I got to wear the 1986 New York Mets World Series Ring and hold the trophy today, in a parking lot of an Embassy Suites, in Omaha, Nebraska, because Ed Hearn, a former NY Mets player, sent me an email asking for advice about publicity. I get a lot of questions from people who see me speak, are on HARO, have read my book, or have seen me on TV. Email is probably 60% or more of my time. I’ve been told over and over to outsource my email. I will never do it. If someone takes the time to email me, the least I can do is email them back, even if it’s just to say “no thanks.” My [...]

Back in 2000, I used the term “run” only in conjunction with “to the store for cigarettes.” I wasn’t a fat-ass by any means – I’d been super-heavy when I worked for AOL – I walked everywhere for the first 22 years of my life, then spent the next three driving from my apartment in Herndon, VA (land of NOTHING back in 1995 but a Taco Bell, a 7/11, and two brand new apartment complexes – one of which I shared a three bedroom apartment in) – to Vienna, VA, where I worked for AOL as one of their founding news editors. But when you grow up walking everywhere, you’re never truly fat – you’re “he could lose five pounds” [...]

As we constantly update the HARO website to make things like submitting queries and buying ads more logical, I figured I’d shoot a quick screen-video so you could at least have some idea as to how to do it. How to buy a HARO advertisement from Peter Shankman on Vimeo. Enjoy.

Spent the past four days in Vegas at Affiliate Summit – Much like Twitter was the big noise on everyone’s lips last year, this year was all about FourSquare. If you haven’t gotten sucked into the black tar heroin that is FourSquare, it’s essentially a location based check-in service, where you compete to become “Mayor” of various locations around the world. You can enter new locations as you find them, and if played right, will be a goldmine for savvy companies who understand the value of immediate marketing. Some of the key takeaways from the summit regarding FourSquare from my perspective: People simply LOVE to announce where they are. Whether it was at the Rio Hotel, the Heart Bar or [...]

Updated with more info in bold! We didn’t know if this part would make it in time, but it will! Scroll down to the bold part!! When I first launched HARO on the web in March of 2008, I never ever could have imagined that in under two years, we’d become the de-facto standard for how crowd-sourcing is done. I never imagined over 50,000 journalists would send queries out to over 150,000 sources – that people would wind up in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Oprah, Shark Tank, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Fortune, Forbes, the NY Daily News… You name it – Almost every media outlet in the country has used HARO – and here’s one of [...]