Monthly Archives: May 2010

hallett defines personal brand strategy

building your personal brand

Josh Hallett’s a social media pioneer who currently directs new media for content creation powerhouse Voce Communications. Their clients include Sony, Playstation, Yahoo, Disney and eBay. He spoke recently as part of PRSA Tampa Bay’s 2010 Professional Development Day on what’s needed in order for a personal brand to achieve online awareness across various media. (Read our series of articles on the same topic here.)

While his work mainly centers on large multi-nationals, Hallett’s comments were directed at the growing number of professionals who need to develop a coordinated online identity that for many is currently just an ad hoc combination of social networking mixed with the occasional hosted blog and a neglected twitter account. Continue reading →

marketing + pr: twin sons, different moms

Shun Or Hug? What Is Marketing’s Role In A Public Relations Practice?

Looks like there’s an opening for using marketing techniques in the message driven landscape of public relations. I’ve always felt comfortable with both and think integration is 1) a good thing and 2) entirely appropriate – assuming proficiency – for maximum audience reach.

Personal experience? PR skills tend to be a developable talent, while marketing instincts depend on process and can, to a much greater extent, be absorbed.

Can PR and Marketing Live Under the Same Roof?

If so, it would be like having two… two… two… mints in one. Given the light speed evolution of mass communications from primarily print delivered by primarily the U.S.P.S., it’s inevitable that public relations dialogue mashes up with marketers advertising message, creating a hybrid format that better fits the digital medium’s need for visuals.

To me, that’s what it looks like is happening, as print only media has blown up and broadcast only media is drying up. Put another way, for PR to rely solely on past best practices renders the message old before its time in a 24/7, app-driven, always on e-reader world.

Check this out at PRBreakfastClub for a first hand account of crossing over.

hd’s hail, mary? looks like

Harley Davidson’s Rebrand Strategy: Kitchen Sink

HD’s still looking for new directions out of the forest of consumer walk-on-by it’s lost in. Media Post’s industry pub Marketing Daily delivers details of TMC’s latest Maxim-ized efforts aimed at winning back share, on the back (figuratively speaking) of spokesperson/model/rider Marissa Miller.

Sigh… I get it. Dangle eye candy in front of viewers, Pavlovian response goes off, reader imagines she’s showering with him, wife’s ok with that, then he’s lickity split off to the dealer where he rite’s dat check before the steam evaporates.

But – but – it’s the chik riding the bike! By herself! And fem biker-ettes need men like fish need bicycles. Meanwhile, the campaign theme “Start Something” indicates an exhaustive naming session that apparantly sailed right past “Hey, What’s Up?” as an inspired call to action.

The image problem remains the bike line, not the actors. The communications problem remains. Period.

nothing in common, really, except

Lena Horne And Frank Frazetta; Cultural Milestones

What to make of yesterday’s passing of songstress temptress Lena Horne and today’s death of Frank Frazetta? Culturally, they have not one thing to do with one another except that each carved a unique niche in our popular psyche.

They lived in the same eras – he white, she black – read mostly the same headlines, drove mostly similar cars, could easily recall a time without air conditioning, cheap long distance calling or air travel on a whim. Long distance. Does anyone even use the term anymore?

Lena’s smokey “Stormy Weather” always makes me glance upward, just to check. Stormy weather. Birds. Sky. Why?

Frazetta’s iconic “Death Dealer”, by the same token – wait a minute, that’s not right. But it is part of the overall lifetime of influences that define me, just like Lena, about how I feel and how I think and how I wonder about just what that is, that Stormy Weather.

Fantasy illustration, the Times calls it. Goth, legend, murderous mystic raiders astride heavily hooved war horses against a flame lit sky at twilight. It was Frazetta, and his peer Boris Vallejo, whose fantastic works were instantly adapted to chopper tank art as the perfect exclamation mark for the biker lifestyle. Then, anyway, before Conan became governor and Molly Hatchet’s lyrics sort of made sense.

There it is then, a circle formed climbing up through the mountains out of Chattanooga, heading for Knoxville one way or Nashville the other. Alone, fading daylight, blackness behind, straight pipes pounding off the pass, “Stormy Weather” plays in my mind as a summer thunderstorm builds in the distance, massive clouds turned impossible shades of pink by an already set sun, while the single warrior on the tank guides the way.