Your PR Architect

(c) DKassnoff, 2014. Cranking out PR for a legendary rock musician should be pretty straightforward. I'm all but certain Billy Joel has no daily involvement in his website or the Facebook page that updates his new tour dates. Nor should he. Someone's minding those tasks, though. And doing a mediocre job. On Oct. 14, a headline on Billy's web site announced:  Billy Joel Sells Out The New Coliseum’s Opening Show In Less Than Four Minutes. Read the details here . A sellout sure sounds impressive, doesn't it? Maybe, if your time-travelling Delorean is tooling through 1985. Internet ticket sales today have made swift concert sellouts an everyday occurance. And, few would-be ticket buyers are happy about it. They know that concert tickets are scarfed up by ticket bots and scalpers before fans ever get through the lethargic Ticketmaster website. The problem's so severe that several states are enacting legislation to outlaw the bots . But the person ...

Ticketmaster never cared about its image. Or its public relations. It charges usurious add-on fees for concert tickets, and people pay them. Sometimes, Ticketmaster gets hauled into court for its fees, and then vanishes from the news radar. OnCenter in Syracuse, NY, by Joegrimes at en.wikipedia  [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons Still, you'd think they actually wanted to sell tickets. Yet, judging by Ticketmaster's weekly email blast, they have a grudge against Rochester. Their emails tout concerts in Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, New York City, Verona, and Salamanca. All an hour or more away.  But, Rochester, where I live? Hardly any shows. Ticketmaster has my Zip code. They know from my purchase history that I'm more likely to buy tickets for Judy Collins than Usher. A 6th grader could look at these data points and assume: "Dave prefers attending concerts by soft-rock artists in Rochester."  Yet, they think I'm dying to...