Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

Is PR broken?

Posted on | August 14, 2008 | No Comments


Every few months we find a major blogger throwing down on the PR industry, some constructively, others destructively. Michael Arrington weighed in yesterday, saying “PR as a profession is broken.” Then Marshall Kirkpatrick, who usually writes with a cooler head, suggests that good technology speaks for itself and doesn’t really need PR.

Most of these guys are relatively new to the media-PR interaction game, so they’re exploring their new-found relationships as they write about them. They seem to be trying to change a 100-year-old industry by sheer force of will. Won’t happen, fellas. Constructive criticism is great, especially because most people in the PR business are running around like it’s a fire drill after just having found out that some bloggers are—shock!—influential. But getting PR to come to heel is an exercise in frustration.

I’ve been on both sides of this dialogue, and on the PR side for not very long. PR isn’t broken; it’s in transition. There’s plenty of people pounding out advice to help with this transition as well. It’ll find its way in the new media landscape, just as new media publishers will find out how to work well with PR. Bloggers aren’t the end game in the media evolution; they’re part of the mix, so PR isn’t going to change its tried-and-true models to suit a segment of the publishing industry whose importance and overall influence is yet to be understood completely.

As for Kirkpatrick’s post, I wrote a similar column years ago for EE Times. But the truth of the matter is great technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum (and as Microsoft et al have proven good technology doesn’t necessarily win the day!).

Matt McGinnis was spreading the posts on Facebook the other day, and friend and colleague Abbie Kendall jumped on to write:

Early, strategic and sustained PR is what led to record sales and Larry Ellison’s purchase of nCUBE. Yeah, the product was powerful, but it didn’t even have any applications sold for it — it was roll-your-own by customers! PR was the foundation for OrCAD to go public with just $20 mil in revenues–we had 8 Wall Street analysts following the company from day-one! Not the world’s finest software, but good enough and marketed precisely to the masses. And good enough for OrCAD to be acquired by Cadence! Good enough products + PR + integrated marcom + continuously increasing revenue = $$$$$ for companies. Duh! PR is about relationships and delivering to editors and analysts what they need when they need it. If bloggers like “discovering” their own news/content, that’s fine. We’ll help them “find” it in ways that make them feel like it was their own discovery.

Well put, Abbie.

It’s just naïve to think that technology will burst on the scene like spontaneous combustion. Someone, somehow has to get the word out.

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Comments

No Responses to “Is PR broken?”

  1. Abbie Kendall
    August 14th, 2008 @ 5:06 pm

    Hilarious pic. and link re Twitter that you posted today, Brian.

    Imagine if the company had used Public Relations to proactively inform and educate its customers, editors, analysts, and yes, bloggers, about the so-called 2K limit and what it really means.

    Twitter failed to communicate clearly, and now the pain in Twitterville is intense. I think I’ll contact the company about hiring a PR agency–mine!–that could show them, among other things, how to eliminate mis-communications and the fall-out from them. ;-)

  2. Lou Covey
    August 14th, 2008 @ 10:59 pm

    The belief the PR is ONLY the interaction between a company and te media is why PR seems to be broken. Public Relations is the process of engineering of public opinion. The media is an important part of that process but generally is the back end of real PR. You know you’ve done your job when the media begins to repeat the position you’ve establishe for the company, based on what the market already says. the media is the echo of your work, not the voice.

  3. Chris Edwards
    August 14th, 2008 @ 11:32 pm

    Media relations is mostly broken but that’s only because they are being measured by the clients on parameters that are irrelevant to the real world – releases sent out, calls made, “messages communicated” – rather than the final results.

    PR in general is in rude health other than having its brand lumped in with poor media relations. Scoble, for example, dumps on PR then points to a bunch of things he wants that, for the most part, require half decent public relations work. And the things he wants that don’t point straight to PR will probably end up in the hands of a PR department that tries to be invisible to the outside world but trains up people on the inside.

  4. Loring Wirbel
    August 15th, 2008 @ 7:32 am

    The notion that technology will sell itself is too foolish to warrant words. Then again, the examples Abbie Kendall gives all were from several years ago. The annoying thing about modern media (and public-at-large) relations is that it’s so tied in the 21st century to a dumbed-down consumer audience, it’s very difficult for someone like Intel to get a story on high-k transistors moving – if the audience can’t touch it and play games with it, it doesn’t exist.

    Modern PR exercises viral marketing to the limit, but smart PR agents do not throw away traditionalists for the sake of TechCrunch and Second Life. Case in point – Ooma, Ashton Kucher’s VOIP company. The Ooma agent snubbed Walt Mossberg, the NY Times, Network World, etc. in favor of a strict focus on TechCrunch, Engadget, ArsTecnica, Gizmodo, under the mistaken belief that all “old media” was irrelevant. And where is Ooma today? The same place as any startup that thinks its technology is good enough to sell itself.

  5. Lisa Gillette-Martin
    August 15th, 2008 @ 9:32 am

    Loring hit the nail on the head. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would still buy into the “If we build it, they will come” theory of technological superiority. If that were the case, we’d all be using Macs. (Yes, I sit on that side of the aisle…)

    To me, the central challenge of effective media relations is the same as it’s always been: You have to have a good story, and you have to know how to communicate it in ways that will appeal to your audiences. The methods available to do this may have expanded and gone more virtual, but the communication avenues are and will always be secondary to the story.

    Which is why today’s consumer-driven environment (”if the audience can’t touch it and play games with it, it doesn’t exist” indeed!) makes PR even more challenging. But, as Brian has said, challenges are the fun part!

  6. Matt McGinnis
    August 15th, 2008 @ 10:09 am

    Right on Loring!

    The media environment is rapidly evolving and so is PR – just not always at the same pace. The real issue here is that not all bloggers get their information the same way and not all PR people understand how to work with these individuals.

    I don’t see the industry as broken, just in flux. Plenty of good PR people, like Brian, are doing a great job with social media and traditional media. The authoritative book on how to absolutely do it right hasn’t and can’t be written. That’s like trying to engrave your name in a lava flow.

  7. Chris Edwards
    August 15th, 2008 @ 10:21 am

    @Loring

    Did Ooma actually snub old media? Mossberg had a review as the embargo lifted, so he clearly had hardware before the launch which was more than most bloggers got, as I understand it. AP carried the story and the NY Times had it on the Bits blog.

    However, the welcome from all was less than rapturous so I wonder whether the PR snubbed anybody but simply found that no-one was very convinced by what Ooma had to offer. In a blog or column, you have the opportunity to trash it. With news, there is far less flexibility so maybe people considered that the spike could take care of it.

    PR seems to have had little impact on Ooma: it’s all about the product itself.

  8. michele clarke
    August 15th, 2008 @ 10:28 am

    I’ve been on both sides for an equal amount of time now (which is scary) and it’s clear: there are as many different definitions of PR as there are people who both practice and are subjected to it. It spans all of things folks here are discussing… product, technology, corporate, financial, employee engagement, philanthropy (i.e., fund raising), political, ad infinitum.

    Equally clear: the effective PR folks understand it’s about connecting to a concrete business (or organizational or political) objective. When you do that, no one gnashes any teeth about measurement – they’re too busy reveling in their success…

    Equally true: there is good PR and horrible PR. Just as there is good journalism and horrible journalism. It’s often just after experiencing “bad” PR that these folks chirp up…

    … they’ll get over it.

    In the meantime, the lousy journalists create wonderful job security for the good PR folks. :)

  9. wretch
    August 15th, 2008 @ 3:38 pm

    I’m another guy who’s worked on both sides of the fence, and the harshest lesson I took away from my stint in PR is that a PR agency can’t be any smarter than its clients will let them be.

    If the PR agent says “let’s disseminate this widely,” and the client insists “I don’t want Mossberg; I want Ars Technica,” well, then, there’s not much PR agents can do after their clients have rejected their recommendations.

    For the past 10-, maybe 20 years, MBAs have tended to not understand advertising, PR, or marketing.

  10. Screaming Lady
    August 19th, 2008 @ 1:42 pm

    anybody remember Joe Williams? He was something of a corporate communications guru in the early 80s. He said at the time that until companies start giving public relations a seat at the boardroom table, they'll never get it. Literally, they'll never get IT. I remember at my first job, an MBA was given the helm of the communications department, and she started pulling headlines off all press releases because (MBA school) studies showed newspapers didn't use them. Wretch nails it re: Advertising/marketing/PR. It looks easy, but is so specialized — like law — that when lay people try to practice it, disasters happen. Joe worked for Johnson & Johnson (Tylenol) in those days, by the way.

  11. Screaming Lady
    August 19th, 2008 @ 5:10 pm

    Correction: Joe worked for TRW in the early 80s. Don’t know where I got Tylenol except maybe we talked a lot about it in his desert workshops.

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