A number of our clients submit their work for industry contests each year and I’m pleased to say that quite a few of them walk away with awards for their work. Usually, the awards they receive are presented at industry dinners or events. Sometimes, there is a photographer present to take pictures of the award presentation. And sometimes, you’re “on your own” trying to use your own camera to get “grab” shots as an industry official hands the award to your employee or executive—all in about three short seconds.

If you aren’t a great photographer and you’re charged with getting photos that you’d like to have as keepsakes or for company publicity, here are a couple of suggestions.

Get in touch with the persons responsible for giving the awards in advance of the presentation and tell them you’d like to do the following:

1) schedule some time after the presentation to take more photos including a re-enactment of the presentation with the presenter and other photos with your executives and the presenter in them. Do this and you won’t be forced to rush a photo with unsatisfactory results.
2) Pick a backdrop that is attractive, photogenic and well lit. Too much glare or not enough light can result in a lousy photo.
3) Only put a maximum of four people in each photo. Take as many photos as you like with as many people as you can, but make sure there are a maximum of four in each image. Editors don’t like photos with the cast of Ben Hur in them. Everyone ends up looking like a pinhead and no one will ever read the caption because it’s too long.
4) If you’re submitting the photo with a caption to a publication, make sure the caption succinctly tells what the award is for.
5) And finally, use a digital camera with a high resolution capability—300dpi or better. Editors can’t use low resolution photos in newspapers and magazines. Low res photos are only good for online reproduction.

As the one-time corporate communications director for a Fortune 300, I confronted just about every possible public relations issue involving the corporate sector. But one of the most interesting came during A recession several years ago when the company was laying off small numbers of people at every location except the corporate headquarters in Stamford, CT..

Times were admittedly tough and we were doing everything we could to support a dealer network with the “good news.” So, I really broke out the aspirin when the business reporter from the local newspaper told me she had received a call from one of the company’s senior executives telling her we were about to lay off hundreds of people at the corporate headquarters.

She said the senior executive asked to remain anonymous and was the layoff true.

First of all, I knew every senior executive in the company. I reported to the chairman of the board at the time. It was unlikely that any executive would have called any reporter. And second, it was unlikely that as head of corporate communications, I would not know about impending layoffs.

So, I told the reporter first that I had NO “no comment.” Anyone in our business knows that if I had said “ no comment” it would have been immediately used in a story with the allegation from the anonymous executive.

She immediately became frustrated and told me I couldn’t have no “no comment.” I laughed and assured her I knew she was right. And I asked her the following: “Do me a favor and call that executive here at work to confirm that they gave you the information. If they did, give me a couple of hours to find out what’s going on and I’ll make sure to get back to you with a response before your deadline.” I had known her for three years and was pretty sure she’d agree to my request.

She did. Because within five minutes of our conversation, I got another call-this time from our senior vice president of human resources. The SVP told me she had received a call from the reporter, asking her to confirm the layoff information she had received from my senior exec the night before. Five minutes later, I also got a call from the reporter who told me the senior vice president’s voice was clearly not that of the person who had fed her the information and it was apparent to her the SVP had never called her in the first place.

The SVP made it clear that she had convinced the reporter there were no impending layoffs (some actually did come months later). And to this day I’m not sure how she did it, but the SVP was able to track the call to a disgruntled employee who had been fired for completely different reasons. This was their way of trying to get “even” with the company.

Either as a client or an agency, you probably won’t run into a situation exactly like this. But you may run into similar circumstances with disgruntled ex-employees. Know your facts. We didn’t have “hundreds of people” at the corporate headquarters so something wasfishy from the start.

Buy some time–the media will usually give you that much. And be ready to respond.

If you have a large business to business client ($50 million in sales and up), chances are good it sells products through distributors, dealers or franchises.

If the 20-80 rule holds as it usually does, 20% of these distributors or dealers are probably generating 80% of the business. And usually, that 20% is the more sophisticated in marketing and sales, with websites and marketing communications programs.

BUT, the other 80% may not be sophisticated—and not have a website. And while they may not be your ‘A” list, they, first, may have the potential to be on that list and, second, are worth cultivating to generate more business in these economically hard times.

Convince your top executives or client that you should help create and maintain a website for as many of them as you can afford. Why should you do that? Several reasons.

1) The Internet is an important and inexpensive way of doing business.
2) Creating a website for each of them can be very inexpensive if you create a template that changes only slightly to accommodate each distributor. In fact, you want the look to be similar to your own website. That works particularly if each has a geographically exclusive territory. A simple four-page website can cover all the bases on who they are and what they offer—with your products highlighted, of course.
3) If you create and maintain the site, you can also track all incoming inquiries to each site, as well as the distributor’s responses, to make sure leads are being followed up.
4) If you are tracking their sites and they are not following up on leads, you have a choice. You can nudge them, you can follow up on the leads yourself or you can ultimately replace them with another distributor in their marketplace.
5) And always make sure that each of the sites has a link right back to your own website so prospects can get a more detailed picture of what you are offering.

Make the cost of maintaining these sites inexpensive by working out a monthly retailer with whomever you hire to maintain them. And reward those distributors or dealers who use the site effectively by helping them to upgrade and enhance their sites. You may even have five or 10 distributors who are major customers who do not have websites. Help provide them with something more sophisticated.

Yes, this takes an investment and that investment , depending on the number of distributors or dealers you have , can cost in excess of $100,000 to set up. You have to ask yourself if the anticipated payback is worth it. I recommend you pay for the sites. You could ask the dealer or distributor to pay part, but you’ll lose control and get less participation.

It has been a decade since I supervised pubic relations for the Miss Universe Contest on Hawaii, but I’ll always remember the lesson I learned from the experience.

The local public relations we generated for each of the 84 girls in their individual countries was just as important as the media we got from the two-week long pageant on Oahu. I took some work and fortunately I had also supervised the Western Union money transfer account for 100 countries just a few years before, but the interest from the media was much stronger for the individual candidates than it was from the big print and broadcast outlets—particularly since CBS owned a piece of it with Donald Trump at the time. So we did our share of getting the big stuff but we also made sure that media in each of the girl’s countries (presuming they had media) got information as well.

It means finding the right kind of translators who know how to reproduce the English journalistic style into foreign languages but we did it. It also meant finding the right media in those countries. The girls, their sponsors and the translators were very helpful.

Nearly all of the girls who ranged from shopkeepers from Eastern Europe to a doctor and a dentist (that’s right!) had little stories about themselves worth feeding back to the home country press. We even had a great story for Miss Israel who participated in services with an Oahu Jewish congregation for Passover—a story that went international.

The Miss Universe contest stands n stark contrast to another beauty contest I had supervised for public relations several years before. It was a tugboat beauty contest held on the Hudson River and hosted by Bert Parks who had been fired the year before by the Miss America people. The contest was for Jones Lange Wooten then one of the world’s largest real estate developers to celebrate the opening of Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City, across the Hudson from Wall Street. Jersey City is now a back office haven for Wall Street. Then, it was nothing. We got the tugboat captains to decorate their boats and parade up the Hudson in front of Harborside while Bert Parks, company officials and local politicians rated the tuggies. Thanks to Bert and the idea we got national media coverage that night for the Center which years before had been a cold storage terminal for goods coming into the New York port. I knew because I had worked loading boxes there as a teenager.

Other events of note:

• A party three stories down in a construction hole on Park Avenue in New York to unveil plans for a 38-story luxury condominium project with only 38 units. We had to reinforce an earth ramp so media could walk down into the site. We served gourmet food and champagne and gave out hard hats and press kits at the conclusion, Front page New York Times the next day.

• Kickoff for Coca Cola Food’s (Minute Maid, Hi-C) participation in the summer Olympics—20 amateur female runners from all over the U.S. legging it cross country to Colorado Springs home of the Olympics training facility, to promote the first year of women’s distance running events in the Olympics. I got Winnebago to give me a camper, GM to give me pace cars and hotel chains to put us up for nothing. We took it through every major American city from the start at the George Washington Bridge to Colorado. At times, the route was circuitous to get there, but we had print and broadcast in every town we hit. And we raised money for the women’s distance running committee by holding running clinics at each of the hotels. We kept switching agency crews to keep everybody fresh and held nightly conferences so our media team in New York could generate fresh stories for the next day.

There are many more but I’m already running long. If anyone is interested in hearing more, let me know. Next time out maybe we can talk about event locations that don’t cost much and might be perfect for attracting attention and media coverage.