Very often when we’re pitching a new piece of business, the prospect starts to wonder out loud about whether everything that could be done for them on the marketing front is being done. It’s not an unreasonable line of inquiry.

Far too often, however, that line of inquiry leads to a terribly silly question being asked: “What’s the one thing we could be doing that we’re not doing that’s going to turn everything around?”

Marketing professionals working inside companies tell me they regularly hear the same thing from their executives. In short, these people are wondering if there’s a marketing silver bullet.

While there may well be intelligent and high-value marketing options that are not being pursued, I have never found an instance where some single initiative would magically turn things around. Marketing simply doesn’t work that way.

Entire forests have been cleared and pulped into paper to print all the studies that establish that customers need to hear the same message several times and across several different channels before they are moved to take action on it. This means that effective marketing must be a strategically planned and coherently integrated campaign of multiple tactics designed to engage your prospects in as many different places as possible or affordable with mutually reinforcing messages whose impact accumulates over time.

When I hear the silver bullet question, I know what’s gone wrong, and it ain’t that some single high-impact initiative is being left undone. What’s gone wrong is the strategy. Specifically, there isn’t one, or it’s inadequate, or it’s not being adhered to.

Here’s what I mean.

A properly developed marketing strategy engenders high-level confidence that all appropriate marketing tactics and campaigns were thoroughly considered and that the proper mix is being implemented. A properly developed marketing strategy builds in evaluative mechanisms that reassure clients and corporate executives that they are on the right track, even if the end point is still far out of sight. A properly developed marketing strategy does not leave people wondering if there is something more they could be doing.

Your customers aren’t werewolves. Stop looking for a silver bullet and start planning your marketing strategically.

(About the author: For  30 years, Francis Moran has navigated the fault lines between journalism and public relations, between technology companies and their markets. Having worked as a consultant, reporter and editor, Francis is an insightful marketing and public relations strategist, an expert writer and a seasoned veteran of the specific challenges of helping B2B technology companies engage with their marketplace and those who influence it. You can reach him at Francis@Francis-Moran.com)

RE: IMPORTANT CORRECTION (URGENT.)

I sigh. I’m frustrated. I didn’t do my job the best I could and something must have slipped. I kick myself for thinking that I might have missed something important or misspelled a name. Even in the era of fantastic spell-checking, that still happens. All that happens before I even open the message from Company X’s public relations team.

Then I realize it’s not a correction. It’s a “clarification” or an “important distinction.” It’s some kind of sick play to get the company represented in a more positive light. But every single time it’s labeled a “factual error” by either the company that is trying to get a little bit of more positive play or the public relations person trying to get me to change the story.

“I must stress that I am not talking about just language used (I take [former VentureBeat executive editor] Owen’s point — you’re not our PR agency!) but describing us as an online service is incorrect — we are a mobile platform,” one public relations representative said in an email.

I then had to take a few minutes to explain that an operating system like OS X or something like Facebook — not his client’s video sharing application — was a platform. That’s, of course, going off the definition of being able to build smaller pieces of software within the framework of a larger piece of software that runs all of them.

Three levels of abstraction away, said video sharing application is a platform. Except that is incredibly confusing because it also throws it into the same category as other “platforms” like Facebook. And it’s also insanely confusing for readers, who odds are also aren’t quite sure what actually codifies a “platform.”

So here I am, trying to correct your correction. During this time — which is usually during typical office hours — I spend trying to spar with you, I could have been writing additional stories. But I’m operating under the false assumption that I might need you to pitch me additional stories and I opened your message under the false assumption that I had apparently written something that was factually incorrect.

Here’s the thing, guys. You are not the gatekeepers of information. There are other ways to get the story. If it’s important enough, I and every other reporter out there in the world will find a way to get the story. It’s our job to be scrappy and it’s our job to be relentless when trying to figure out the best story.

You can either help us by pitching us stories with useful information and facilitating the communication. Or you can insult every one of us for the sake of getting a single word changed to something that is an even worse buzzword and run the risk of sabotaging an otherwise useful relationship. We here at VentureBeat already put up with your insipid demands for embargoes over new cloud computing software model number 771.

I’m personally going to ask you guys to stick to your guns and help us do our job. It make things much easier for all of us.

Lynley out.

(Also, everyone is banned from using the word “platform” from here on out.)

NewsBasis, the startup aiming to make communication between journalists and the companies they cover smooth as butter, is launching a new media-relations service today that hopes to bring publicity to small companies which can’t afford a professional PR firm’s monthly retainer.

Content publishers who are overwhelmed with the rigid PR apparatus that spews an unstoppable torrent of unfiltered pitches and cold calls may also benefit.

Brevity is a key feature: NewsBasis allows companies and organizations, PR agencies, and experts to pitch stories in 280 characters or less, the length of two posts on Twitter. In its new Content Development Exchange, the service automatically promotes stories to relevant content publishers who can then easily follow up if they’re interested.

Launched in August of this year and already in use by the staff members of major news organizations like the New York Times, CNN, AOL, and the Huffington Post, NewsBasis is currently based around content publishers making media requests and company reps directly responding to them.

While currently in beta and free for all members, the company will eventually charge a subscription fee for the companies that enlist its services, remaining free for journalists. Similar to this main revenue model, the new features will charge companies to promote stories, most likely on a per-day basis (for however many days it’s in rotation). In this manner, companies get the flexibility to “turn stories on or off, or run a bunch at once if they want,” according to founder and CEO Darryl Siry, who added that other premium services and products are in the works as well. These may include detailed analytics packages, targeted media, and the like.

Siry, who was inspired by his media relations experience as the former senior vice president of marketing and sales at Tesla Motors, believes there’s a market opportunity nearly $2 billion large (by his own account) in serving the millions of such small and specialized businesses that are currently underserved by PR firms that commonly require a $3,000-5,000 monthly retainer, way above these businesses’ threshold.

As a VentureBeat contributor, I have used NewsBasis to make requests for my own story pitches. Reps from the company side quickly responded with the clever angles and insights I needed to beef up my piece. I basically crowdsourced my story angles. Based off the few request workflows I’ve initiated so far, the feedback has been phenomenal.

I haven’t witnessed what some might call “A-list” Silicon Valley respondents, like some of the activity on Q&A site Quora, but it’s still made my job as a journalist a lot easier. Instead of hunting through a rolodex, trying to find the right people to contact, and then reaching out one by one, the NewsBasis model let me cast a wide net and get responses I needed quickly (which matters when you’re on deadline)!

Similar to how the company allows for media request crowdsourcing, this new feature will hopefully provide a similar disruption to the company-side of the equation: bringing flexibility to a world of rigid press releases and email pitches (which, like many others in the industry, our own editor Owen Thomas has a gripe or two with). If early experiences with the original NewsBasis service by myself and other journalists can prove a useful measure, this new feature will bring much value to small companies who need PR tools on the cheap and swamped publishers who are overwhelmed with the stagnantly rigid PR apparatus.

The company, which has attracted bad press before for serving users misleading offers in games and for comments made by its rather candid chief executive Mark Pincus, will need to tightly manage its public image as it quickly grows toward 1,000 employees.

Dudeck expressed enthusiasm on her personal Twitter account about moving back from Southern California to the company’s Potrero Hill office in San Francisco.

She leaves after a string of senior employees stepped down at MySpace. Ali and Hadi Partovi, who sold iLike to MySpace, left full-time roles at the social network while former chief executive Owen Van Natta left the company earlier this year. Dudeck was one of the few executives at MySpace who stayed on after the departure of Van Natta’s predecessor, Chris DeWolfe, who ran the company at the time of its sale to News Corp.

It has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.  There are very large companies spending huge resources to develop applications and operating environments and then saying, “Please steal this.”

Well, virtually steal.  The cost to run substantial implementations on Google Sites, use Amazon Web Services or leverage Salesforce.com are obscenely small compared to what the features in those services would have cost five years ago.

Open source started the trend and still makes up a huge portion of the theft-worthy applications available.  A website CMS is essentially free these days, requiring just some nearly-free design talent (such as 99designs), a decent nearly-free writer (i.e. elance) and some of your time.

You now can do three of five basic components of a pre-product company for almost nothing: A web presence, a good idea, and a good business model.  The fourth depends on the idea – either a good team or good operations.  Either way, you need resources to translate your idea into something people can interact with.

Once you’ve got these four, you can get to market. But it’s the fifth component – finding enough feedback to validate your idea – that’s toughest to get. Ultimately, you need to get input from potential consumers before spending years on what might turn out to be a bad idea.

These days, there are four ways to get the minimum necessary attention to determine if your idea is worth investing additional time and effort:

Public relations – Getting media outlets to do your job for you, by covering your idea and disseminating it far and wide, is the dream. But achieving that dream isn’t easy, given the sheer overload of pitches reporters get daily.

Many entrepreneurs go no further than cutting a check to a PR firm.  An alternate approach is to find an out of work PR pro, hire them for a week, suck their brains dry and do it yourself.  This isn’t for the faint of heart, and it may just be simpler to keep the PR person on retainer, but the basic PR tasks of developing relationships, pitching story ideas, and helping writers aren’t rocket science. They just require discipline and focus. (The larger question is: Do you have the time to do it right?)

Natural search – Like good media coverage, this is exceedingly difficult area to master these days unless you have an incredibly focused topic or lots of friendly inbound links from your contacts. The average entrepreneur doesn’t have the specialized expertise to develop this.  Again, it might be worth hiring an out of work SEO specialist for a week and suck him or her dry.  Better yet, negotiate a low rate and keep them on retainer.  (Elance is a good option here as well.)

Social networks – There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people who spend every second thinking about this, so I’ll spare you another essay.  My one word of advice is to stay focused on the target audience’s needs and find their watering holes.  Whether it’s Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, LinkedIn, or one of a hundred other resources, there are plenty of ways to reach your audience.

A great byproduct of the social phenomenon is that most expertise is disseminated for free, open to steal.  Applying the expertise is, of course, the hard part, but a smart entrepreneur can figure out 90 percent of it from readily available resources.

Search engine marketing –You can always buy Web traffic if you have the bankroll.  If all else fails, buy a thousand visits and see how customers interact with the site. This, unfortunately, is tough to steal. (Google has lots of lawyers, so stealing from them is a bad, bad idea.)

Practically everything you need to succeed is waiting for you to raid it.  You can get enough from a single credit card advance to pay for everything mentioned above.

Unleash your inner pirate and steal the technology and knowledge that are there for the taking.  If you have the brains, drive, and disciple, there’s no longer a capital barrier to proving yourself well enough to figure out if you have the next Facebook or the next Pets.com.

Photo by Spanner Dan via Flickr

While you can’t underestimate the power of a good press release, too many businesses forget that it’s just the beginning of a process. The real trick to successful marketing is ensuring you have all the elements of your public relations campaign in place before turning the spotlight on yourself.

Consider the four “Ps” when it comes to establishing the groundwork for a successful PR campaign: photography, pitch, profile and pack. With these elements lined up, you’ll be better prepared for the follow-up.

Photography: Make sure that you have a great selection of visuals available, should your press release capture a reporter’s eye. This includes projects, screenshots, shots of the spokesperson and anything else that is relevant.

Reporters like to have distinctive angles to their stories, so try to have a wide selection of photographs available, rather than using the same one for every outlet.

Also, make sure you have high-quality content. Many journalists use digital images, so make sure these are available — with a resolution of at least 300 dots per inch (300 dpi).

Pitch: Capturing attention with your press release is just the start of the process. You need to have your pitch ready for when the media begins calling.

Journalists often call looking for a quote and some additional news beyond what was in the release. Make sure you have something prepared, so you don’t fumble through a phone call, making the reporter less inclined to write about you and your company.

Profile: Your corporate profile should always be up-to-date. Never assume the reporter is familiar with your company. Many reporters file several stories per day and sometimes details get lost in the process.

Providing an accurate, comprehensive and succinct profile will help the reporter do their job and give you an opportunity to control the positioning of your business in the story.

Press pack: A good way to communicate that profile is via a press pack. This should contain additional background information to help journalists prepare a story or an interview.

Put together both a traditional printed pack as well as an online version. Both should include the same information — background, biographies, images, database structure and data sheets. Include a company brochure if you’ve got one.

As with your profile, keep this pack up to date at all times. This will allow the journalist to easily find what he or she is looking for when preparing a story.

The four Ps take a little more time, but if you make the investment, you’re likely to see a much greater return on your press release.