All tagged marketing
I'm looking to make a move with my two-car situation. I'm not a typical sales target. I'm a social guy. I'm an online guy. I don't want to sit in a showroom and do the dance. However, on this particular day, I was in the mood. However, no one was listening.
No, this is not a post about the Harlem Shake. It's a post about how much fun I get to have at work.
We are a creative bunch. We pay attention to online trends. Lately, the Harlem Shake has been one of those trends we've been following.
We've been yapping about potentially doing one of our own Harlem Shakes. After a quick brainstorm -- and I mean like :30 seconds quick -- we decided to mash up the Harlem Shake with a flashmob.
I introduce you to the #BostonSHAKE:
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December 2011 was an interesting month for me. I was closing out a pretty good year when I was slapped pretty hard by reality. I won't get into the gory details, but after 18 years of being in the communications business, I was back on the job market right before the holidays.
Needless to say, it was a tough pill to swallow.
However, everything happens for a reason, as the saying goes. And after the past two weeks, I truly believe that the saying is dead on.
Flash forward to today, and I find myself sitting on some very interesting opportunities -- all leading in different directions, yet with a very similar focus.
You see, I've built my career in order for me to be a generalist/specialist. This means, I'm good at a lot of things as it relates to Public Relations, Marketing, Digital Communications, Mobile Marketing and of course, Social Media.
I've worked for big, mid-sized and small agencies. I've worked on the client side. I've developed programs for big, mid-sized and small companies across a variety of industries.
This broad experience means that one day, I can be pitching trend stories to connections I have at the Wall Street Journal and later that hour, managing a client's social listening program in order to provide them with market intelligence via online chatter.
What this boils down to is that I'm good with people. I'm good at managing relationships. I'm good at connecting people with people, people with brands and brands with brands (in the case of B2B communications).
This leads me to my point:
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As I eluded to in an earlier post today, the PR, advertising and marketing business has converged. Each segment is doing social media. Each segment is trying to do parts of other segments, i.e. PR agencies doing traditional marketing work, while advertisers are conducting PR exercises like messaging training.
It's a confusing, yet exciting time to be in this business considering where the job market is in relation to the industry.
Two elements I've enjoyed of my career has been the writing and communication aspects, i.e. telling stories. And, if you think about this industry in terms of the responsibilities, a lot of what we do is rooted in story-telling.
We create campaigns that tell the story of a brand. We create messaging that clearly communicates the value proposition of a company or non-profit. We develop personas that help bring brands to life online.
These are all elements of story telling, but there are more. Here are more:
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I've been in the journalism/PR/digital marketing business for 18 years (in that order). If you've ever worked at an agency, you know that the lines between PR, advertising and marketing has become blurred because of online communications, i.e. social media.
The space is become very crowded. Guru's are a plenty. Books are being written at a feverish pace; books on Google+, Facebook, social media in general, location-based stuff, etc.
It's never ending and to be brutally honest, it's tiring.
Here's what I'd like to see from PR, advertising and marketers in 2012:
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My buddy Ed Cafasso has a great post over at his blog called Bending Light. He does a weekend roundup of items he finds interesting and one of them in today's issue includes using the words "content creation" on your resume. Basically he's saying there's no shame in doing so:
