Sacrilicious Marketing

When it’s simply not enough to release a raunchy sex tape, try becoming a true Twitter Whore and selling out for 10,000 per tweet to advertisers like Bumpit and Shoedazzle. So, not only does this girl act like a shameless whore in real life selling out her family to reality TV, her body to Golden Shower Sex Tapes but now, even her Twitter page to sponsored tweets. What concerns me most is that she is clearly skirting the FTC laws that require bloggers to clearly label sponsored posts and endorsements.

Personally, I really can’t respect any advertiser that thinks the credibility and trust value of someone like Kim Kardashian warrants $10K per tweet.

Resource: Twitter stunned Kim Kardashian earns $10k a tweet

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Top 10 things you can do to improve your online reputation:

1. Monitor your online reputation with Trackur. Trackur is an online reputation management tool that monitors your entire online presence for you. Where Google Alerts fail, Trackur picks up. An easy to use AJAX dashboard allows you to monitor all forms of media for you and your brand, receive RSS and email alerts of new mentions and even share, bookmark, filter and sort content. Sign up for the 14 day free trial and I guarantee you will be hooked.

2. Build more positive information about yourself, product and brands by creating profiles on various social networks like MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, etc. The more profiles you have online with positive information on them the more opportunities you give people searching on the web to find good information about you out there.

3. Contribute regularly to article syndication sites like Buzzle and EZineArticles,etc.

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The art of a good PR story is knowing how to spin it with Disney moments

Snow White & The 7 Dwarfs Before the Disney PR Spin! Ho White.

What Would Snow White Look Like Without Her Disney Moments? She was a single girl, living with 6 miners and a Doctor! I’m just saying, without a song and a tap dance the story loses its PG rating and turns into bad Skinamax late night TV. And, no, I am not proud to have had to tart up a fairy tale to teach public relations strategy. Not proud at all…

Bill Gates was a college drop out that started a world-class multi-billion-dollar company. Jewel lived in a van down by a river and hung out with street gangs before she made it big yodeling. Kurt Cobain camped under a bridge for a while before fronting the most famous grunge band ever. Mrs. Fields was a desperate housewife before she baked a batch of cookies that changed the world and set the stage for more housewives like Martha Stewart to turn baking into a billion dollar business. And one of the greatest single mother stories of all time, JK Rowling was living in poverty on government assistance until she wrote Harry Potter! Great stories, right? Makes you feel like you too can spin hay into gold. But here’s the kicker, each and every one of these stories is PR spin – a Disneyfied version of the truth.

Let’s take Disney out of the details:

• Bill Gates’ parents were wealthy and sent him to private schools, the school he dropped out of was Harvard and the business he started was initially funded by his money bags parents.
• Jewel CHOSE to live in her van because her parents were hippies that CHOSE to live off the land in Alaska and she actually graduated from the $25K/year Interlochen Arts Academy in 1992 so somewhere along the line, her family wasn’t exactly as impoverished as she claims! (It’s more an Into the Wild story than a “I’m poor” story when you hear the details). Besides, don’t all rock stars have to live in a car or van to call themselves rock stars? Seriously, there’s even a site dedicated to this phenomenon BetterThanTheVan.com.
• Mrs. Fields’ husband was millionaire investment banker, Randy Fields, who bankrolled her and got all his millionaire friends to help market the company. (FYI- this chick might be crazy, she claims to have invented the cookie.)
• JK Rowling actually planned to quit her teaching job and go on welfare so she could write her book. Hell, she basically made welfare part of her business plan.

Now, I’m not saying these people didn’t work hard to get where they are, I’m just saying that the spin on their stories is world class and we can all learn something from each of them. If you want to be a legend, get your PR story right! Strategize it, stick to the formula and start telling it.

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The Susan Boyle Effect and the Untold Story of the Underdog

Susan Boyle

People love underdogs when they win. Now, before they win, well, we pretty much just make fun of them or if you are the self-righteous type, mutter to yourself, “there before the grace of God go I.” But, in the end, we love to see somebody, who against all odds, succeeds. It’s the stuff legends and fairy tales are made of and we all want to believe in that because it means that no matter how desperate our own circumstances might be, we, too, can succeed. Underdogs give us hope. They give us a hero that is just like us. They tell the tale that one-day everything will be alright.

Read also: The Case for Celebrity Forgiveness: How to smoke crack with a hooker and get re-elected for public office

Underdogs are not born, they are made.

Underdogs are the people that we snicker at as they walk by. They are the people we joke about behind their backs and use as the butt of our jokes. Let’s be honest, there is something inherently funny about the unfortunate. And especially the unfortunate that have big dreams and keep trying no matter how many times they are shot down or fail. These are the people that life beats the hell out of but for some unknown reason just won’t lay down and raise the white flag or crack a beer like any other normal person. This is the unicorn of which I speak, the underdog. And because they refuse to wave a white flag or curl up at the bottom of a bottle and take that desk job or give up their lifelong dream, we snicker at their failures. We revile them and cast them out because they did not go gently into that good night of mass mediocrity and assimilate like the rest of us. No, they rail against it, swim into the current and basically make the rest of us a little uncomfortable, until…. they make it big.

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Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac

My rant on why everyone in the music industry should have a basic understanding of what white, gray and black hat SEO can and should be used for.

So, every once in a while I get a comment or a cluster of comments (suspiciously from the same IP yet registered to different emails and domains, hmmm… how diabolical of you) where I get told I don’t know what I am talking about or I am a black hat SEO and give black hat (I guess this is the code for “bad”) advice. Let’s set the record straight here. I am an active member of a number of black hat forums. I practice and experiment with all forms of SEO which includes black hat techniques. Why? Because in order to speak with any authority on the overall subject of SEO, shouldn’t I know how to practice and apply each discipline within the study? You don’t go to medical school and say “I will read the books but not cut the cadaver” or “I know this is about the whole body but I’m not interested in learning about the anus – I just don’t feel right about it.”

OK, back to the topic at hand. So, yeah, I know some black hat stuff. Could I make a living at it? Probably not, but I understand and can effectively use the principles to get a site to the top of the engines very quickly for valuable terms. Does that make me a “black hat?” In some people’s eyes it may. Do I take offense to it? No. I consider it a compliment. When I get a comment asserting that I am a black hat, it indicates that the commenter recognized I had a knowledge base of more than just white hat SEO. So, while, the commenter more often than not cannot correctly identify black hat tactics, I still consider it a great compliment that they felt my knowledge base extended to things he/she is too “ethical” to study. Now, because we also know I am a bitch, I want to add, I also highly suspect the commenter still has his V card and lives in his mama’s basement.

So, for you to understand what the various disciplines within the study of SEO are here is my best explanation:

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Pamela Anderson

So, sex sells. Nobody can argue with that, but have you ever put a price on what selling sex would cost? More and more celebrities have spun negative press into a sob story of how they were wronged by some ex lover or employee who stole a sex tape and… sold it. Sex tapes have catapulted some to fame like Kim Kardashian while others have only brought shame to whole families like Bob Crane. The trick in the face of such a negative event is crafting the story so you come out smelling like a rose.

So, here are the 10 most famous celebrity sex tapes. Consider how each even was handled and how the overall event affected the career of the celebrity. Consider what you would do and how you would handle an event like this? This is where reputation management and public relations come together to protect and restore a personal brand or celebrity reputation.

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Lindsay Lohan with a Knife

Ever wonder why we were so willing for forgive Marion Barry for getting caught smoking crack with a hooker or why we can’t help ourselves in giving Britney Spears yet another chance to revitalize her career and screw up her kids? The psychology of forgiveness is complex. There are people we will forgive anything and there are people we will forgive nothing. Our forgiveness boils down to two very specific things – our love for the person or entity and our overall desire to trust them. Nowhere is this more evident than in our ability to forgive some celebrities anything and others nothing.

What does any of this have to do with marketing?

Reputation management is always a hot topic in marketing- it is where PR crosses paths with shock and awe marketing at Forgiveness Rd. Truth be told there only two real paths to forgiveness in a consumer’s mind. Love and Trust. So, how can you earn love and trust through marketing? Take a page from what works and does not work for celebrities.

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