Writing Press Releases
20 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in All Things That Matter Press, amazon.com, books, business, consulting, fiction, finance, FL, investing, investments Tags: advertising, All Things That Matter Press, Amazon.com, AP, marketing, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, press releases, sales, USA, world news, writing
I am a writer and I’ve written what I thought were press releases, but perhaps in my rush to get the word out about my book I’ve missed the entire point. I did a little research today on this topic and found the following information that may be of help to anyone and everyone seeking to do the same. This information comes from the website www.akswiki.org.
Write the headline-a real attention grabber
- News release headlines should have a “grabber” to attract readers, i.e., journalists, just as a newspaper headline is meant to grab readers. It may describe the latest achievement of an organization, a recent newsworthy event, a new product or service. For example, “XYZ Co. enters strategic partnership with ABC Co. in India & United States.”
- Headlines are written in bold and are typically larger than the press release text. Conventional press release headlines are present-tense and exclude “a” and “the” as well as forms of the verb “to be” in certain contexts.
- The first word in the press release headline should be capitalized, as should all proper nouns. Most headline words appear in lower-case letters, although adding a stylized “small caps” style can create a more graphically news-attractive look and feel. Do not capitalize every word.
- The simplest method to arrive at the press release headline is to extract the most important keywords from your press release. Now from these keywords, try to frame a logical and attention-getting statement. Using keywords will give you better visibility in search engines, and it will be simpler for journalists and readers to get the idea of the press release content
Write the Body.
- Start with date and city where it originated. Say what is happening and lead into the story. Should be compact/brief: two to three sentences.
- The 5 W’s and the H. What is the news, why is it news, other things related to this news, purpose behind the news, and source of the news. Three pages max length!
Include information about the business, author (in my case) and URL’s.
- Include hours of operation, physical address, specialization, etc..
- Don’t forget to provide contact information for ordering and the author feedback information too!
- Add contact information or information on where to order the book depending on retailer, customer, or wholesaler.
Include a call to action.
End of release signaled by three ###’s
I hope this helps. I know it helped me and I hope to practice it a bit and hone my words before sending the next press releases out. Now each of you should log on to amazon.com and get your copy of my new book, The Swindler. Isbn 978-0-9844219-4-7. Thank you!
Bernie Madoff Inside Prison
02 Sep 2010 2 Comments
in All Things That Matter Press, amazon.com, books, business, consulting, fiction, finance, FL, investing, investments, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, ponzi schemes, scams, schemes, The Swindler, USA, Wall St. reform, Wall Street, world Tags: Bernie Madoff, business, crime and justice, finance, news, President Bush, President Obama, prison, USA, world
Last August, shortly after his arrival at the federal correctional complex in Butner, North Carolina, Bernard L. Madoff was waiting on the evening pill line for his blood-pressure medication when he heard another inmate call his name. Madoff, then 71, author of the most devastating Ponzi scheme in history, was dressed like every other prisoner, in one of his three pairs of standard-issue khakis, his name and inmate number glued over the shirt pocket. Rec time, the best part of a prisoner’s day, was drawing to a close, and Madoff, who liked to walk the gravel track, sometimes with Carmine Persico, the former mob boss, or Jonathan Pollard, the spy, had hurried to the infirmary, passing the solitary housing unit—the hole—ducking through the gym and the twelve-foot-high fence and turning in the direction of Maryland, the unit where child molesters are confined after they’ve served their sentences. As usual, the med line was long and moved slowly. There were a hundred prisoners, some standing outside in the heat, waiting for one nurse.
Madoff was accustomed to hearing other inmates call his name. From July 14, the day he arrived, he’d been an object of fascination. Prisoners had assiduously followed his criminal career on the prison TVs. “Hey, Bernie,” an inmate would yell to him admiringly while he was at his job sweeping up the cafeteria, “I seen you on TV.” In return, Madoff nodded and waved, smiling that sphinxlike half-smile. “What did he say?” Madoff sometimes asked.
But that evening an inmate badgered Madoff about the victims of his $65 billion scheme, and kept at it. According to K. C. White, a bank robber and prison artist who escorted a sick friend that evening, Madoff stopped smiling and got angry. “Fuck my victims,” he said, loud enough for other inmates to hear. “I carried them for twenty years, and now I’m doing 150 years.”
For Bernie Madoff, living a lie had once been a full-time job, which carried with it a constant, nagging anxiety. “It was a nightmare for me,” he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,” he said in a little-noticed interview with them.
And so prison offered Madoff a measure of relief. Even his first stop, the hellhole of Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), where he was locked down 23 hours a day, was a kind of asylum. He no longer had to fear the knock on the door that would signal “the jig was up,” as he put it. And he no longer had to express what he didn’t feel. Bernie could be himself. Pollard’s former cellmate John Bowler recalls a conversation between Pollard and Madoff: “Bernie was telling a story about an old lady. She was bugging him for her money, so he said to her, ‘Here’s your money,’ and gave her a check. When she saw the amount she says, ‘That’s unbelievable,’ and she says, ‘Take it back.’ And urged her friends [to invest].”
Pollard thought that taking advantage of old ladies was “kind of fucked up.”
“Well, that’s what I did,” Madoff said matter-of-factly.
“You are going to pay with God,” Pollard warned.
Madoff was unmoved. He was past apologizing. In prison, he crafted his own version of events. From MCC, Madoff explained the trap he was in. “People just kept throwing money at me,” Madoff related to a prison consultant who advised him on how to endure prison life. “Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said, ‘What, I’m not good enough?’ ” One day, Shannon Hay, a drug dealer who lived in the same unit in Butner as Madoff, asked about his crimes. “He told me his side. He took money off of people who were rich and greedy and wanted more,” says Hay, who was released in December. People, in other words, who deserved it.
There is, as it happens, honor among thieves, a fact that worked mostly to Madoff’s benefit. In the context of prison, he isn’t a cancer on society; he’s a success, admired for his vast accomplishments. “A hero,” wrote Robert Rosso, a lifer, on a website he managed to found called convictinc .com. “He’s arguably the greatest con of all time.”
From the day Bernard Lawrence Madoff, prisoner No. 61727-054, arrived at the softer of Butner’s two medium-security facilities in handcuffs and shackles, his over-the-collar hair shorn close, his rich man’s paunch diminished, he was a celebrity, even if his admirers were now murderers and sex offenders. The Butner correctional complex, which includes four prisons and a medical center, already has its share of crime kings. Pollard, the Israel cause célèbre who spied for the Jewish homeland, lived in Madoff’s housing unit, Clemson (the dorms are named after Atlantic Coast Conference colleges). Persico, the former Colombo-family godfather, lives in nearby Georgia Tech. Omar Ahmad-Rahman, the blind sheikh who helped engineer the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is in Butner. The Rigases from Pennsylvania, the father and son who bankrupted Adelphia Communications Corporation, are there—they wear crisp, pressed uniforms, which inmates assume they pay others to maintain.
Daughter Turns Mom in for Ponzi Scheme
01 Sep 2010 2 Comments
in All Things That Matter Press, amazon.com, business, consulting, finance, investing, investments, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, ponzi schemes, scams, schemes, The Swindler, USA, Wall Street, world Tags: All Things That Matter Press, Amazon.com, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, Politics, ponzi schemes, President Oabam, scams, USA, Wall Street
Kim Flanigan (right) said the last straw was when she heard her mother trying to solicit funds at church from a widow with nine kids.
By Mike Celizic
TODAYshow.com contributor
updated 4/2/2010 10:28:12 AM ET
Would you have the courage to turn your own mother in to authorities in order to stop a Ponzi scheme?
That wasn’t a rhetorical question for Kim Flanigan, who faced just such a dilemma when it became apparent that her widowed mother was involved as both a participant and a recruiter for a classic get-rich-quick scheme that had already ensnared 100 or more people.
When Flanigan heard her mother trying to convince a widow with nine children to invest her life savings in the scheme, she knew she had no choice.
“That was my breaking point,” Flanigan told TODAY’s Ann Curry Friday in New York. Rather than watch a widow lose money she desperately needed, Flanigan called state and federal officials. Her courageous act would bring down a $50 million Ponzi scheme and put its three ringleaders in federal prison. For a time, Flanigan’s mother as well as an aunt were also under investigation, but authorities eventually decided they were more victims than victimizers and filed no charges.
One reason the scam worked so well is because it preyed on churchgoing people. The widow Flanigan’s mom was trying to recruit was a member of her church. One of the three ringleaders of the investment scheme was an associate pastor of a church in California.
Many of the participants wanted to use some of the 50 to 300 percent profits they were promised to donate to charitable projects.
“You have just normal people who want to do good — and make money at the same time,” Flanigan told NBC News, which will tell the full story on Dateline at 9 (8 CT) tonight.
vTODAY
David and Kim Flanigan appeared on TODAY, discussing the tough decision Kim made to turn her mother in for her Ponzi scheme involvement.
Kim and her husband, David, who joined her on TODAY, were also sucked in at first by her mother’s enthusiasm, offering $10,000 to the investment pool.
Preying on friends, family
Such frauds are called “affinity schemes” because they prey on people with natural affinities. In that, the scam was similar to that pulled off by Bernie Madoff, who used his shared Jewish heritage to sucker the bulk of his victims.
The participants were pulled along by nightly conference calls that could last an hour or more and involved 100 people. During the calls, Henry Uliomereyon Jones, described as the mastermind of the scam, would keep everyone updated on the latest developments.
Kim Flanigan’s aunt — her mother’s sister — was the first to get ensnared. She had attended a “Millionaire Mind” seminar put on by Peak Potentials Training in her home state of Washington. The Flanigans, who now own a furniture store in Casper, Wyo., were living in Kalispell, Mont., at the time and Kim’s mother was living with them. Peak Potentials was not involved in the scam, but the aunt met people who were during networking sessions that were part of the seminar.
Two investments were involved, both phony. One was an outfit called Tri Energy, Inc., which claimed to own four coal mines in Kentucky. The company needed investments to put the mines on line, when huge profits would start pouring in. In reality, there were only two mines, and neither was profitable. This accounted for $32 million of the scheme.
The other deal, and this one really was too good to be true, involved 20,000 metric tons of gold bullion. That’s twice as much gold as the entire U.S. reserves. The bullion had to be moved, and there were huge profits to be made for helping to finance that move.
‘It became an obsession’
Kim and David realized early on that it was all a scam, but they couldn’t convince her mother or aunt of that. To build a case, Kim started taping the nightly conference calls.
“It became an obsession for months and months. I just laid on my bed with a speakerphone on and a little tape recorder in my hand and recorded phone calls,” she said, likening the sessions to a soap opera.
“It seems like there was always something that was happening, progress that was being made,” Kim continued. “Then setbacks would happen, where more money was needed to be able to complete it. It was a daily powwow to keep people enrolled involved, to make it feel like it was being moved forward, that there was progress that was being made.”
David Flanigan said that once people had invested their belief and their money in the scam, it was hard for them to back away and admit they’d been taken.
“They had a lot invested. No one wants to feel that they were made a fool of, that they were taken advantage of,” David said. “The people that were running it, Henry Jones and others, were very convincing. They were very good. When you asked questions, they would just make it more complicated, and you’d feel like, ‘I don’t want to be the only one that doesn’t understand this. Henry seems to know what he’s talking about.’ ”
Retreat from Stimulus
31 Aug 2010 1 Comment
in All Things That Matter Press, bailouts, business, finance, investing, investments, news, Politics, ponzi schemes, scams, schemes, USA, Wall St. reform, Wall Street Tags: All Things That Matter Press, Amazon.com, democrat, economic stimulus, Federal Reserve, fiscal reform, government, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, Politics, President Obama, republican, stimulus, stumulus plans, USA, world
By Greg Robb, MarketWatch
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. (MarketWatch)
Lawmakers in the U.S. and across the world are preparing to retreat from stimulus measures based on theories that have no scientific basis and amount to alchemy, Indiana University professor Eric Leeper charged Saturday.
“Does any model exist to show that 18 months ago it made sense for the United Kingdom to expand fiscal policy, while now it makes sense to implement the recently announced 25% nearly across-the-board budget cuts?” Leeper asked.
Former IMF economist says Fed isn’t Superman
The former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, tells MarketWatch’s Greg Robb the Federal Reserve can’t be expected to be a Superman in times of economic trouble.
Leeper urged central bankers gathered at the annual Federal Reserve policy retreat to end their taboo about discussing fiscal-policy issues.
Leeper’s remarks came a day after European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet argued that across-the-board deficit reduction was the best strategy to foster growth in Europe and global economies after the global recession.
Leeper said there is no evidence to support Trichet’s view.
While some countries have succeeded in cutting budget deficits without producing a downturn, “there is no evidence that [if] many countries — say, much of Europe — undertake fiscal austerity measures simultaneously then economic activity will improve,” Leeper said.
With the U.S. economy teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession and possible deflation, U.S. lawmakers could help by fiscal expansion, he said.
Unfortunately, “U.S. fiscal policy, like its European counterparts, is too politically confused and paralyzed to be a player.” Leeper said.
Leeper also criticized a paper written by top Obama administration aides Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein defending the government’s $787 billion stimulus plan, saying it didn’t “rise to the scientific standards to which monetary policy analyses aspire” because the multiplier numbers they used aren’t in the public domain and can’t be professionally scrutinized.
Obama administration officials attending the Jackson Hole conference declined to discuss Leeper’s paper.
Former Bush administration economists, who have been very critical of Obama economic policies this weekend, admitted that policy over the past decade could have been better.
Lawrence Lindsey, president of the Lindsey Group and a former Fed governor and Bush administration official, said more focus was needed “on the quality of policy” in Washington.
The Obama administration’s stimulus package was a “big mistake and not about job creation,” Lindsey said in an interview. “That is why we are in the situation we are in.”
Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School, and the architect of the Bush tax cuts, said both parties are guilty of poor economic policies. He called for a national debate to decide how big the government should be and then the tax system should be modified to fund it.
****Government is not the enemy if you ask me…
For some great insight into the inner working of Wall Street please purchase my new book, The Swindler. It is available in trade paperback or eFormat from amazon.com. ISBN 978-0-9844219-4-7. Thank you!
Was the Flash Crash Rigged?
30 Aug 2010 1 Comment
in All Things That Matter Press, business, finance, investing, investments, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, ponzi schemes, scams, schemes, The Swindler, Wall St. reform, Wall Street, world Tags: All Things That Matter Press, business, CNBC, Cramer, finance, financial sector, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, NYSE, Politics, President Obama, SEC, Wall Street, world
| MONDAY, AUGUST 30, 2010
By JIM MCTAGUE
Hunsader is founder and president of Nanex, a quote-feed provider. “We consolidate all trade quotes from the equities, options, futures, futures options—anything that trades on U.S. markets,” he says. He normalizes the data and compresses it 20-to-1 so that it can be sent over the Internet, “which is a thing we do that nobody else does.” Customers need only a regular high-speed Internet connection to receive it. High-frequency traders can execute thousands of stock orders each second, via advanced computers using decision-making algorithms. The traders pay exchanges hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for direct feeds to their trading floors and to their pricing data. The data allow them to see information headed for the Consolidated Quote System in advance. The CQS is the “tape” that the stock-buying public sees. The regulators believed that the time advantage provided by the direct feed versus the CQS was just a millisecond or two. But Hunsader asserts that traders are delaying the tapes by hundreds of milliseconds during short intervals.
HE SAYS Exchanges have tried to duplicate Hunsader’s findings with their own data for May 6 and say that they have been unsuccessful. They see no corresponding slowdown in the tape at 20,000 trades per second. The tape slows on any heavy trading day. Rather than manipulation, they contend that the slowing might simply indicate insufficient capacity to handle existing customer volume. In any event, they hadn’t a clue about any tape slowdowns until Hunsader raised the issue. It lagged behind direct feeds on May 6 by over 20 seconds.
Hunsader says his data show that on April 28, similar high-speed activity caused an ultra-mini flash crash in stocks like Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, which fell 50 cents and then fully recovered in just two seconds—more than enough time for a high-frequency trader to short the stocks, buy in at the low and then sell when they again traded with a normal bid-ask spread of a cent. “It was eerily similar to May 6,” he asserts, adding that the exchanges could write software to thwart such manipulation. “It’s programming 101,” he declares.
They send quotes for a Big Board stock or combination of stocks to an exchange at the rate of 20,000 quotes-per-second versus a usual flow rate of about 10,000-per-second. The higher or longer the message traffic stays above 20,000, the slower the tape. This seems right out of the movie The Sting. If you have advanced knowledge of the market’s direction and more time to use that knowledge, you make more money. You can short a stock before the public knows it’s headed down or scarf up shares that are headed higher before individual investors can react. a self-taught programmer who became an expert on market data, argues that rogue traders using high-speed computers deliberately slow the stock market’s consolidated tape every trading day, to create fleeting price mismatches among the dozen exchanges handling NYSE-listed shares and to profit from the momentary differences.
Creating an Efficient Government
28 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Politics Tags: All Things That Matter Press, business, congress, democrat, finance, government, Michelle Kaye Malsbury, news, Politics, President Obama, republican, Ron Paul, tea party
Very little has been written on the topic of the relationship between the leader and his/her followers. Yet, we understand the best and most effective leaders are only as good as their followers. This is true in corporations in America and around the globe, as well as, inside our various governmental agencies and NGO’s alike. [non-governmental organizations] Fox and Baker[1] call the relationship between the leader and the follower “reciprocity in leadership“. In order to reap the most rewards from this relationship we need to consider it a system in, and of, itself.
Collaboration and communication are two of the major drivers behind change and success for organizations. President Obama has been heralded as a great orator or communicator, but if his words fail to move people toward the appropriate or intended action (collaboration) then whatever he does he could still be considered a failure. What sets a great leader apart from a good or mediocre one can be as simple as how effective and open that leader is in readying his organization for continuous and inevitable change. That said, there is no reason that Barack Obama [or for that matter any other President before or after him] cannot be the instrument of great and lasting change for this country and our government.
Great groups and great leaders create each other…” said Bennis and Biederman. [2] Creating lasting, meaningful, and durable change in our government will mean implementing new ways of thinking, observing and acting from the top down. It is possible that each of our governmental department heads, both singularly and united, can create truly great leaders and followers within our government as a whole. Doing so would serve two purposes: it would make the people of America proud, regardless of party affiliation, and could serve as a template for emerging and antiquated governments around the world.
Today’s managers and leaders have to be change agents if they want their businesses to survive. More and more emphasis in businesses is being placed on streamlining functions, increasing responsibility and accountability, and doing more with less. Noted educational business author Goetsch, et.al.[3] [paraphrase] stated that by continually improving processes and activities across an organization [via benchmarking or best practices, or systems analogy, high performing organizations, etc.] we can achieve and sustain increased job performance and improve employee job satisfaction. I believe the same can hold true for our government.
Roulet [4] said that “Leadership is the quality of the leader’s performance.” He then speaks about some ways to measure leadership performance beginning with three basic criteria: accomplishments, “cost effectiveness of resources”, and “adherence to values”. Leaders of all types are challenged to create something of value or a legacy based on something of value handed down to those that they led. Leaders have limited resources and must therefore maximize the use of them. And leaders must do things that are important to the people they lead.
President Obama has many achievements to prove he is performing. Those most critical of him have taken exception to his allocation of resources and priority of accomplishments during our down economy, and burgeoning deficit, as well as, how important these accomplishments are to the people in America. I happen to think that if our government was operating at optimum those oppositional voices would fade into the background.
Isn’t it the custodial right of every American citizen to ensure that our government is working for all of us and not just the few who can afford to pay for their voices to be heard? Afterall, we, the citizens of America, are the stockholders and shareholders of our government via payment of our taxes, legal citizenship, and the ability to vote for our chosen leadership. In boardrooms around the world inefficiency would be unacceptable and a serious deterrent to profit. Why should we treat our government differently that we would any other organization?
Whether you are republican, democrat, or independent we are all, or should be anyway, concerned about our rising deficit and overarching growth of our government in comparison to the private sector. Like the orbit of the earth if it slips just a degree or two off its axis we could be doomed. Our government is operating as close to that tipping point as any of us should be comfortable with. We need to bring things back into balance. What can, and should, be done to save us from bankruptcy and certain failure while optimizing the resources we currently have in our portfolio?
Getting our government back in balance and working harmoniously for us will take a concerted effort on everyone’s behalf. Change is never easy, but change is a necessary part of life. Things change day to day and in some instances hour to hour. Yet, there are programs and policies in place in our government that have not been changed for decades. It is my opinion that if we did look into those agencies we could find a lot of waste and duplication that could save us all time and money. These savings can help pay down the deficit or be reallocated to programs that are working but in desperate need of more resources to maintain momentum and achieve their desired goals.
There are things we can do to make our government work more efficiently and effectively. These practices can be implemented from the Pentagon through the Veteran’s Administration, from the oval office and cabinet staff down through our rank and file government offices and beyond. We’ve got nothing to lose and perhaps everything to gain by looking into creating a more efficient government.
The purpose of this book is to analyze many of the plans and policies implemented by thoughtful leadership in the business arena that have helped take struggling corporations back to being high performers. I will begin with Continuous Quality Improvement and work forward through the 360 Degree Evaluation Process, Best Practices, Total Quality Management, Sigma Six, the Z Theory and more.
I happen to believe that by doing so we can find the right mix for elimination of waste and duplication of processes and procedures thereby improving performance, increasing accountability, cutting costs, and making our government more efficient for all parties involved. Making an efficient government only takes a spark of an idea to generate a following and before long that spark has turned into a full flame. We can create a win-win situation. We deserve a government that works for everyone and we can achieve it if we try. Can you get on board?
[1] Leslie Ann Fox and Katharine Gratwick Baker, Leading a Business in Anxious Times: A Systems Approach to Becoming More Effective in the Workplace (Care Communications Press, Chicago, IL. 2009), 15
[2] Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1997), 198-99
[3] David L. Goetsch and Stanley B. Davis, Quality Management, (Prentice Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ 2003) 4th Edition, 10
[4] John Roulet, The Supervision Solution: Manage Performance-Not People, (Javelin Publishing, Whitsett, NC 2009), 5
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