We are going the alternative media route.
We had an open house and invited the online news site:
http://www.swrnn.com/ to come by and check us out. Unfortunately we would never get this kind of coverage from our local paper anymore.
I have arranged for one of my favorite podcasts:
http://evadot.com/ to attend the Virginia Regional and do a live podcast. All made arrangements with a team I know is going to be there to hook up with them for the podcast.
Invited Dr. Kiki Sanford from Dr. Kiki's Science Hour (part of the TWIT network) to attend the San Jose regional. I was listening to her last podcast co hosted by , Ariel Waldman, digital anthropologist and the founder of SpaceHack.org, and they were talking about wanting to learn how to build robots. What better place to learn than hangin' at a FIRST competition.
Printing tons of these Regional Competitions Handouts (they look like entry tickets)
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2309, to tell people about the regionals I am going to (San Diego, LA). They are cheap to make and easy to hand out. I give stacks to our team members to hand out too.
Lots of activity on Twitter talking about robots. This actually helped to encourage one of the execs at the company I work for (he follows me on Twitter) to ask me to help get his daughter on a team. Now I have one more allie in the company to help get it to support FIRST. It is so much fun watching someone's first exposure to FIRST
Started a FIRST Robotics group on LinkedIN;
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=..._ltod_requests and update regularly with FIRST robotics news. This was actually part of Dean's homework in 2008. We are getting near to 700 members.
Presenting any chance we get. We have a canned presentation that any of the team members can present in 4, 10, and 20 minute formats. All the text is there, all they have to do is read. We presented to the Riverside City Council on Jan 4th and now have the ears of our local leaders. Also worked with the Kiwanis for a couple of presentations and got invited to their annual Turkey BBQ where a ton of community leaders show up.
Hope this help spur some ideas.