Unless reporters already knock at your door it can be difficult to win their attention. Expensive consultants and PR firms might help but few guarantee results. How to get attention when you’re not already a headline act remains a challenge.

A growing option for you is social media. The best known platforms like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter are all available to send messages, post pictures or video.

Social-casting is a new option in this space. And a new platform – TrakVu TV – offers you your own social-casting channel to program as you like. TrakVu TV operates like a TV talk show where the audience can talk back to and ask questions.

Invite your audience to log-on to the special page attached to your website where the guests watch and hear your live discussion, panel presentation, or launch party. But much more than just log-on, your guests join the event, interacting with you, asking questions in real-time and getting individual answers.

This gives you the chance to build the new relationships that you can then use to promote your idea or your brand. The mechanics are simple. TV cameras shoot your live event and transmit the pictures and sound to your specially built social-casting page. Guests then send their questions and comments to you through platforms like Twitter and you respond – all in real-time.

You set the discussion focus, date and time, and invite the audience of your choice. TrakVu TV costs a fraction of what you might pay to televise your live event along conventional lines.  Further, your audience is drawn to your website, boosting traffic, and at the end of the program you have the names and addresses of the guests who logged on.

TrakVu TV is not a substitute for conventional promotion but it can serve as an effective add-on, helping you expand into social media with a live interactive event that builds attention and drives buzz.