By popular demand… The top 4 ways to make HARO requests more relevant to you: 4) Ask yourself how well you really know your clients: Every time I sign a new client, I sit with them over pizza (or whatever they want to eat, I usually make it pizza…) and ask them seemingly off-the-wall, off-topic questions. What do you do for fun? You fish? Got any kids? How old? Public school? Private? Are you married? For how long? Parents still alive? Belong to any civic organizations? Perform? Play an instrument? Any clubs? See where I’m going with this? The more information I find out about each of my clients, the more potential I have to pitch them to reporters who [...]

So imagine this… You walk up to me because I’m doing you a favor, and I put out my hand. Instead of shaking it, you violently slap it away, then tell me exactly how I’m supposed to talk to you, what I’m supposed to say, and warn me that if I utter so much as one syllable that’s not what you expect, you’ll never talk to me again. Chances are, I wouldn’t be friends with you, right? I mean, that’s just logic talking, right? Guess some people just don’t really “get” the whole concept of logic. Or of people doing nice things. Check out this email I just got from one “Gloria G Wolk,”, which was in reply to the [...]

On my flight from IAH–>LAX today, I got upgraded at the last minute to 1A from 14F. As any fan of Seat Guru (www.seatguru.com) knows, on a 737-300, that’s not such a great upgrade. 14F doesn’t have a seat in front of it, 1A is against the front of the plane. Other than a slightly better lunch, staying in 14F is actually better than 1A. Plus, all my luggage was already overhead, and there wasn’t any room left in the front. So I gave the upgrade to the guy they put in 14F, assuming I was in 1A, and I stayed where I was. He’d never been in 1st class before, and sure enough, as the woman came by with [...]

So, I’m headed to LA, to keynote the Executing Social Media Conference over the next few days. Should be a lot of fun. You there? Let me know, let’s connect. There’ll also be a HARO happy hour on Wednesday night (where I’ll have club soda. Woo.) at Lucky Baldwin, starting around 5:30pm. It’s at 17 South Raymond Avenue, in Pasadena. With any luck, I’ll catch some good photos for the “Idiot Things Travelers Do” and “Live Travel Webcasts” segments of the site. See you out there!

Thanks to some “emergency maintenance,” HARO emails are currently delayed. aWeber, the company that I use as HARO’s email distribution, brilliantly informed me that “yeah, we’re down, we don’t know when we’re coming back up, probably today.” Stay tuned to my Twitter feed for updates. Sorry about this.