Lindsay Lohan has a hard working publicist. So does Charlie Sheen. So, surely, someone in the PR industry must be willing to take on the poor snakehead fish as a client. Ever since making an inglorious splash in American headlines for being a marauding invasive species indigenous to Asia and Russia, the public has both hated and feared the snakehead fish.

Scientists, reporters and TV personalities have inundated the public with scary facts detailing how the snakehead fish is a voracious predator that can decimate entire species of indigenous fish and wildlife, upsetting the precious ecological balances of entire ecosystems. Oh, and did we mention the snakehead fish can slither—well, more like wiggle—on land and breathe air via suprabranchial chambers? Well, it can. So load your guns and lock your doors. Snakehead fish are coming after your daughters.

Snakeheads do pose a serious and ecologically costly threat to our communities. They’ve proliferated in the Washington, D.C. area, and have even been spotted in New York City’s beloved Central Park as well as in Florida and California. So the public has every right to be both intrigued and concerned. Snakeheads are spreading. Naturally scientists, anglers and environmentalists are all asking the same question: What should we do now?

This is where public relations can play an important role. The snakehead fish, also known as Frakenfish or Fishzilla, has a horrible reputation. And there is no un-ringing the bell on this ecological development. The snakehead is here, and we must deal with it. Perhaps a savvy PR strategy can help contain the snakehead’s expansion by motivating its only natural predator: the public. However, people aren’t too keen on eating anything with “snakehead” in the name. It doesn’t really read well on a menu.

So can public relations help integrate the snakehead into our cultural palate? With a new name, can the snakehead fish be the next Chilean sea bass?

What would you rename the snakehead fish? Let us know.

PR industry experts are inundated with columns and advice about how clients should manage their personal brands. Much of that input is common sense: don’t get coked up and crash your Porsche, don’t beat your girlfriend and land in jail, don’t get drunk and start tweeting. Most of the public is able to avoid these situations. (Thanks, moms.)

Nevertheless, brands love spokespeople. Brands need spokespeople to provide that human element that connects with the complex psychology that is consumer behavior. From Donald Trump to Eva Longoria, personal branding is big business, and a dangerous one, because all humans are fallible. But if there were ever a control in the experiment of personal branding, it would be Tim Tebow. The guy is as clean as a bag of cotton balls.

In fact, Tim Tebow’s personal brand is so sterling that even without a job—he has yet to be picked up by an NFL team after being dropped by the New York Jets—his sponsors aren’t worried at all. ESPN, Nike, TiVo, FRS, Fox Sports and Jockey are all on board with whatever happens next in his career, even if it doesn’t include football. Those brands are even lining up to retain his services after he hangs up his cleats. That’s personal branding done well. But there is more to successful personal branding than avoiding mug shots and visiting children in the hospital.

There is authenticity. Tim Tebow lives according to the values he espouses regardless of what his handlers, agents and PR people do. Tim Tebow runs the Tim Tebow show (which is his life), and his fans adore him for it. In a parallel universe, Charlie Sheen fans feel the same way about his personal brand. For some reason, many PR experts struggle with this idea of authenticity. So do young celebrities like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus; it’s hard to be authentic when you are still wrestling with who you are and the trappings of becoming an adult. Read more

We were more than a little amused yesterday to read news of one Angus T. Jones, an actor better known as “that kid on Two and a Half Men”, pulling what looked like an outright effort to sabotage his own show.

Jones appeared in a bizarre YouTube video that just happens to double as a promo spot for The Forerunner Chronicles, a multi-media project pushing the “end times” Seventh-day Adventist movement. He makes his new-found allegiance to God quite clear in the pseudo-interview while bemoaning his current gig, telling viewers to “please stop watching Two and a Half Men” and “filling your head with filth” and encouraging the public to “do some research on the effects of television and your brain” because “it’s bad news.”

This little incident provided the Internet with more awkward chuckles than a Charlie Sheen rant while creating a huge headache for anyone who makes money producing, promoting or performing on what remains one of TV’s top-rated sitcoms (and that’s quite a few people). Based on follow-up reports, it seems like the only folks happy with Jones’s online outburst are his friends at Forerunner Chronicles and the Valley Crossroads Seventh-day Adventist Church–because everyone loves free PR from a semi-famous “soldier of truth.”*

Anyway, we had to ask: why would a massively successful actor pull a stunt like this? And how can the show’s PR team contain the damage done?

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Publicists usually act as the middle men between their clients and the media, but what happens when journalists skip the PRs and go straight to the source? According to Dylan Howard, editor-in-chief of Celebuzz, a pretty good story.

In his So What Do You Do? interview, Howard describes how he pursued Charlie Sheen directly, and eventually scored an exclusive interview with the #TigerBlood celeb.

“After a little research, I hit gold, sourcing Sheen’s phone number from another source. When I called his cell phone, his personal assistant Rick Calamaro, told me Sheen wouldn’t be commenting. Unperturbed, I sent Sheen many more text messages, offering him that time-honored reporter’s standby: a chance to put forth his side of the story. Eventually it paid off and I got replies from the man himself,” he said.

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Dylan Howard, Editor-in-Chief of Celebuzz? and let us know your comments.

How do you handle it when a journalist bypasses you and contacts your client directly?

– Andrea Hackett

Photo: Danny Feld/CBS/Associated Press

A record (for the show) 27.7 million people tuned in to last night’s premiere of Two and a Half Men, which killed off Charlie Sheen’s character and introduced Walden Schmidt, Ashton Kutcher’s sad Internet millionaire character to the show. In addition to ending the suspense about how Sheen dies (Spoiler alert! Slip-and-fall off a Paris Metro platform), Kutcher got naked a couple of times for good measure.

Meanwhile, Charlie Sheen was getting roasted over on Comedy Central. While he had been #winning (groan) earlier this year when we followed his every move on the Web, Twitter, and across the media, Sheen is obviously trying to make some sort of a comeback with an appearance on Leno, the Emmys, and tweets promoting last night’s broadcast.

Speaking of Twitter, Visible Technologies took a look at the Twitter chatter last night about both the Two and a Half Men premiere and the Roast of Charlie Sheen (#SheenRoast), finding that Sheen still gets the birdies chirping lots and lots. Tweets about the roast more than doubled those for the premiere. We’ve got graphs after the jump.

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Today is the final day for interested prospects to send their first-round applications for the summer social media internship with Charlie Sheen. According to a follow-up press release from Internships.com, more than 74,000 applications had been received by Wednesday.

In this week’s PRNewser poll, we asked if this was a good opportunity for an aspiring student. Nearly 52 percent of respondents said “yes”; and about half, 48 percent, said it wasn’t.

“It’s not a one size fits all answer,” Andy Getsey, co-founder and CEO of Atomic PR told us in an email.

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Glenn Beck‘s ascension in the talk radio and TV news stratosphere had a pulpy blend of polarization, right wing Muscle Milk, and a pint of vitriolic I.P.A. The longer Beck stuck his neck out the more feathers he ruffled; the more feathers he ruffled the more people watched; and the more people watched the more he stuck his neck out.

Yet here we are today wondering if the future of Glenn Beck is simply a dark abyss. There are reports that since last summer, Beck has lost a third of his audience, or in more dramatic math, a million viewers. Granted, Beck is still drawing a would-be healthy two-million viewers. MSNBC and CNN might consider hiring Charlie Sheen as a political pundit to achieve those numbers at 5p.m. on a weeknight.

But even the great right-winged typewriter of Bill Kristol has been keystroking some seriously questionable thoughts about Glenn Beck and questioning Beck’s journalistic integrity.

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Do you have #TigerBlood? Are you all about #Winning? Can you #PlanBetter than anyone else? If so, we want you on #TeamSheen as our social media #TigerBloodIntern!

Image: Greg Gayne/Warner Bros

So begins the ad on Internships.com for an eight-week, full-time, paid summer internship with Charlie Sheen. Prospects only have until this Friday at midnight to apply. They must use 75 characters to describe why they should be chosen in the first round, and then submit a resume and further info for the second.

Sheen holds the Guinness Record for how fast he amassed a million followers, and he’s got everyone’s attention on social media and elsewhere. But, we don’t know how long that will last, how #winning the Charlie Sheen brand really is, or what it would be like to work with him.

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Phase one: Charlie Sheen comes out of nowhere with some of the most outlandish behavior ever. Phase two: People try to find a way to capitalize on Charlie Sheen’s outlandish behavior.

SiriusXM Radio announced today that they’re airing Tiger Blood Radio, a channel dedicated to the “breaking news, facts, fallout and career implications” of all things Charlie Sheen. The channel will air from March 5 at 6a.m. ET to March 6 at 6 a.m. ET. So far, the channel is planning to rerun interviews with adult star Kacey Jordan, among others. As Brian Stelter noted on Twitter: “it’s a 24-hour-long stunt. they probably hope charlie will call in.”

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Charlie Sheen has broken the Guinness World Record for “Fastest Time to Reach One Million Followers.” He did it in 25 hours and 17 minutes. He now has more than 1.3 million followers. Sheen was able to get his Twitter account verified, up, and running in just a short time with help from Ad.ly, Ad Age reports. He’s only following 25 people, including George Lopez (@georgelopez) and Sarah Silverman (@sarahksilverman).

[via CNN.]