Google Alerts leads to ‘Good Morning America’ gig

What’s a valuable, time-saving tool that every Publicity Hound should use?

Publicist Renee Young can tell you. Her client, Dr. Amiya Prasad, a New York City plastic surgeon, appeared on a two-minute segment on this morning’s “Good Morning America” as a result.

Google Alerts is a nifty service that notifies you as soon as something appears online about your area of expertise.

Renee  created a Google Alert for “plastic surgery” so she could pitch her client and piggyback off related breaking news events.  Google scans news stories, blogs, websites, videos and even user groups to find information related to “plastic surgery” and emails her whenever it finds something.

Yesterday, Google alerted her that Donda West, mother and manager of hip-hop star Kanye West, had died, possibly of complications from cosmetic surgery.

“I dropped what I was doing and got on the phone to pitch my doctor as an expert to the national morning shows and local television news,” said Renee, of Renee Young & Associates in Scarsdale, New York.  “Three hours later, I was in my client’s office with a crew from Good Morning America.”

Here are other ways to use Google Alerts:

–To find bloggers who are writing about your topic, so you can post comments at their blogs, or pitch them. (See “How to Pitch the Best Bloggers & Create a Publicity Explosion.”)

–To find journalists who cover your area of expertise.  Once you know the name of the journalist who wrote a particular story, you can do even more research on them before pitching.  How?  By creating a Google Alert for their name.

–To get up to speed quickly on hot topics.

If you haven’t created Google Alerts yet, get going.