Your PR Architect

In an earlier life, I reviewed films for a small-town daily newspaper. It was pre-Rotten Tomatoes. Pre-internet. So if you wanted to know if a movie was worth your $5, you read newspapers or hoped Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel reviewed it for their TV show. USAF Snipers by By Tech. Sgt. Bonnie A. White (USAF)  (http://www.af.mil/weekinphotos/040730-02.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Today, I don't review films. And I try not to wade in to debates about controversial films. I saw The Interview on pay-per-view. And I may see American Sniper , Clint Eastwood's latest film. But I'm unlikely to write about either movie. I gave up reviewing films because I found scribbling in the dark distracting. I wasn't experiencing or enjoying the on-screen stories. I found myself analyzing the product, much the way testers at Consumer Reports test toasters and microwaves. In a way, I was contributing to the PR buzz for feature films. And I decided that I wasn...

A Monkee has taught me plenty about Facebook. And how we're viewing the social media juggernaut all wrong. We use it for product publicity. Or as an online chronicle of our everyday musings. And, we're missing the point. Facebook isn't a journal. It's not about news. It's about sifting information about you and selling it to Purveyors of Other Stuff. In exchange for allowing us to post recipes or fuzzy smartphone photos, Facebook sifts and parses our comments for clues about us. As we share our opinions or lunch menus, Facebook neatly packages that information and re-sells it to marketers. Maybe Facebook is a useful mechanism for public relations professionals who want their clients' views and products shared. On its own, Facebook isn't an all-inclusive PR strategy. Those "which rock musician are you" quizzes tend to muck up the sharing process. Your posts are arbitrarily ranked by Facebook's software, meaning they may not show up in your...

Yesterday, a fellow who makes a living depicting big explosions experienced one of his own. On an international stage. Film director Michael Bay, hired by tech giant Samsung to talk about next-generation ultra HD televisions, got tangled in his TelePrompTer readout, lost his place, and abruptly left the Samsung booth at CES. See it here. Michael Bay (photo by Romina Espinosa at http://www.rominaespinosa.com [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) Bay -- whose works include Armageddon and the Transformers series -- is well-known for his work behind the camera, not in front of it, or before a live audience. So choosing him as your spokesperson at the world's largest consumer electronics orgy seems, on its surface, a gamble. (The tie-in for Samsung was that Bay's next Transformers movie will be previewed on a Samsung UHD-TV .) There's some alchemy involved in choosing a frontman for a trade show like CES. He or she sho...