There has been a lot more discussion over the past few days in blogland on GoogleNews and it’s penchant for including of corporate press releases in listings of news stories.
Mitch Wagner has, in my opinion, one of the better takes on this whole story on his “Monkey in my pants” blog.
Rich Karpinski has penned an article in the latest issue of BtoB magazine on how firms are using blogs to promote closer connections with their customers. It’s a good read with some very interesting opinions ;-).
Jon Udell at Infoworld, one of the pre-eminent technology media bloggers has picked up on the excellent RSS whitepaper (pdf) written by Phil Gomes.
Jon welcomes a better understanding of RSS by PR people, evaluates the usefulness of RSS (as outlined by Phil) to him in his work as a journalist and makes recommendations. Of course, every journalist is different and some features that Jon may not find useful others may and vice versa.
What’s interesting is the hysteric responses to Jon’s posting.
“PR People know about RSS now � only a matter of time before it becomes useless. Advertising, PR, and Marketing destroy everything they touch on the internet.” Link
“it was only a matter of time before the industry sharks descended on innocent bloggers, coming up with ways to “nudge” them into mentioning their clients’ products and services.” Link
The last response is from a PR person….from the PR school of Karastamatis no doubt.
Anyhow, I digress, all these people who fear PR’s infiltration of RSS, completely miss the point.
Readers decide whether or not to subscribe to an RSS feed. If it’s useful and informative, then they will read it and continue to subscribe to it. If it’s useless, marketing speak, then they will unsubscribe and it will die. This isn’t spam. You choose to subscribe. Our RSS feeds are very popular. If we start posting rubbish they will fail. It’s in our interest to provide relevant content, that it useful.
This is democratic PR at it’s most democratic.
You may have missed it, but there has been some consternation over the past few days about press releases appearing on GoogleNews ahead of actual news (read: editorial) stories.
I’m not sure why anyone is getting upset. It’s unlikely that you would use GoogleNews as anything more than a primitive news portal. Do people also think the newswire feeds posted on sites like Yahoo’s message boards are real news? I don’t think so. GoogleNews is useful for research and maybe an overview of what’s hot, no more.
Karlin Lillington points out that many legitimate news sources more or less cut and paste releases anyway…
My grandmother always told me that nice was a colorless adjective, but I think it describes the following miscellaneous stories…
Dave Chalk, technology columnist at the Toronto Globe and Mail has a positive article on Public Relations and it’s role in building successful brands.
The Nashville City paper has a story on how HealthSouth Corp. successfully executed a textbook response to overcome a recent scandal.
And to finish a PR story from none other than Poker Magazine about how the National Indian Gaming Association is investing in Public Relations to promote their gaming interests.
The release of the afforementioned film “Phone Booth” about the PR trapped in a phone booth by an unknown sniper in Manhattan is generating a lot of PR-related thinking from the media.
The New York Post‘s Jared Paul Stern comes to our aid with an eight step program to help the image of our profession.
As he subtly puts it: “Not all publicists are lying scum,of course, but the bad apples taint the whole industry.”
Indeed. 
In a story in CNET, Rich Vancil at IDC is forecasting a growing momentum behind hard metrics for marketing investment and warns that intangibles like “buzz” and “brand identity” will no longer be acceptable justification for marketing dollars.
I thought everyone was already measuring ROI on marketing spend?
Your challenge, should you accept it, is to secure for your client (a large multi-national producer of domestic appliances), a mention in this very influential blog.
Best of luck…
If there’s one story you should read this month, this should be it.
It’s a short story from Atlantic Monthly and it’s absolute hilarious.
The story concerns PR guy, “Rick Renard” and his work in lobbying for an American Pope.
“Monsignor Murphy had told me over the phone to go in the back way. I was tempted to say something, but didn’t. I tell my graduate students, “Don’t tease the client about sex scandals until you’ve established a good working relationship.”
Recommended reading…
That’s according to Hollywood muppet Joel Schumacher in advance publicity (oh the irony) for his movie “Phone Booth”. Ah yes, from the mouth of the ignorant comes ignorance.
Joel has about as much idea about PR as I do about directing large budget movies, so I guess I am qualified to say that all Hollywood film directors are overpaid, alcoholic, lying philanderers? No probably not.
His latest movie’s main character is a PR person who doesn’t use an office but walks the sidewalks with his assistant and a cell phone. That certainly sounds like my working day.
The quote itself comes from a smug article in the Toronto Star penned by self acclaimed ‘flack’ John Karastamatis.
It is a truly pathetic article, Mr. (he’s a man, that’s an important point as we’ll discover later) Karastamatis states that he’s not offended by being labelled a liar, “because it’s a clich� What? Well I’m offended, not by the term ‘liar’ but by his ignorance.
Poor Karastamatis is something of a campaigner, who was “berated by other publicists” for telling the world at large the truth about PR. Whose version of the truth was that?
“I have never known my fellow flacks be so passionate about something (okay, maybe the new pair of shoes they bought on sale at Holt Renfrew).”
He’s witty too eh?
He continues: “It was astonishing these women (and they are mostly women) would actually think what we do is anything more than a glorified sales job.”
This is before he gets started on Corporate PR people, who, according to Karastamatis, are “a more lethal branch of the practice”.
There is a disturbing trend among some practitioners of trying to promote themselves by degrading their fellow professionals. I am not sure why this attitude exists, but it’s clearly not professional. I’ve yet to see a doctor come out and say, “Most other doctors will kill you, I on the other hand know what I’m doing.”
Mr. Karastamatis obviously missed the “PR 101” class where we all found out what the ‘P’ and the ‘R’ of PR stand for. Here’s a hint for him, the P doesn’t stand for Press.
Public Relations is a diverse profession that employs hundreds of thousands of hard-working professional people in all walks of life. While the media and entertainment is part of it, it’s a small minority. Like any profession, some practitioners may lie, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. Most PR people I have known over fourteen years are ethical and professional.
What this article does show is that the barriers to becoming a practitioner are too low. When uninformed, amatuers like Karastamatis start to talk like they know any more than would fit on a postage stamp, it’s time to up the ant�/FONT>
Can anyone recommend a decent beginner’s course for him?
Rant over.
Murphy's Law 