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	Phil's Blogservations Monday, April 01, 2002 Posted by philgomes 10:39 PM Starting My Own Business Venture: Though I'm sure it comes as a surprise to most of you, I am ending my employment at Phase Two Strategies to start my own company. The venture will be a combination of PR agency and technology finance publishing group, seeing as how both sectors are showing extremely good growth prospects. (In other words, there's really nowhere to go but up.) Known as Flacks Using Crooked Concepts, Inc., this company will form an end-to-end solution, combining—for the first time—a public relations agency with exactly the type of publication group that it seeks to influence. This, of course, represents the next evolutionary step in the industry. After all, technology publisher CMP and press release distribution network PR Newswire are both owned by the same conglomerate, United Business Media. The mission of FUCC is to make a further, simultaneous penetration into both the publishing and public relations business sectors. Since every PR firm must market itself according to a proprietary methodology, my firm will simply brand said methodology by leveraging the name of the agency. This is to avoid fragmentation and dilution of the brand. For example, the now-defunct Neihaus Ryan Wong firm used to talk about the "architecture of identity." However, other PR folks took that phrase as an industry term and started throwing it around in everyday conversations at dot-com party punchbowls. NRW, after a while, lost that brand since that three-word New Economy marketing catch-phrase turned into the next "Kleenex" or "Walkman." I'm determined to not let that happen, and I will thus brand the firm's proprietary methodology according to the name of the firm, thereby ensuring that the methodology's brand and that of its company are one and the same. I am so confident in this burgeoning change in PR that, very soon, I know that companies all over the technology landscape will want to be FUCC'ed. Is there a product launch that needs that extra strategic thinking in order to further ensure success? Well, then FUCC it! Is the entire marketing program broken? Then FUCC everything! "FUCC me!", understaffed corporate marketing departments will say. In order to properly market my new company, the CEO (that's me, dum-dum) will have to serve as the brand, so I guess I might have to FUCC myself. To tell you the truth, if the launch of my company goes well, I might have to FUCC myself three, four, even five times a week! Additionally, since the PR firm and the publication will be one and the same, the firm will likely FUCC itself—several times, in fact. One philosophy that was missing at many PR agencies during the recent technology boom was restraint. My firm will be the first to tell its clients that, well, we know when to shut the FUCC up. Nothing's more embarrassing to a client than an overzealous agency, as Blogservations covered during Sept. 11. Of course, technology publishers tried to make money by sponsoring conferences. This, of course, went bust but, then again, there's nowhere to go but up. FUCC will start a new series of high-level regional conferences where executives can learn the new seamless communications paradigms that hold the promise of expanding new, exciting market opportunities. I expect that several marketing executives will spent at least $1,500 to enroll in a three day seminar at, you guessed it, "FUCC U." | HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a free video game console. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.