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Full Frontal PR
Getting People Talking about You, Your Business, or Your Product

by Richard Laermer, Michael Prichinello
February, 2003
Bloomberg Press

Excerpt from SELF MARKETING GONE WRONG

Our parents' idea of success was to land a job with a great company. It didn't matter what job, as long as it was in the right building. You could be the mail clerk at IBM, so long as you were with Big Blue. Success came from working for IBM, or Western Electric, or wherever, for the long haul, climbing your way through the ranks and making a name for yourself within its halls.

During the past decade (give or take a few), that formula for achievement bit the dust. New technology companies sprang into action, made a product, got bought by a bigger company that turned into something else, went public, merged with its competitor, yada, yada.

Thanks to a hyperactive market, short-lived businesses and experimentation, people don't stay in the same place for very long. In the mid-to-late nineties, executives (and everyone who thought they could be) began courting the media in ways we've never seen before. The idea was to build a clip book not only for business or product, but for yourself as well. There was plenty of money to be spent on talent, and every start-up wanted the hottest Web designer, CFO and CEO. Workers were hell-bent on creating demand for themselves, knowing the next job was just a phone call away. And how!

Once the market took the deep dive, the "cult of personality" went buh-bye. Guys like Bill Gross of Ideal Lab and David Wetherall of CMGI, who went through great pains to be come household names, soon were the notorious poster boys of the Web's demise. It was a bad use of the media, it was never real news and being in the spotlight proved to be hazardous to their professional career.

With a smarter, more experienced market and industry emerged from the 90's, the concept of plain self-promotion has evaporated. Smart business people and entrepreneurs aren't promoting themselves anymore; they're using the media to create a profile and thus a market for their services. Demand isn't based in name recognition anymore, it's steeped in new types of services and insight. Building media awareness about your type of business is the only way to drive deals and it's purely great for sales and your own profile in the near future.

Take Victor Chu for example. Chu, a friend of ours, is a self-made "fashion technologist ," and rather than promote all Chu all the time, he's been teaching journalists what fashion technology is, making it part of the lexicon and the thing to know about. Slowly but surely, his coverage has validated his hobby, embedding MP3 players into sweatshirts, making the first really cool digital photo-frames, creating digital logos that are always changing - digitalized images to make Nike's "swoosh" frown - and more. These days, big name designers take note of what comes out of this guy's mouth - basically, that there's more to clothing than thread and needle. Victor is the one guy in the game he has created and his phone rings off the hook.

As any good marketer will tell you: This is all good for Chu. Cause indeed Donna Karan will undoubtedly want in!

Related Links
RLM PR
Buy the Book
Excerpt: Full Frontal PR mediabistro.com