I’m a social media junkie and love how press releases, blogs, and social media can combine to create some amazing PR campaigns and results. This campaign was to help business for a car web web site.

The site is basic – it highlights cars on eBay that go for under $1,000. So he (Chris Hedgecock – is that his real name??) doesn’t have his own product (which I like – I hate dealing with products). You too could start a business like this if you have some online savvy.

I thought it would be a great idea to buy a car for under $1,000 from the site and drive it coast to coast in an attempt to get some news coverage and visitors to the site. We were successful in appearing on a dozen news broadcasts and driving almost half a million visitors to the site in three weeks – all for free.

On the largest day we did over 110,000 uniques – all for free. Not to say it wasn’t a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun.

You’ve got to read about it on Shoemoney’s blog for the details. While he didn’t hire a PR firm, he did get friends involved (and he has good contacts who had the know-how). I wouldn’t say it was free but it was definately less than he could’ve spent running ads and much more effective.

Notice that he had:

• A personality and attitude – he likes meeting people (being social). He was willing to be creative and then do what it took to accomplish what he was after.
• Time. Notice he drove across the country and planned all of this – lots and lots of time. He wasn’t sitting in his office. He followed up A LOT and kept track of things. He took the time to make the story relevant to the local market he was in.
• Know-how. He learned or knew how to create a YouTube channel, video, blog, etc. If you don’t have this, you learn or you pay someone for consulting.
• Contacts. His real estate friend did a lot of legwork. He had someone write the press release (free?)
• He used News Power (the free trial?) who figured the news value was over $92,000!!!

Here are some posts from Drew Schulte:

Tips for social networking
and another list of niche social media web sites

Many times the trick is tracking results. He had web site analytics see to see how many people were coming to his site. He then used News Power to track how many stories resulted.

Thanks for sharing your experiences – a great example of creating your own news and running a campaign around it. I talk about this in my book. If you don’t have something newsworthy, then create something. These can be some of the best campaigns.

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