The newscaster said shark attacks are directly related to the economy, because in order to have a shark attack two conditions apply:

1. People Have To Be In The Water
2. Sharks Have To Be Where People Are

Then he proceeded to explain that as the economy declines less people go to the beach (People In The Water), because they don’t have the money.  He followed that up with a stupid line that basically disproved his theory, “But surfers are not deterred by the economy, and are out in the water everyday, regardless of the economy, so they stand to have a much greater risk for shark attacks!”

Shock Attack!

Stories like the above are ways the television and radio news teams sucker you in to listen to the entire newscast by giving you a teaser headline, “Economists Predict Decline In Shark Attacks In 2009! The complete story after these commercials.”  They just baited you with a shocker.

First, why would an economist be predicting shark attacks?

Second, why are shark attacks declining?

Shocking headlines tend to grab your attention and pull you in.  You are going along on your merry way and you hear something that does not make complete sense to you. You have to know more.  They baited you.  You listen and they tease you until you are fully hooked, you listen all the way through the story until the stupid anticlimactic conclusion and you leave ticked off that you wasted your time.  But they got you.

Tweeting A Big Juicy Worm!

Social media is like that, you can keep people engaged with golden nuggets that pull people in.  You can ask open ended questions that require people to reply to you. Tell funny stories that can only be completed on your blog.

These are ways you can bait people into your sphere of influence.  Using humor, love and good information.  Seducing your audience like a fisherman uses a lure or a worm to tantalize a big bass from under the log in the lake.  He may look at it suspiciously for a few minutes, but if you don’t scare him off, he’ll bite.

Ride It Like You Stole It

As you know Lance Armstrong had a one of a kind bike stolen during one of his races this week.  The guys who make his bikes didn’t waste a second getting another bike to him.  They inscribed a great motivating quote on it that you just have to read:

Lance uses twitter as a way to stay in touch with the thousands of fans he has all over the world, and he receives an insane amount of motivation from those people who follow him!  But he makes sure that he keeps them fed with good content, he will send out videos, blog posts and pictures like the one above that inspire.

I don’t think Lance has a strategy in his use of twitter.  Instead, I believe he is genuinely interested in his fans and he allows them the chance to look into his life 140 characters at a time.  When he needs to communicate more than that, he has his images, blogs and videos.  His communication with twitter acts as a distribution center as it directs people to his more detailed information.

Fishing With Headlines

Your tweets should be the bait for the bigger story.  Like Lance, you should be giving a glimpse into your life without revealing everything in a tweet.  You should be saying to yourself as you write a status update, “take a peek, but if you want more, come to my blog, or my flickr page, etc.”  Each tweet is the headline of the newspaper, and the reader can decide if it is interesting enough to follow to the website.

You can really be sneaky and see if anyone is paying attention.  Start a story, and don’t give anyone a place to go to find out more.  If you have done it right, you will get a lot of @replies asking you questions about what you started.  Mark Joyner calls this the Zeigarnik Effect, where people have to have completeness in their lives.

On television, you see Monk always completing sequences, or putting a book back on the bookshelf to complete a series.  Same as puzzles, they are so addicting, because they are incomplete.  If you only give readers a couple of hints, it will drive them nuts until they get the complete story.

If you don’t want a riot, you really shouldn’t wait to complete your story until your next blog post…

I love sushi!

I would be a richer sushi lover if I had a dollar for every time someone told me they didn’t like sushi AND when asked if they had tried it, responded with a definite NO!

What do you and I miss out on as individuals and in our businesses?

What could happen if we were willing to test assumptions?

Of course, we may not like the sushi but how will we know until we try some? We may just discover that we enjoy it.

What is the “sushi” in your business?

Is there something that you haven’t tried because you think it doesn’t “taste good” / isn’t effective?

Or maybe you are the one serving up the “sushi” to others?

Assumptions have the potential to be limiting.

Test assumptions. Take the sushi test.

1. Define your “sushi”

2. Taste/test the “sushi” (do this a few times) to determine if the assumption is fact.

3. Do not avoid other “Japanese foods” eg. Teppanyaki based on a negative test result as this would be another assumption.

4. Repeat process as you may discover a new interest, an asset for your business or throw off things that hinder progress.

Will you take the sushi test?

What is the cost to your business if you don’t take the test?

I talked before about why the bloggers are so important in media today. They are certainly a great outlet to get your word out.

So, getting the name of you, your product, service, blog, company, etc onto blogs is important for obvious reasons. You are getting exposure to new people and may even be getting traffic to your website. Both of those things are great.

But, reaching out to the bloggers has another excellent side benefit. Every time a blogger mentions you and puts a link to your website/blog in there, it’s a bit of light Search Engine Optimization. I’m not claiming to be an SEO expert, but I know that part of some SEO campaigns includes link-building. Google likes to see people sending links to your site.

Are a few blog hits going to catapult you to #1 in Google search engines. I really doubt it. But, you should always be thinking big picture and how to maximize your website.

So, keep this in mind when you are thinking about your PR campaign. Getting on television is awesome. A mention on the radio? Great! A two-paragraph quote in the Chicago Tribune is phenomenal. But, don’t forget about those bloggers. They can help in more ways than one.

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Alejandro Reyes