Category Archives: events

views and insight from attended events

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 →

media spotlight: pbs tracks trends

a five-member panel hosted by pbs' newshour deliberated the changing media landscape

surviving in a digital tsunami

PBS NewsHour host Gwen Ifill led a five-member panel consisting of local print, digital and broadcast personalities in discussing The Changing Media Landscape, the last stop on a multi-state tour taking the public’s news temperature in cities across the country.

The 90-minute discussion, held today at St. Petersburg’s Poynter Institute, represented community, for profit, consumer and business POVs. It opened to an audience that included a contingent of Iraqi journalists by acknowledging the challenges facing a recession battered journalism that’s also being hammered by social media’s cultural transformation of how consumers take their news. Continue reading →

web w.o.m. – careful what you wish for

You! Customer! So What!

Will anyone, anywhere, ever say anything nice about Delta again? The answer is… no. Never. Just when I thought the statue of limitations on self-inflicted airline stupidity had run out after the Pringles/Virgin Air episode, Delta’s merger completion with Northwest last January actually signaled a fresh round of lowering the bar of customer expectations to depths previously unknown.

Reporting for Feministe, Jill Filipovic hit the mother lode of original travel horror story source material on her recent “trip” to Austin’s famously famous SXSW. Lucky for Delta, Jill’s a lawyer with a samurai writer’s instinct.

So even though the year’s still young, here’s my nomination for Best of Show – Travel Horror Stories (Domestic). Turn off the phone, make yourself comfortable, and enjoy.

taking a break from dealer expo

dealer expo: the early yearsIt’s been 15 years since I took a time out from the annual powersports trade show pilgrammage. Fifteen years of slogging north (why?) into the snow, sleet and slush, usually followed by a bike week encore, first in the mid ’60s but later abandoned as full on lifestyle turned 100-percent commercial. This year, I’m giving it a rest and using the time to concentrate instead on overdue hardware and software upgrades while dedicating a serious investment in time to integrate the latest high tech applications into a leaner, more efficient production and marketing workflow.

What’s changed? Plenty. Before the web, annual trade shows were the only opportunity for new product, catalogs, trends and personalities to converge. Schedules were built around catalog production deadlines. Business publications targeted show issues to preview a limited number of the latest products selected months in advance, and dealers learned about what they’d be selling during the coming year only after they got to the show. Life was orderly and well behaved. Marketplace control was top down and ironfisted in a traditional analog way. That was then. Continue reading →

learn to set silos aside

silos are great for storing grain - and that's about allLast month I was in Baton Rouge for, among other things, the Public Relations Association of Louisiana’s (PRAL) June meeting. The featured speaker was SSA Consultants partner Christel Slaughter, whose emotional plea was for everyone in the audience to “Stop The Silos!” as the first step in improving internal and external employee engagement.

Silos are a popular marketing metaphor for the formal compartmentalization of personnel, departments and functions. Silos not in the agricultural sense, but in the org chart ability to keep contents separate; corn from wheat, rice from peanuts, sales from marketing, pr from advertising, progression from regression – a.k.a., bureaucracy run amok. Continue reading →

cinco de may-O-mayo

acambaro_001CW Trek pal Steven Soto (second from left) sends his warmest Baja de Mayo regards after a quick weekend spin south of the border. Though not a doctor, and he doesn’t play one on t.v. either, Soto reports that swine flu was easily kept at bay by constant replinishment of the essentials: great trail, good friends, warm hospitality and tequila. As in margarita.

sema adds channel…pwspts is in

web-powersportJust in time for 2009. SEMA – the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association – has added a powersports and utility vehicles channel to its massive automotive collection of OE and aftermarket exhibitors.

Peter MacGillivray, SEMA vice president of communications and events, said that “The Powersports and Utility Vehicle marketplace is of growing importance to our core buyers. Manufacturers in this area will discover a slew of potential buyers. Continue reading →

mx to or at pri

You never know who you’ll see at PRI. Ex-MX Champ and current truck racer/event promoter Ricky Johnson, left, was at the Alpinestars booth talking strategy with team owner Steve Barlow, center. Steve owns 2 Red Bull/KMC/Bosch sponsored CORR trucks, drives Pro 4 while RJ handles the Pro 2 truck.

It’s no secret that marketing budgets have been slashed and with them the lifeblood of direct sponsored motor and powersports rides. Broadcast and print budgets have also been hung out to dry. What happens next is anyone’s guess: much will hinge on how quickly new from the ground up marketing models are created.