Worksheet Publicity stunts for your business

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video I want to walk you through a worksheet with ten different ideas to get your thinking going on what kind of a publicity stunt you can create and let's go through them and let's have a little fun because all of these this video is brought to you by Appy Pie’s Academy our controversial things you that are maybe not so recommended okay these are just that's the whole point is you gotta stand out you don't have to do them it's just an option if something seems like it's too much just don't do it but let's have fun with these for brainstorming sake and let's see how far we get so disasters customer incident for example you can privately talk to a customer and tell them hey you can allege that we did this and this and this and this that's gonna make the news if you can pay that customer you can give them free service you can maybe there's something in it for the customer maybe there are business as well and maybe they'll get some attention for themselves and you know if you're small enough businesses at the end of the day everybody would mostly forget it and the only thing that'll remain is the traffic or the attention that you immediately or the sales that you immediately got probably there's limited long-term effect but you could get immediate traffic another option is disasters vent vendor incident for example I actually had this happen to me where it was actually real but you could make it fake as well I was working with an ad vendor and this ad providers ads were so intrusive it was from my mobile apps that a lot of my app users immediately quit the apps and a lot of them left bad reviews and the app tanked in the App Store ranking and I lost a lot of downloads and sales and the app just went really down and didn't recover for a while this was actually real I mean but it sounds like it could have been almost a stunt and I ended up publishing that and I ended up talking to a journalist and the journalist and that are publishing that and I got so much attention in some of the major tech publications this is years ago now that this vendor actually contacted me and asked me if they pay me will I be quiet so I can say who they paid me I took the money now I cannot say who it was and I don't really talk about it but this was real and I got well not only attention but also I got paid for it another thing is doing something illegal with your business now this is really tricky not too illegal because illegal means you're gonna go to jail don't do that there are some things that are borderline illegal just not cool but not persecuted don't go crazy don't get yourself in jail take this with a grain of salt you can go a lot of things illegal for example when I had my hiking business you can just hike through some private property if somebody really wants to persecute you they can but almost that almost never happens but you will get some kind of attention let's say you accidentally hide through some governor's mansion or something like that and there's pictures and posted and like they're angry and they're waving a stick or something I don't know what happens and nobody's gonna go to jail for that it's an accident make sure that it's mild enough and but you can get that kind of attention and so these are just these are just stunts it's it's literally meant to provoke someone so these aren't particularly angelic again sorry if this is kind of a little bit out of comfort zone but that's the whole purpose of now crazy lawsuits you can file a crazy lawsuit do I recommend that not really is it possible sure it's gonna be a complete waste of time and a lot of resources going to creating a lawsuit but it's an option something to consider most likely nobody will do that that that's one of the far-fetched ones so let's keep going you can create a wild embellishment for example when I did my shipwreck hikes a long time ago I got a lot of publicity but that's because I did slight stunts because I used to say we're gonna see shipwrecks it's gonna be cool like the Pirates of the Caribbean and people who would come they'd expect some like wild amazing shipwrecks but really this ship wrecked the ships that I would show them I can't just make Hollywood love all ship wrecks you know these ships that I show them the only the only options were ships that are 95% submerged underwater and just like little things sticking out of the water so when they saw it they were disappointed but people saw that attention-grabbing headline and it came now you can also expose a lie you can also have cheating allegations right now I'm not gonna say the show but there's a show on TV two of the it's a cover to do a reality show and two of the contestants decided okay we're gonna blame each other for cheating and it's been all over the news I'm sure they could loot it behind the scenes and they mapped out what's gonna happen every day and part of the way so that they have replies and retorts and one person accuses the other the other proves them wrong the other person has another accusation then it goes in some celebrity blog and so they get a lot of attention they stay in the news but really there is no news they just fabricated all the attention and all the publications just were like tricked so that that's possible you can also say hey I'm putting on an event with a celebrity never shows up but the reporters show up and you're totally embarrassed but you're not really embarrassed because there was never going to be a celebrity it's just that it's a stunt you will get mentioned somewhat negatively in the news and blogs but you'll get mentioned you can you can kind of loudly get kicked out of somewhere for example maybe some website membership or some club membership you get kicked out and the community of that website gets know about it because you you're not gonna care that much that you got kicked out but you can create YouTube videos and say hey I got an entirely kicked out and people will share that because it's controversial and you'll get the attention and lastly the tenth item is you can be strategically not just mean but tragically mean to customers some years ago there was a company in New York they saw they were Optometry company boring company there's a million companies like that they provide a pretty commoditized service so what they did worse was they were really mean to their customers so mean that it got picked up by the news and all the news sites linked to that optometry site yes what happened now even years later everybody knows about that optometry business not only that but there's all these Google links that point to that site making it really strong in search that company was surgically mean and they got a lot of benefit they also got a lot of bad press and bad things happen to them but they also got a lot of benefits from it so these are ideas for or what you can kind of just burn your own thinking so try to fill out this worksheet for every one of these try to write what can you do give yourself that exercise if you really don't want to skip it but it is an exercise that's easy to do because you might not create any ideas today or tomorrow or this week but something if you kind of think about it for a while something might hit you a month or three months from now and you'll be like oh my god I got a greatest idea for a stunt and it would be cheap to do it would be simple to do and it can get you a lot of attention