The Wax Blog

In honor of being incredibly lazy this week, here’s one of my fave 2009 posts – the last Friday of every month I’ll throw a repeat of one of the more popular posts, just in case you missed it!

A product, service or book is probably the greatest thing in the world – to its creator. But when an editor or producers says “pass” it’s the publicist who has to tell the client. Sometimes ZERO  media are interested. And for anyone who has written a book, started a business or provided a service, that can be a pretty personally hurtful message no matter how carefully it’s couched. For me, it’s the equivalent of having to tell clients “your baby is ugly” 95% of the time, without hurting their feelings. Nearly impossible. (more…)

Because I’ve worked with a pretty wide range of celebrities – from Ralph Nader to Bode Miller -people sometimes call to find out how much it would cost for a celebrity to attend their event, endorse their product or contribute to their non-profit cause.   No matter HOW GREAT your product is, or how important your cause, stars generally don’t do anything for free unless its for their own foundation (or for George Clooney). The good news is that almost any celebrity can  be booked if you have enough money. Here are a few tips for figuring out how to find someone, how much they cost and what the process might be like.

First, find out who reps the star. The easiest way is to buy a subscription to Who Represents an online listing of virtually every celebrity’s agent, publicist and manager.  Although some people like to go through managers first, I always call the agent. Agents are usually straightforward, no BS types who will give you prices and explain the ins and outs of back-end deals and endorsements. (more…)

Wax Marketing mug to the first 5 who ID this photo

I got so many questions about my last post “7 Steps to Bigger Marketing Muscle in 2010″ I thought I’d give you some detail on each one of the steps.  Measurement seems to be really tricky for people – but it’s actually pretty simple. Once you have some basic measurements in place and you feel a need to go deeper, visit KD Paine’s measurement blog – she’s the real guru. I’d love to hear specific examples of how people are measuring their own results, so comment away! Here’s my quick and dirty take – (more…)

I  tell my clients that marketing is a lot like working out – you have to be consistent or you won’t see results. No one expects to see muscles popping out all over after one visit to the gym. For the same reaons you can’t expect immediate, lasting results from one promotional campaign. As you look toward 2010 and what will surely be a better year for all of us, it might help to build a marketing practice that looks a bit more like a workout schedule. Here are few ways to do just that. (more…)

We’ve had some juicy celebrity crisis’ lately that make writing this post lots of fun. When your company, product or personal brand encounters a crisis it’s important to decide what ‘voice’ you’re going to use.  Choosing the right approach is one of the reasons little-known (but uber-powerful) flacks like Marty Chalmers and Eliot Mintz make the heavy wood.  Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics of voices being used most recently – as well as a few thrown in from the past.

Above It – How can I write this post without addressing Tiger Woods’ current situation? As I write this, he has refused to meet with the police and has posted a note on his website thanking his well- wishers and telling everyone the rumors are all lies and he wants to keep this ‘private’. First of all, not cooperating with the police right away sends the message that the guy has something to hide. Second, he doesn’t tell us what happened. Apparently we aren’t privileged enough to hear the real story. How would we feel if Oprah showed up 50 pounds thinner and refused to tell us how she did it? This voice implies arrogance and an attitude that Tiger’s above it all. Not a good move for America’s favorite sports hero and NEVER a good move if the law is involved. (more…)

Flacks get a lot of, well, FLACK. Some of it deserved and some of it not. If you’re a new product, new author, small business or otherwise lower profile brand it can take a long time to establish a media footprint, digital or otherwise. Getting placements right away isn’t always the best measurement as things can take a long time.

It’s time to give new buyers of public relations services a checklist for separating the rock stars from the ones with rocks in their head. Please add your own thoughts but let’s not rant. We’ve got the Bad Pitch Blog for that! (more…)

(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Sorry old school journalists, savvy advertising experts and prickly control-freak publicists but it’s time to realize something. To survive you can no longer be storytellers – you have to be information managers.  Here are some examples:

Rachel Maddow is an information manager. She takes the current news trends, analyzes them and offers up her opinion. She translates and disseminates information using a liberal, celesbian lens. We know it, we’re fine with it, we’ll watch her if we like that slant – and her numbers are through the roof.

Katie Couric is a storyteller. She takes the current news, tells the story she thinks we will find most interesting (called a HOOK or ANGLE) and puts a pretty package together hoping no one else has that same ANGLE.  Boring, yawn, her numbers are in the toilet.

Jon Stewart is also an information manager. He takes the current news, translates and gives it to us with using the funny lens. His numbers are great. Even Perez Hilton, as much as we love to hate him, is  an information manager. Perez takes the celebrity news and translates it with a snarky, ‘I used to be a geek and now I’m more powerful than you’ lens. His traffic numbers are still incredible.

Just try to ‘package’ a story or launch a brand these days with a clever message and a nice dose of spin. What happens? The public’s immediate attitude is that ‘WE WILL TAKE YOU DOWN, MOTHERF*&#ER’. (Remember Motrin Moms?) Today’s social media/citizen journalists love nothing better than to debunk a story, expose an exclusive, steal a headline from a print paper, or do whatever else it takes to prove they can get there faster and more provocatively than traditional media. And guess what? They’re winning the race.

It’s time to admit what we haven’t wanted to admit for a long time -  information is  too real-time and too accessible for us to believe the ’stories’ any more. We want to pick our chosen lens and get our information there.

Who’s your favorite information manager?

photo courtesy of vitrue.com

Wax is an integrated marketing firm – the only other “Wax” I’ve found in the U.S. Of course they’re in Miami so I imagine it’s a little different corporate culture (if I actually have one) than here in Minnesota. But since all their posts come up in MY google alerts I tend to read them. And they’re good. (Maybe someday they’ll want my URL and pay me big bucks for it. )

Take a look at a post on trends in Facebook that may help you if you’re starting to market in that particular social network. Enjoy! waxcom.com/impressions

I read Schuyler Brown’s blog on the Huffington Post last week feeling a weird combination of amusement, distaste and even awe. First of all, kudos Ms. Brown for writing “As we speak, or blog, or Twitter, the Information Age is spawning its evil progeny, The Golden Age of PR.” Not because I agree with it, but because I haven’t heard  nonsensical statement like that since I was a ignorant bar manager at wine tastings. When we couldn’t figure out what snotty thing to say, we’d say “My, that was oblique without being obtrusive.” Although it didn’t really mean anything it always came across very well, especially when said with an expert twirl of the wine and an arched brow.

Let me get to my point before I get lost in alcoholic nostalgia. In her blog, Ms. Brown has captured the bias of many people out there regarding PR. A lot of people think we’re just a bunch of liars who will do anything to get a placement. Or, clever spin doctors that we are, we distort the truth to pull the wool over the poor unsuspecting consumer who never knew what hit him. Now, I’m not going to say there zero truth to this or that there aren’t some dishonest, conniving PR folks out there (as there are in banking, telecomm advertising, politics, management…..) As a publicist, it IS my job to present my clients in the best light possible to ALL their “publics” – whether it’s the media, the customer, the government, whomever.  What strikes me as ridiculous is that most of the people who bash PR (like Ms. Brown) don’t seem to have any understanding of what it is exactly that we do.  I’m not going to go into a lengthy description of what we do – if you’re interested the Princeton Review has a pretty good job description. I’d point out in particular their comment that publicists “.. must always be available for comment (even when that comment is “no comment”) and remain friends with the media, no matter how demanding the desires of both clients and the reporters on whom they depend.” That’s  why instead of dreaming up Machiavellian ways to distort the truth for our own evil purposes, we’re most likely working the phone on a Friday night to get a client to a last-minute requested interview.

According to Ms. Brown, brands are abandoning advertising, which is “pretty transparent”, in favor of ” spin and PR.”  I think the people fighting the cereal companies who make those nice little websites for your kids to play with – that also contain hundreds of brand impressions for their sugary breakfast foods – would probably disagree about the transparency of advertising. If you don’t know what an advertorial is, well it’s a very common practice where advertising is thinly disguised as an editorial story in a magazine. It’s a fact that advertising can bevery misleading – just ask all the people writing about the ethics of subliminal messaging in advertising. (Or you can watch this fun YouTube video for some examples too – note the extremely tragic music)

But arguing  the ethics of  advertising aside -  regardless of what the general public thinks,  public relations is usually pretty honest because basically, it’s pretty hard to pull the wool over the eyes of a CNN producer or an NPR correspondent. And guess what – you get caught in just one lie and those people will shut you out forever. Sure, do we write releases to show our clients to their best advantage – of course! Do we try to reduce the damage from a crisis and somehow turn it into a positive? Absolutely! Does Madonna’s rep lie to the media – probably, mainly because she can get away with it. The other 99.9% of us don’t have that luxury.

I was absorbed in some lunchtime tweets today and started to feel a little schizophrenic. My Twitter path consists of client promotion, Wax info, personal thoughts and conversations with friends. (Not to mention that weird story about the hair weave stopping a bullet…still freaked out about that one)  No wonder big business is scared to hop into social media. All that stuff we learned about “protecting the brand” goes out the window when you’re swimming in the sea of online chatter.  But should we really care? After all a brand is the perception of a product or service in the mind of the customer. Too many fat cat marketers have forgetten that – you don’t “create” a brand. It evolves based on your integrity, your service and yes…your personality.

Maybe Twitter is destroying that supposedly required separation of “personal” vs. “business”.  Customers buy from brands and people they trust.  So maybe by letting them see our personal side, even if it’s only online, we’re actually building that intangible part of our brand that has to do with trust. Trust that comes from knowing what to expect, because you know the character of the person – or company. @zappos has taken that idea and embraced it wholeheartedly. I imagine the company is thriving because of it. We feel like we all know the guy at the top…on his good AND his bad days. He’s our friend so that’s where we get our shoes.

At least that’s what I tell Charlton when the giant box of shoes arrives weekly at our door.

So tell me, what other CEO’s are doing a great job of using social media?