Good Lessons on Leveraging Events for PR

I know a lot of organizations are cutting back on events. But there are still times when they are necessary.

In the current issue of Fast Company, Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, a nonprofit, provides an instructive postmortem of an event that Do Something held.

Key points from the article, Stinking it Up: We had a big party, but got no buzz. Lessons from a PR failure," included:

• Find a good story happening at the event -- not just who's being honored. Lublin's example: Boys Like Girls (a band playing at the event) has "a pet turtle named Dorota, named after the Gossip Girl character, and they met Zuzanna Szadkowski, who plays Dorota, at the event.
• If you have celebrities, be exclusive with the media to get bigger play.
• Don't forget to work with bloggers and others in the social media space (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• Make sure to get a photographer, and then to send photos to appropriate outlets.
• Strategize after the event. What worked, what didn't.
  
• Follow up. Not just to make sure articles hit, but to leverage those articles by bookmarking them (via Digg), tweeting about them, etc.