Pinning Your Personal Brand on Self-Curation
Looking to boost your PBI (personal brand index) and secure that dream job or snag some new clients? Now that we’ve entered an age in which a solid personal brand strategy is as important as a lack of typos on your résumé, the name of the game is no longer self-promotion but self-curation. We live [...]
Five Things to Think About as Facebook Goes Public
[Originally posted on CNBC.com.] With the Facebook IPO looming and everybody watching, I’m wondering if the social network to end all social networks is going to live up to the hype. (Could anything live up to all this hype?) With big advertisers not convinced that Facebook is a good platform to propel brands forward and [...]
The Value of Creativity
As a PR professional, I know how crucial creativity is to success in business today. As a socially networked person (is there anybody out there who isn’t?), I’ve watched as network friends draw something, write something or video something. As a trendspotter, I’ve read at length Richard Florida’s thoughts on the importance of the creative [...]
Informed Consent
My husband and I are both on Facebook and share many—but not all—of the same online friends. I’m generally a more prolific user of social media than he is and update my Facebook status more often, with text, photos and location-based check-ins. I know that his universe of friends includes co-workers, friends and clients, so [...]
We’re All Living in Glass Houses
Originally posted on Fuel the Future. I’m experiencing a bit of social media myopia these days and think I need to adjust my lens. It’s getting blurry out there, isn’t it? In this crazy connected space we’re all playing in, every move we make is watched, followed and interpreted—sometimes without our consent. It’s a fact [...]
Social Network Overload
Originally posted on Fuel the Future. Let’s face it: We are living in an over-networked world, with very few boundaries between life, love and work. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what all this connection means to our already overly scheduled lives and what the payoff is from having thousands of Facebook friends or [...]
Feeling Stressed?
Originally posted on Fuel the Future. It’s hard not to feel stressed, and all the time. For starters, there’s global weirding and the many unknowns (and knowns!) of the economy. As PR people, life moves so fast because of how quickly media is changing; what exactly is news today, and how can we possibly keep [...]
Music Lessons
Those who know me well are quite aware that I am a total, complete, unabashed music addict. Recently, because of my high concert-ticket purchasing volume, I was invited to attend “This Is Music: Social Media Secrets” at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, N.Y. The event consisted of a meet-and-greet mixer, a panel discussion, and a [...]
An Ounce of Prevention, or a Pound of Anxiety?
My husband and I gave our kids all their vaccines throughout their childhood and never had any regrets. Part of our rationale stems from my having worked with vaccine manufacturers and pharma companies throughout my career, and I have spoken with parents who actually lost their children to benign illnesses such as chicken pox before [...]
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 [...]
Rethinking Teen Rebellion
If you google “teenage rebellion,” you get a gazillion sites that explain how to cope with, prevent or quash it. You even get advice about how to medicate it—a couple of years ago, bloggers began talking about “oppositional defiant disorder,” though most of the response to that diagnosis was highly critical. What seems to have gotten [...]
Putting the Social in Social Responsibility
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Corporate social responsibility looks a whole lot different now than it did a few years ago. Back then, the emphasis was on responsibility—look at all the good things we’re doing!—and on corporate, since so much of its DNA was based on business practices and funded by corporate largess. Lavish [...]
Rethinking the Presidency
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. President Obama’s latest poll numbers may be decent—a New York Times/CBS News poll found that he has higher approval ratings than the GOP, and that more Americans blame Congress, George W. Bush and Wall Street for our problems than they do him—but we hoped for better than decent from [...]
Generation Real-Time
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. A few years ago I was publicly fretting over the arrival of millennials—young people in the generation after X—in the workplace. I described how these new adults would bring with them a sense of entitlement, a need for constant praise, a habit of multitasking to the point of distraction [...]
Why Local Is the New Global
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Remember how in the 1990s, everyone was talking about globalization? Protesters railed against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, angry about treatment of Third World workers and homogenization of cultures. Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his best-selling paean to globalization, which argued that wherever Big [...]
The Latest Rage in Men’s Fashion
Image is everything in fashion, as well as in public relations. Whether it’s how a message is communicated or how a designer’s outfit is worn on the runway, preserving an “image” is what sets brands such as Gucci and Hermès apart from Gap and H&M. It’s our job as PR professionals to make sure it’s [...]
Bash, Bash and More Bash
I’ve been watching the trend of mobmedia for some time now—it’s one of my top 10 trends for 2010—but it really hit home for me last week. I got a vicious, hateful (hate being the operative word) phone call, possibly from someone I know. I’ve done a number of TV appearances in the past month, and it [...]
Social Media Happens to You When You’re Busy Making Other Plans
I found out this week that a friend of mine died. At age 35, I’m too young to start reading the obituaries; I found out by reading his thread on Facebook. I’ve reported in the past that each day, I experience something truly phenomenal through social media and networking—but I never even considered that I [...]
Alone for the Holidays
It’s that time of year again. We’re all supposed to be nothing but joyful, yet magazines, newspapers and blogs are all offering their annual “survival tactics” for coping with holiday angst. This supposedly most wonderful time of the year has somehow become something that must be endured. There’s a great disconnect between the expectations—the fantasy [...]
Part II: Leveraging That E-Trail
This is the second in a series of six. Last week, I spoke about screen-mediated social interactions. Well, there’s one downside to them: Users will always leave a trail. Every click of a hyperlink, every word in an e-mail or blog, every comment on a social networking site—they’re all potentially tracked and collated. One specific [...]
