Welcome to Tuesday.
I had a lovely week off (thanks for asking). Travelling around the North Cascades is to be highly recommended.
Of course returning to civilization also means dealing with a backlog of post, e-mail and voicemail – and for you cool social media kids, loads of unread RSS feeds. (I remained joyfully unconnected for the week – something I would also heartily recommend).
It is of course ironic, and often humorous (but in a sad way), that PR people are the single greatest cause of negative perception for this “profession”.
Skimming my RSS backlog threw up loads of examples. My favorite is Phil Gomes’ account of e-mail correspondence with a PR spammer.
Sammy: Thanks Phil, it would just take me ages to find your addres in our database.
Phil: Probably no more time than it took for me to fish your note out of the trash and find the link, I’d imagine.
Also raising a smile is Nick Blakin’s guest post on the ever-reliable Bad Pitch blog.
Speaking of lessons, these are absolutely the only ten you’ll need throughout your entire professional life. Remember, PR isn’t all smoke and mirrors, and name dropping, and hot parties, and lookin’ good while you sip your free martinis at the lowliest dive on the block. That’s only 95% of what we do. To make it in this business you have to one day get your hands dirty. And that, I’m afraid, is the one really ugly truth.
Read it (and read the comments, they made me laugh).
Shel Holtz has some nice common sense on why PR and Marketing remain as relevant as ever.
If your reading was restricted to social media purists, you’d think that PR and marketing had no role left to play, that the rise of the trusted peer has so marginalized the communications profession that agencies everywhere should just fold up their tents and encourage their employees to learn a new trade.
Typical isn’t it? You go away for just one week, turn off the WiFi and… well nothing changes…
Murphy's Law 