Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel both hit out hard against PR professionals. PR is broken, they claim. They're referring to the e-mail pitches they both receive. I receive a lot of spam too.
It's way too easy to judge an industry by it's worse offenders. We could judge PR by the spam and lying. We can judge bloggers by not checking their facts and abusing copyrights, and we can judge journalists by perpetuating lies and aggravating stories to sell advertising.
Here's a better idea. Lets look at what the best of these industries can accomplish. Lets judge PR by what Dell have achieved online, lets judge bloggers by their speed to publish stories and their ability to connect people, lets judge journalists when they bring us truth.
Perhaps the biggest problem is PRs work in the shadows. When a PR professional does great work, you hear about the client. No journalist or blogger publicly thanks the PR professional that helped them. From the outside, it's difficult to know what the PR professional is advising the client. Has the professional advised the client how to be 'blog worthy'? Is that why you've discovered this new client all by your self?
To sum the work of a PR, by a poor pitch that lands in your inbox is ludicrous. It's a bad starting point. How about looking at the companies you really love, and finding out who does their PR?
When PR turns into cheap marketing, that's bad.
I believe that the future is through chatting to people in natural environments and for someone to say - "oh we're doing this event" or "wow, my friend is doing an article on X - that would fit in great" and through informal mediums such as Twitter - with TweetScan etc - where people pick up about things and then form links/through that network or networking... It's happened a few times now with me along the way.
If it wasn't for Twitter then I don't quite think my life would be the same... Which is sad but it's a nice ice breaker for people.
Whilst Digg/Reddit/Delicious Popular/Google search results etc are all close to natural forms of information less touched by PR... but we'll never be able to deny that regardless of that, lots of it is down to someone knowing someone etc...
Posted by: Kai Chan Vong | Thursday, 14 August 2008 at 09:17
People don't really have much of an idea of what PR is. I support you when you saying "hey we're doing an event on x"
Which is what PR do, but if you're trying to reach 60000 people, then maybe hitting a magazine or two helps?
But also this 'natural' information is surprisingly populated by the work of PR people who have given advice on how to be there. Often PR is just about giving advice to make something better.
Posted by: Richard Millington | Thursday, 14 August 2008 at 18:51