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APCUG Reports
April-June 2007

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Publicity in Tokyo
by Barbara Manning, Advisor, Region 13

I do the publicity for the Tokyo PC Users Group even though I don't live in Japan right now. All our publicity is done online in publications within Tokyo. One publication, Tokyo Classifieds has a weekly paper publication where we get a free ad because we are a non profit organization.

I started with no information and called Tokyo classifieds. I asked them who to contact for publicity, and they were very understanding and cooperative giving me the names and contact data for their competitors. Since it was a free ad it made it easy for them to share the information.

Now I have a list of contacts in my date book which pops up the deadline dates each month or week so that I never miss a deadline. We post a generic ad advertising the club in Tokyo Classifieds. Where I can, I post information on the specific topic for the meeting.

I also post longer length pieces in other online club and organization newsletters. We also have a standing arrangement with other computing clubs to cross reference our meetings. In most cases the clubs do not compete for members so there is no problem.

I also regularly invite the editors from the publications in which I advertise to send a reporter to a meeting. They get a story from it, and we get some publicity. Of course you can't be certain that the publicity you get will be what you want, but its a very small risk. We've also traded advertising in online newsletters or email newsletters for club sponsorship. Rather than pay for advertising on our site, publishers will cheerfully post a meeting or club announcement in their newsletter in exchange for showing their logo on our site.