Five Steps to a New Brand
Brand strategist Karen Kang puts the importance of personal reinvention bluntly: “Consider yourself a free agent—no one else is looking out for your best interests but yourself. You need to be crystal clear about who you are and the value you bring to a world where constant change is the only norm.” That’s the premise [...]
What CEOs Can Learn from Social Media About Building Their Brands
Now that social media is clearly a permanent disruption (i.e., here to stay, and making organizations and individuals reinvent themselves if they don’t want to get left behind), it’s worth paying attention to the various ways its precepts can inform professional development, organizational leadership and personal branding. Business “best practices” that have been in use [...]
Branding the Pope
[Originally posted on Forbes.com.] I’m writing this just after the conclave of cardinals announced the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, who last month became the first modern-day pontiff to abdicate the throne. They charted some new ground, choosing 76-year-old Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first non-European to fill the role in more than 1,200 [...]
We’re Breathing Change
New business is what makes us very happy, because it is brainfood for the mind and soul. So we’ve been pigging out in February, a month of intensive learning, with topics ranging from music to advocacy, NGOs to personal care (all our new wins are confidential, but think pharma and cause). If you don’t love [...]
Get Savvy About What’s Next
[Originally published on the blog of the Council of Public Relations Firms.] Great trendspotting creates great consumer marketing campaigns, terrific innovative new products and savvy newscrafting. I know: The most famous brands in the world have hired me over and over for my trendspotting methodology, ensuring that their multimillion-dollar (sometimes billion-dollar) ideas, products or services [...]
When Brands Need a Reboot (Think Lance)
[Originally posted on Forbes.com.] It used to be that if you were famous and you screwed up, the path to redemption was clear: Hire an old-school, big-name publicist to keep yourself out of the news for a while, then orchestrate a high-profile comeback (think a self-deprecating turn on “Saturday Night Live”) to prove that you’re [...]
Rumors Gone Wild
[Originally posted on the Huffington Post.] Behold the velocity of change, where technology has enabled a Mach 11 approach to spreading and receiving information. And as an outcome of all this now-or-now business, the rumor mill is not only buzzing but also shouting down the lane. It’s not at all unlike the virus portrayed in [...]
One Young World: An Eye-Opening Experience
I have always considered myself a well-traveled person. Throughout my life, I have lived in six cities in three countries on two continents. I learned at a very young age to be sensitive to local and cultural differences, and this has formed the way that I think about the world today. From a young age [...]
Moved to Action
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. In my travels around the world, I’ve (over)heard a lot of ways for people to say they’ve reached a point of no return with their frustration, feeling so full of stress that they’re stirred from passive acceptance to action. Some cultures say it’s “the drop that makes the jar [...]
What I Learned from My Interns
They are a familiar summer sight, and they represent one of my favorite parts of the job—the fresh-faced, enthusiastic interns. I had been recruiting them since January, and by the time they showed up for work in June, I was eagerly awaiting their arrival like some sort of maternal corporate stork. Over the years, I’ve [...]
Is Mark Zuckerberg Today’s Country Joe?
Originally posted on Euro RSCG Worldwide’s Prosumer Report microsite. In recent months, Euro RSCG has commented on how the revolution is not just being televised, but tweeted about, updated on Facebook, and uploaded to YouTube. In our trends preview for 2011, I touched on the new face of anger and how most of us are [...]
Millennials #Makeachange
With almost 9 million followers on Twitter at last count, Justin Bieber has quite the commanding social media presence. But, as the mantra goes, with great power comes great responsibility—a concept that Justin, or maybe his PR team, seems to know well. Using his power for good on his 17th birthday, Justin sent out a [...]
Tapping Minitrends
This is the 11th in a series of 12 posts expounding on the 2011 forecasts in the annual trends report from Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR and an internationally respected trendspotter. How does a trend get legs? Some trends start small and grow elephantine as if by force of nature, like the rise [...]
Yes, We Can…Reinvent Ourselves
This is the sixth in a series of 12 posts expounding on the 2011 forecasts in the annual trends report from Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR and an internationally respected trendspotter. We hear the word “reinventing” applied to systems all the time: reinventing capitalism, reinventing credit options. Reinventing health care, politics, journalism, food, [...]
Voting Local Is the New Global
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. As a marketing and PR professional, I’m a strong advocate of the phrase “Local is the new global.” (I am not, however, a huge fan of the jargon-y term for that idea—”glocal”—even though I used to toss it around promiscuously in the late 1990s.) If you meet me at [...]
Let’s Be the Leader in One More Category
Maybe it’s all the Thanksgiving and (dare I say) Christmas decorations already lining the shelves, but I’ve been bitten by the bug to start doing some good around here. I’ve thought about volunteering, assisting with teaching, feeding the hungry for Thanksgiving. For some reason, I’ve been yearning to give back lately. To add fuel to [...]
Don’t Mess with Oscar
In today’s super-social society, judgment is passed at the speed of light. Almost as soon as the news breaks, the judgment drops. Whether it be a movie that doesn’t live up to its hype, a celebrity who has been involved in a scandal, or a simple wardrobe malfunction or fashion faux pas, the social media [...]
The Consumers’ New Clothes (Sarah Ferguson, Take Note)
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. I don’t need to tell you that the world has seen its share of change lately. We used to embrace change and make it happen (which entails pretty much everything before Sept. 11, 2001). Then we watched it from the sidelines (the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the various financial crises), [...]
Power from the People
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Look at the American political landscape today and you might begin to get the sinking feeling that the red state/blue state dichotomy is, on the one hand, just a bit of political show and, on the other, a pitiable piece of naiveté. We have to admit that if we [...]
The Transformation of American Youth: From Teenager to Teenagent
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Would it be an exaggeration to say teenagers are running popular culture? We don’t think so. And, if anything, we’re willing to up the bet. Take a look at teenagers today—their habits, their purchasing power, their mastery of media—and momentarily suspend your belief in the stereotypes or hollow assumptions [...]
Judging the SABRES
Spoiler alert: Don’t worry, Paul Holmes, I will not be revealing any winners in this post. This Tuesday night, May 11, is the 2009/2010 SABRE Awards. And this year I was privileged to be a judge of four categories: beauty, food, corporate and automotive. Three of the categories I have a fair bit of experience [...]
Why Purple Will Be the New Blue
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Ten years ago, I predicted that blue would be the new green. When I released my annual trends forecast for 2000, I pointed to the power of Millennium Blue. I meant it figuratively—our concern with all things environmental would morph into heightened awareness about the world’s water supply (and, [...]
What Happened to Privacy?
There’s no bigger question in the world of the social Web than what’s going on with privacy. Is it over? Can it be saved? Is it worth fighting for? Facebook made headlines around the world a few months ago when it changed (weakened) its privacy protections and founder Mark Zuckerberg said the age of privacy [...]
