be Here Now, urged Dr. Timothy Alpert, in this million-copy best-seller on spirituality written after Alpert had become Ram Dass, a student, and then yogi, of the Hindu tradition. Both emphasized the power of now.

DO IT NOW. Don’t just think, DO. IT is what is here in front of you, needing to be done, though you might be tempted to put it off awhile. NOW is not tomorrow. Much of our problems would be reduced if we were to get down to business rather than procrastinate. We know that. This is the blog I might have put off until tomorrow.

BE HERE NOW. BEing is even more important than doing, though doing affects who we are and what we become. HERE is not somewhere else, not some other time. The past is over, though it influences our present, The future is yet to come, though it, too, influences our present. Most important is NOW, when we can do what we can, be who we can. Put regrets and hopes aside, brighten the corner where we are. Now.

I'm taking a nap. Now.

BLIND: A MEMOIR, BY BELO CIPRIANI, REVIEWED

Preparing for a possible part-time job at the Catholic Guild for the Blind, teaching blind and nearly blind students to help them get their GED certificates, I browsed through amazon.com’s listing of books concerning teaching the blind. The first thing I noticed was that many of them were surprisingly expensive. This specialized area apparently commands higher prices. I ordered a few of the less expensive books plus Belo Cipriani’s Blind: A Memoir, published in 2011 by Wheatmark of Tucson, AZ, this last sent to me for reading on my Kindle e-book reader. This book opened for me a window into the world of the blind.

Cipriani’s blindness was caused by a severe beating given to him by former friends who felt he had shunned them by going on for higher education that they themselves could not obtain. Belo is openly gay, as were these friends, and had feared the intolerance of straight society, but as his book demonstrates, he was often victimized one way or another by those with whom he shared the homosexual lifestyle. As a blind gay man, so rare that he jokingly called himself a “unicorn,” Cipriani used his intelligence and inter-personal skills eventually to overcome or accommodate to the losses his blindness produced.

Those of us who still have our sight, and mine has deteriorated a bit, cannot fully appreciate the implications of its loss. Some of life’s simplest things become difficult, and almost everything takes much longer than it would if one could see. Cipriani’s description of these frustrating incidents make them clearer to the sighted and helps explain the anger with which he often had to cope.

His being gay is an important sub-theme of the book, but it is presented in a tasteful way, so that even a straight male such as myself need not find the passages repulsive. There is no explicit sex, and one gets used to his having a boyfriend, rather than a girlfriend, fairly early in the text. My now deceased gay friends prepared me for some of the themes dominant in this area of the book, the emphasis on looks, youth, physique, finances and fashion. These near-obsessions are not so different from those I found recently in reading a romance novel evidently written for women in their 20s and 30s. My own tastes lean more toward action and detective novels, as do those of most other heterosexual men, and even these are often spiced with beautiful and sexy women.

Cipriani grows from being a rather superficial party-boy and “clubber” to a serious, contemplative, skillful writer. This development was assisted by introspection, interactions with others blind and not-blind, and organizations such as Lighthouse for the Blind, the Orientation Center for the Blind, and Guide Dogs for the Blind, whose adaptive techniques and equipment and --- finally --- a guide dog, Madge, gave Cipriani renewed capabilities and freedom that he thought he would never regain.

Both the sighted and the vision-impaired or blind need to be more empathetic toward each other. Just as Cipriani finds shortcomings in his treatment by those who can still see, his book reveals his somewhat unjust impatience with those who still have their sight. He criticizes those who, on learning that he is blind, say that they’re sorry, which he interprets as erroneously taking on some blame for this misfortune. I think that saying they are sorry really should be translated to “I think it’s a shame that….” Not everyone knows not to pet the guide dogs without permission. Having returned to his college, Belo finds himself isolated by the reluctance of almost all the students to strike up a conversation with him, for example at meal times. People are typically somewhat uncomfortable with those they view as different, and they are not sure how not to offend those who are handicapped. Still, many people tend to find guide dogs, such as Belo’s Golden Lab an inviting topic for conversation, for breaking the ice.

Eventually, the students who first welcomed Cipriani among them were the athletes, football and basketball players, for example, and as these friendships developed, and as his writing classes continued his education, Cipriani has faced his future with renewed confidence.

Who are the blind? A small fraction have been blind from birth. Others, like Cipriani, have been blinded by trauma, others by diabetes, HIV, age-related macular degeneration, as well as sickle cell disease and retinosa pigmentosa. Among the vision-impaired themselves the first questions revolved around the degree of vision loss and the causes thereof. One young woman is cited by Cipriani as saying that she would not want to be not-blind, because her blindness now defines who she is.

I think we would each agree that of our five senses the one we would find most difficult to lose completely would be our sense of sight. Fortunately, science and engineering are giving us increasingly useful adaptive technologies for the blind, for the near blind and even for those of us still with sight. This fascinating book was read to me using Amazon’s Kindle, which I find very convenient, allowing me to listen as I rest or drive or search the book. I am dictating this with my eyes closed using the Dragon Naturally Speaking program. Of course, to edit it, I find it convenient to have my eyes open, but the Dragon program would indeed read it back to me for editing, and there are other similar programs used by the vision-impaired to read, to write, and to edit using their computers.

Adaptive technologies and greater understanding of the needs of the blind and the vision-impaired, and deeper insight as aided by the material in Cipriani’s book, will certainly help to make a brighter future for those who cannot see and those who care about them.

　

Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., a retired environmental physicist, lives in southern New York State with his beloved wife, Tina Su Cooper, who has been bedridden for two decades due to multiple sclerosis, quadriplegic and ventilator-dependent at home for the past eight years. Tina is the central figure in Dr. Cooper’s book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage, and Devotion, available from Amazon. Barnes and Noble, or their website, tingandi.com.

BRAVER THAN RUSH LIMBAUGH?

In an earlier blog posting, I bravely noted that the pedophilia alleged of Penn State football ex-coach Jerry Sandusky was homosexual in nature, a fact little alluded to in the media coverage of the affair. If it had been done with a young girl, I noted, it would be heterosexual pedophilia. I also noted that homosexual promiscuity has been documented to be far greater than heterosexual. This was one of the few blogs of mine that stimulated an irate response, leading me to write another on the importance of careful reading and writing of essays.

A columnist recently noted that Rush Limbaugh, with whom I generally agree, skirted something about the Sandusky issue as too hot to handle, and the columnist [Prof. Michael Brown] speculated it was that the sex was gay sex:

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2011/11/17/what_could_end_rush_limbaughs_career