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Cole Bartiromo
The package and the content: Media, motivation and your message
Written by admin on January 13, 2011 - 2 Comments
Categories: Publicity and media relations
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Cole Bartiromo
When Jared Lee Laughner went on a shooting spree in Tuscon, AZ, I followed my natural journalistic instincts to see if he had a Facebook page. Well, a page linked to that name quickly showed up, but it wasn’t his — it belonged to a guy named Cole Bartiromo in Riverside, CA. That discovery has taken me down some interesting paths. (Please bear with me. This narrative will seem distant from the blog’s Construction Marketing Ideas theme, but we’ll get to the relevance later.)
Bartiromo is truly an interesting individual with a seemingly irresistible desire for publicity and Internet mayhem. He has been convicted of some rather serious crimes, including a massive investment/securities scam and extensive Ebay fraud. These crimes occurred while he was a teenager living at his parent’s home. Sent to prison and released to a half-way house, he had strict restrictions on any technology device: He was “caught” using his cellphone to complete college assignments, and whisked back to prison to serve his entire sentence. (Despite this criminal experience, he also achieved some fame for the legitimate discovery of some previously unknown Tiger Woods collectors cards, which he successfully discovered and sold at auction for more than $100,000.)
Released last year, Bartiromo returned to his home and to an odd mix of publicity-seeking initiatives, rants about the Securities and Exchange Commission (who have slapped civil penalties greater than $1 million for his ill-gotten gains), and a desire to achieve fame and recognition with public speeches and addresses. He claims federal authorities are unjustly harassing him, but of course he committed some rather serious crimes and SEC documentation indicates that he and his parents have not been co-operative in explaining the fraud and tracking down the money collected from it. (He, in turn, says he didn’t make any real money from his crimes and the SEC is unreasonably attacking someone who made some mistakes while in high school.)
Baritromo, who says he is a cousin of MSNBC’s Marie Bartiromo, saw the first media reports regarding Jared Laughner and quickly set up the Facebook page in his name. A day later, he (at least temporarily) seemed to lose his Facebook account, along with his YouTube site. As I write this, his own website, dollarscholar.com (he purchased the domain last fall for $1,700 as part of his branding exercise) is down. He is now posting the image of someone who is supposedly a major lottery winner who has sought privacy — all part of a strategy to create news for himself out of news events from others.
Fair enough. I’m working from memory now (because his dollarscholar.com site is down, at least for the moment) but he suggested he would be interested in finding backers for a publicity stunt of a scale greater than when a rock band, The Imperial Stars, blocked three lanes of the Ventura Freeway (Highway 101) in Los Angeles to stage a concert with a song aptly named “Traffic Jam”. Police hauled the band members in and laid felony charges against them for the media stunt. Their music video has, well, not achieved the highest and best reviews.
Cole Bartiromo, like the Imperial Stars, appears to be playing the publicity game for all it is worth — perhaps more than it is worth. The strategy appears to be that notoriety, no matter how distasteful, if worthy of the risk (in the case of the rock band, even serious criminal charges). Of course when you’ve done some time in a federal institution and you are still at college age, I suppose you can take this type of risk.
I’ve taken a slightly different approach to my Internet presence and adventures, enjoying some fun and causing some havoc in places I would never normally visit. Generally, I’ve not sought out publicity for myself but have enjoyed “outing” scammers, con-artists and phonies. This work generally does not have much to do with this blog’s theme so I don’t discuss it here very much. Sometimes, I fear, it distracts me from my primary business. However, it is fun to track down and catch the bad guys from time to time.
Cole Bartiromo's internet domain dollarscholar.com is registered to an apartment in this building
Publicity, indeed, can be a powerful marketing tool and if you are fortunate enough to be able to create and generate widespread positive media attention for yourself and your business, you will enjoy (at least temporarily) a potentially incredible surge in sales. Unfortunately, it is hard to maintain the publicity momentum because, after all, you need to constantly be doing stuff that is new and so far beyond the ordinary to gain continuing recognition. As well, we all know that the amount of Good News is dwarfed by the Bad News — and when you play around with negative stuff you are playing with a serious branding fire, if you are not extremely careful.
However, you may find some interesting possibilities in assessing risk, potential and media publicity power. If your marketing budget is small or you don’t have any money at all to promote your business, some thoughtful and creative publicity stunts might propel you to success. If your business is larger, and you are willing to take the risk, reallocating some funds for competent and creative media publicity initiatives will probably produce much higher marketing results than any conventional advertising. You probably will never want to go as far as The Imperial Stars or Colin Bartiromo, however. Fame is fine, but jail time is not.
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This clown is a joke. He is chasing the illusion that he was once famous. He is trying to regain something he never had other than in his own mind. This guy made the back page of a couple national newspapers and wants to regain that level of attention so he is doing anything and everything he can to try and stay relevant. It really is kinda sad. This guy is now making fake facebook accounts of people that are truly relevant in a pathetic attempt for attention. Now that I think about it, I actually feel kinda bad for this low life, even though he is a low life.
he's the guy on here saying not getting paid his 25 grand for people that don't know
Try it haters, see how prison treats ya…
Originally Posted by ttwarrior1
