Today’s a big day for Colorado ice cream fans. Although Blue Bell ice cream becomes officially available in Colorado stores Monday, a handful of stores along the front range are offering previews starting today. Between noon and 6:00 p.m. today and tomorrow, you can try a free sample and buy – yes, buy! – Blue Bell ice cream at the following Colorado locations:

Denver area:

King Soopers, 4600 Leetsdale Drive in Glendale

Albertsons, 6100 Gun Club Road in Aurora

Wal-Mart, 9901 Grant Street in Thornton

Sunflower Market, 4700 38th Ave in Denver

Walgreens, 9141 S. Broadway in Littleton

Colorado Springs area:

King Soopers, 1750 W. Uintah

Albertsons, 7055 Austin Bluffs

Wal-Mart, 6301 US Hwy 85/87 (In Fountain)

Sunflower Market, 1730 Dublin Blvd.

Clean out your freezer before you go, you won’t be able to resist the brand spankin’ new Rocky Mountain Road, made just for us and only available in Colorado!

• GUEST BLOGGER: Bethany Siegler – Owner of UniqueThink Online Marketing & Web Design – is our Guest Blogger.  Bethany helps to build your complete online presence. She can improve on your existing website, set you up with a WordPress based site & blog, show you when to do an email newsletter, establish your presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, integrate your online & offline marketing efforts, and more…Visit her at UniqueThink.com

Did you know you can schedule a blog post to go live at a future time & date?

With the Timestamp feature in WordPress, you can write a post (or even a page) and have it release a week from Tuesday, at midnight on New Years Eve, or at any future date.

It’s very easy to use – here is an image explaining how:

Setting The Timestamp in WordPress

You might be asking, “Why wouldn’t you just release the blog post when you write it?”

There are lots of reasons to auto-post (as I like to refer to it), below are 4 of them:

1. Product Launch Campaigns: You have a cool new product, but there is a reason you are waiting to release it:

• Your boss will only release things on prime number days
• You are the boss, and you’re trying to create mystique
• Your astrologist says you have to wait until a full moon (or is it the new moon?)
• You are waiting for the product to be completed
• You have an official release date, to coordinate with marketing efforts

The good news: You can prepare the page or post, in advance, and use the Timestamp feature to tell it when to go live.

2. Press Releases: We can’t all be Facebook or Apple, who make an announcement that they are holding a Press Conference (without a hint of what its about) and have the world wait with baited breath for the new product/service to be revealed. However, if you are holding off on the product launch and your press release will link to that page, then you have to hold off on putting the Press Release up on your site, too.

And you do want to put your press releases on your site for lots of different reasons (which maybe Cori can talk about in another post).

So, just like the product launch page, set the timestamp to have the press release go live on the same future date and time. Prepare it in advance, by heading over to WordPress, lay it out and pick the exact time and date for it to be released to the world.

3. Holidays and Seasonal Events: Grab a calendar (or do a search online), find all the holidays, industry relevant events, and/or historical references that relate back to your product/services (maybe its the anniversary of the first woman to swim the English Channel and you sell waterproof goggles).

Next, take an afternoon, write up some blog posts addressing each event that inspires you, and then post date them to auto release on their appropriate dates. If you prefer, you can do this annually or quarterly, whatever works for you.

Don’t forget, there are an ever-growing number of observances from well established ones like Earth Day to ones with more select followings, such as If Pets Had Thumbs Day (March 3rd, for those interested).

So have fun with the ones that you can make relevant to your company’s offerings.

4. Time to Travel: This should not be confused with time travel, though you can faux time travel, by dating things in the past (maybe you have some old newsletters you want to add to your site and need them to reflect the original – past – date, when they were written).

But this isn’t really about the past, it’s about vacation time! After all, you have worked hard, launching your new product, releasing info to the press, filling your blog with holiday & seasonal relevant posts, and now its time for a much needed vacation! But you want to stay top of mind, even when you are away.

The timestamp scheduler lets your business work for you, while you are sipping that mojito, touring the Louvre, or even enjoying a stay-cation.

And, this also works when you are traveling for work. Say you are going to be at a trade show or other business related event.

In fact, this whole post was initiated when Cori Keeton emailed me that she was traveling and needed someone to write up a blog post, while she was away. I reminded her of the Timestamp feature and told her I’d write a post addressing how to take advantage of it.

In the case of auto-posting with the Timestamp feature, there are obvious and not so obvious ways to pre and post date your content. Hopefully, some of these examples have giving you ideas of how to use it for your company.

How are you most likely to use this timestamp scheduling feature? If you have some great uses for auto-posting, definitely share them in the comment section below.

There’s a blog post percolating in my head about comedic talk show hosts and their role in the consumption of news today, but for today I’ll just serve up the amuse-bouche.

Today I came across Jon Stewart’s closing statements from the recent Rally To Restore sanity. Isn’t it ironic that some of today’s most insightful people earn their salaries as funnymen? To me, his words about racism and working together ring loud and true. You go. Then I’ll go.

Today, I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by Steve Squyres, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and the lead engineer on the Mars Rover project. The science, engineering and precision that went into the creation of the Mars Rover is astonishing, but several themes from the presentation apply to all businesses.

He attests that four key parameters apply to all complex projects, and that unless you have some flexibility on one of them, you’ll inevitably paint yourself into a corner. The parameters are:

• Performance: If you don’t have any wiggle room on any of the other three parameters, chances are good your performance will suffer.
• Schedule: When challenges come up, can the deadline be pushed out? If not, something else will have to give.
• Risk: NASA had suffered several space exploration failures prior to the Rover project, so there was absolutely zero tolerance for risk on this project. Squyres said that even the people responsible for tightening the screws on the Rover had NASA screw-tightening training, then they had a supervisor check their work, and a second supervisor to check the work of the first. Listening to his full presentation, I believe every word of this.
• Cost: This happened to be the parameter with a little wiggle room for the Rover team. Challenges did arise, and because the other three parameters were set in stone, the project went over budget – to the tune of $2 million.

The next time your boss, client, business partner or anyone else asks for the impossible, keep these parameters in mind. Where is your wiggle room when challenges arise?

As for the Mars Rover, it’s currently 2,400 days into a 90 day mission. Talk about exceeding expectations.

Over the past nine days, I’ve had a handful of people ask me how the daily blog post effort is going, and others ask me what I hope to get out of it. To tell you the truth, I’ve wondered that myself. The plan was to explain (and remind) myself of why I bother here today.

Then, Ragan’s PR Daily, my favorite PR e-newsletter, ran this blog post by Mark Shaefer today: Ten reasons to blog – even if nobody reads it. He says it so well, I see no reason to re-create the wheel. Thanks for the insight – and the reminders – Mark.

In general, I think of myself as a pretty good listener. Even so, I have to admit that I often find myself nodding along when someone is in the middle of  a long story, wondering to myself when he or she is going to get around to the point. Or worse, spacing off completely through the middle of the story and snapping back to attention toward the end. If stories were sandwiches, truth be told, I sometimes just get the bread.

This could be because I’m busy and have a lot of things fighting for space in my head, but I think it’s actually a side effect of my profession. In journalism, and therefore in PR, brevity is best. Since journalists are always on deadline, those of us who want to get through to them must get right to the point. There’s no time for niceties on the phone, or email chit-chat.

Anyone who has been to a PR seminar has heard the basics of reaching any reporter: 1) read the magazine first, 2) know what this person covers, and 3) sell your story in the first two sentences of the email. The same goes for more formal written communications in the world of journalism. In newspapers or magazines, space is money. People are paid good money to change phrases like “ate her lunch” to “lunched” and “took the dog for a walk” to “walked the dog.”

Take it a step further and you’ve got Twitter with its 140 character limit, and text messaging where we shorten complete words to just a letter, and it seems we’re on a pretty slippery slope.

True (short) story: I started this post with the title “Brevity Is Best” but as I’ve written I have to wonder, is it really?

Any PR person who is worth his or her salt should know at least the basics when it comes to optimizing a press release for search. Yet I’m constantly surprised at the number of releases I see that don’t have one iota of search effort put into them, and as often as not, these are releases from big companies, paying big PR firms big bucks.

If you’re not in PR, ask your PR person or agency to explain for you what they’re doing to optimize your press releases. There are many things you can do to make your press releases, and ultimately your web site, more friendly to search engines. Here are three of the basics:

• Hyperlinks. Be sure to use active hyperlinks in the body of the press release. At the very least, make the first reference to your company’s name an active link to your web site. To take it one step further, add links to other companies mentioned in the release, or link somewhere other than the home page of your own site.
• Key words. Ask your IT or web team to give you a list of key words for search, then use them often and high up in the release. Be sure to use key words in the title and in the first paragraph. Take caution: there’s a fine line between using key words well and overdoing it. The egregious use of keywords can penalize your release when it comes to search, and frankly, is usually just bad writing.
• Use the wire. The best way to get your release out on the web and visible to search engines is to distribute it over the wire. The biggest – and most expensive – options are PR Newswire and Businesswire. PR Web is a decent less expensive option, and there are several free choices that will get the job done, as well.

Lately, I’ve been working out with a personal trainer. Through her education and professional experience she has learned a lot of things that are serving me well. She knows a gazillion uses for a Smith machine, when I should bend my knees more, and how to make pull-ups easier and triceps dips harder.

But the single most important thing she does is encourage me to keep going when I want to quit. For all of her training and knowledge, it’s really that “Keep going! You’re almost there! Ten more seconds! Five more! Three, two, one! Awesome job!” that I pay her for. It’s the high fives, and the keep-up-the-good-works that I really appreciate, even more than the thoughtful, customized workouts she creates for me.

I realized lately that many of my clients feel the same way about me. The place I provide the most value isn’t always where I think it is. It’s not necessarily the front page article, or the national-news interview that earns us a spot on the “vendors we can’t do without” list.

It’s dropping everything else to help a client write an urgent internal memo, or answering the cell phone on Saturday. This is a reminder to myself as much as anyone:  it doesn’t matter what we think is the most important service we provide – what matters is what our clients believe to be the most important service we provide. And sometimes, it’s not all that complicated.

When you’re in the business of telling company stories through the media, you spend a lot of time coaching people on how to give a good interview. Looking back at the advice we most often give clients, I’ve pulled out some of the most common tips we give when preparing someone for a print interview:

• Read the publication, and preferably a couple of articles by this particular writer, before going into the interview.
• Always use your company’s full name. You may call the company by a shortened name internally, but be sure to use the full name in an interview. It all goes back to branding, but it boils down to the fact that you want people to be able to find you after reading the article.
• If you don’t want to see it in tomorrow’s newspaper, don’t say it to a newspaper reporter. Plain and simple.
• Be prepared. I know you know your business, but giving an interview is a very deliberate conversation. Jot down some notes and spend a few minutes preparing before taking the call.
• Have a final thought. Often, a reporter will end an interview by saying “Is there anything else you’d like to add?” Always have an answer for this, even if it means reiterating an important point you already made.

If you’re like me, you’ve been up to your eyeballs in political ads over the past few weeks. A story I heard on NPR this morning sheds a little light on why.

Politicians whose campaigns are decided today shelled out a whopping $4 billion in political ads for this year’s mid-term election, up 80% from two years ago. While this should provide a nice shot in the arm for the beleaguered media industry, where newspapers and magazines are being shuttered every day due to comatose ad sales, doesn’t it seem just a tad overboard?

Although the final tally won’t be in until later this month, each San Francisco Giant will have a pretty good month at the bank, as well. Last year’s World Series Champion NY Yankees split a pot worth $21 million between them, and this year’s Giants will each take home somewhere in the $300,000-$500,000 range on top of their typical salary for winning the Series.

The last thing I want is to sound un-American. I love a good political race and baseball game as much as anyone, but how have things become so out of whack? Anyone who has seen the heartbreaking movie Waiting For Superman or is watching a loved one fight a disease with no cure would surely agree that these big bucks could better benefit our society if they were spent elsewhere. Political ads are almost so over-the-top they’ve become useless. Does anyone even make a voting decision based on an ad anymore?