By Leo Valiquette
In the course of staying on top of what’s the meme of the day in the PR blogosphere, I wade through reams of commentary on social media and how it can be turned to serve a corporate communications and marketing strategy. In fact, one would think it’s no longer possible to run a marketing or public relations campaign with any effectiveness at all unless it relies heavily on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.
This perception has been fueled by passionate early adopters eager to explore the features and functionality of The Next Big Thing, whatever that may be. In fact, last week came word of one fellow launching a new PR outfit called 3W PR “designed to help organizations, brands and individuals navigate through the World Wide Web.”
Web 2.0 has certainly provided a dazzling array of shiny new tools for the marketing and PR toolbox. The trick is getting past the giddy rush of excitement that comes of having a new toy to play with and understanding how to use them effectively in a practical sense.
George Livingston over at the Buzz Bin reinforced that point today by extolling the virtues of having a sound grounding in traditional PR and marketing strategy to understand a particular business, its market and its value proposition, in order to develop an effective communications program.
Bottom line: Web 2.0 isn’t a standalone game complete in its shrink wrap for marketing and PR practitioners. It’s an expansion pack.
The subject warrants another look at a piece of Shel Holtz’s from a month back about where social media responsibility should reside in the enterprise and the importance of ensuring it is used with surgical precision to further the organization’s goals.
By Francis Moran
While we here at in
media have long maintained there is
little difference between bloggers and conventional journalists when it comes to pitching, we do appreciate that many bloggers do not care at all to be pitched by us PR types. That’s not usually an issue for us; as an agency specialising in business-to-business marketing public relations for technology companies, we’re interested only in those bloggers who have real influence in our clients’ markets. These folks are often journalists who have simply moved to this new channel, or
de facto technology news sites, like
engadget or
gizmodo, that welcome properly crafted pitches.
Still, many bloggers are looking for a nice, polite way to tell us PR folk to stay away and Todd Defren is again advocating that bloggers be explicit about their wishes. It’s an approach, as Defren says, worth looking at.
By Francis Moran
I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.
One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.
Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.
I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.
Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.
The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.
In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.
The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)
Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.
