Well I’ve been keeping rather busy lately (cars, houses, family) and my list of things to blog has been growing ever longer. Thankfully (in some cases) others continue to be more productive in hitting the publish button.
A wise women* once told me that the great thing about opinions was that anyone could have one, and the downside of opinions was the same.
I’ve been blogging since 2002 and I would love to know how many blog posts since that time have had the words dying, dead, doomed or extinct in the headline. Quite a number I’d imagine.
The interesting thing is that no many how times these posts appear (and are proved false), they keep coming.
On my list of things to blog last week was a rebuttal to Fuat Kircaali’s mindless post on the extinction of Public Relations.
Of course these posts always focus on the press release which (un)fortunately highlights the author’s lack of domain knowledge – but doesn’t stop them offering their opinion anyway.
For the record, Public Relations is all about helping individuals and organizations to connect and communicate with their audience. The continued acceleration on online media, tools and channels, along with the (shock) continued existence of traditional media, means that PR will be around for a long time yet. Sorry about that – we do seem to be an inconvenience for a lot of people based on the number of posts forecasting our demise.
Luckily there are people who are far more productive than I in translating “oh I must write about that” to actually doing it, so I am delighted that Mr. Shel Holtz beat me to it in his post: Bold predictions or just plain hubris?:
The post is as preposterous as a lot of Kircaali’s other assertions. For example, he suggests that 70% of today’s PR agencies won’t survive the “fast approaching media avalanche” because 90% of today’s PR firms are still in business because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow companies to communicate material information on websites.
I’d pay real money to know where Kircaali gets his statistic. I could have sworn all those agencies were out there helping organizations build and maintain positive relationships with constituent publics. How silly of me.
Further, Kircaali says there are only three kinds of agencies. Those using Ulitzer every day as a channel for their clients’ news, those who are using Ulitzer to publish bylined articles and tapping into its syndication features (these are the agencies, of course, that will survive), and those who are “horrified by the idea that their clients may actually find out about (Ulitzer).” Those must be the doomed 70%.
Preposterous just about sums it up.
*Hello Mum
Murphy's Law 