This brings a host of PR opportunities for your business.

Firstly, for the next 29 days, journalists are going to be very hungry for unusual election content. They’ll be looking for alternative angles about voting, why we vote, how we pick candidates, etc.

Already the UK’s radio stations have interviewed body language experts and speech analysts. Expect plenty more in the weeks to come.

The question is this: How can you take whatever it is that your business does and make it relevant to journalists who have to come up with new coverage about the election tomorrow?

Secondly, an almost bigger opportunity is generating story ideas that are NOT about the election.

For every story about the election, newspapers and radios will be desperately looking for non-political content. This is a huge opportunity for you. Quirky stories will especially be welcome, as journalists look for something to balance the dry political stuff.

Partly this is to try and keep the newspaper publishers happy. For example it has a new scheme that will allow papers such as The Times to let their content be indexed and appear in Google News, but require readers to pay for reading some of that content.

The latest experiment from Google is the Living Story idea.

It’s explained in full here.

The concept is brilliant. You will have a single page for each story that is constantly updating itself as a story changes and new content is added by publishers across the world.

A stunning idea. If it works and spreads to the UK it could make it easier for you to track what the media is saying about your business.

Just had a call from BBC WM, the regional radio station for the West Midlands.

Would I do a live interview this afternoon about this Tesco publicity stunt? Absolutely!

But 5 minutes later, another call from the BBC… seems they have gone for another PR expert instead. Some bloke called Max Clifford… personally, haven’t heard of him.

(actually I’m delighted to be on the same press contacts list as Max Clifford! And the BBC were lovely in the way they ‘let me down’, promising to turn to me for help in the future. Nice people)

It’s almost always about the story.

Good contacts can open doors and set up opportunities. But a great story gives you the biggest shot you’ll get at major PR coverage.

I caught the end of our regional BBC TV news tonight, where they did a live outside broadcast from an Indian restaurant that had introduced a curry so hot, no-one could eat a whole plate of it. And they had to fill in a disclaimer form before they did.

A classic publicity stunt. Getting plenty of valuable air time on a BBC TV show.

Fantastic.

OK, so it must be a slow news day. But you don’t get coverage like that “because you know a journalist”. You get coverage like that because you had a great story at the right time (exactly the timem the BBC had a slot to fill).

The story has generated more than 500 articles already this morning according to Google News. And that’s on top of the thousands it has received over the course of the competition.

This has been the perfect PR stunt. Here’s why – and how you can use the lessons to generate publicity for your business.

It was packed with standoutability: This was the first time anyone had offered up a job such as this. Although an unashamed PR stunt from the very beginning, it was highly unusual. Calling it The Best Job In The World helped label it as more than just a normal competition. 

It was aspirational: In these times of financial doom and gloom, it was the perfect antidote for a public and media weary of negative news. Pictures and descriptions of a beautiful island are high in demand.

It had legs: The competition has been running for months, and it’s virtually guaranteed that Ben will get extensive media coverage throughout the six months of his job. There are many different media angles to the story. This one stunt alone has generated a year’s worth of free publicity. 

The stunt promoted the product: The product was the island and every story about the competition plugged the product.

So how can you use this to influence a PR stunt for your business? The most important of the four things above is standoutability. Do not underestimate the power of being the first to do something. This alone will determine how much media coverage you get.

And ensure you are plugging your product. It’s relatively easy to generate a publicity stunt that will get media attention. It’s much harder making sure a sell for your business is built into the stunt.

It allows the crime to be shown with the court report.

Not good PR for a certain sandwich chain.

It’s worked fine for three years but this morning is down. Argh! Have we done something wrong?

No. It’s not us, it’s Gmail. And it’s down across the world.

What’s interesting is how we found out. 20 minutes before there was anything in Google News, it was all over the micro blogging service Twitter. At one point 100 people a second were tweeting that their Gmail was down.

You can follow it with a simple Twitter search, or using a clever application like Twitterfall.

An important part of PR is connecting to your audience in the way they want to be communicated with. Right now, Twitter is a hot way of talking to people.

Our friends at Bytestart have a very useful guide to using Twitter in your business.

UPDATE: Our email is back! And apparently, Google’s London PR team couldn’t send out a statement… because their email was down!

Again the people running Little Chef came over badly.

At the end of programme Heston – surely the UK’s most amiable chef – was threatening to walk out because there was no sign of any commitment from Little Chef.

He had redesigned the famous Olympic Breakfast and was quite fairly asking them to commit to five test sites instead of just one. Heston’s biggest fear about the project was that they were using him for publicity and not to really make a long-term change to the menu.

With one programme still to go, it increasingly looks that way.

At every turn the chief exec of Little Chef came over as insincere and false. His mouth was saying that he thought he had a real connection with Heston, but his eyes and actions were saying otherwise.

When the Little Chef board trooped into Heston’s restaurant to taste his new menu, they looked like a board. A bunch of suits who had lost touch with what was really happening in their restaurants.

If Little Chef’s goal for this was to reach people like me who haven’t eaten there for years and show me how much they’ve changed for the better (or are starting to change) – then so far they’ve failed. Let’s see what if tonight’s final episode turns this PR disaster around for them.