The Clean and Green Club

In today’s instant world, the faster you can get attention when a story breaks, the better your chance of being covered. If you can get a pitch letter or press release in when the ink is still drying on the new develiopment, you’re very likely to be quoted.

A few ways to get into position:

• Sign up for free alerts at HARO – you’ll get three alerts per weekday, each with about 40 leads from journalists actively looking for story sources. Also the occasional speaking lead and on Fridays, opportunities to get your swag into gift bags.
• Also sign up for PR Leads. This is a similar service, but because it costs $99 per month, there’s far less competition in answering the queries (HARO now has over 50,000 members, so reporters tend to get deluged. PR Leads and its big sister Profnet reach only a fraction of that number.) Note that there is a fair amount of overlap, but there are still quite a few reporters who prefer to use the less crowded service.
• Follow Skydiver (HARO) and ProfNet (PR Leads) on Twitter for last-minute journo requests that don’t make it into the feeds.
• Set up automatic Twitter searches at one of the many 3rd-party Twitter utilities such as TweetDeck or Twellow for your name, your product and company names, and your key topics.
  Create similar searches in Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts (categories: breaking news, daily news, keyword news). Note that there may be significant time lag, so don’t rely on these services as your main source of breaking news. I find my Google alerts are usually about a day after the story is released.
• Check in for a quick headline crawl several times a day on any of the major news services.

Next month: What to do with the leads when you find them.