Category: General

I promised myself I would never think these thoughts, but they keep recurring so I have to own up.

I realize I will sound like one someone’s grandparent, but here we go anyway.

Is it me or are people becoming afraid of a bit of hard graft? Public Relations is a business where experience and knowledge are the cornerstones of your professional offering. You can’t purchase either of these items, you have to accumulate them.

What is this new thinking that says “hey I am too good to do this basic stuff, I want to be a consultant, I want to be leading people, I want to be the big earner, I am not happy with mundane rubbish.”

My take on this is as follows.  The PR apprenticeship, while not flawless in any respect, teaches you the basics, provides experience and takes you through a process of learning which, although it may not be sexy, provides you with the skills that will make you a good practitioner.

There’s nothing wrong with always striving to grow and get more responsibility, but a strong grasp of the basics must be a given.  And guess what? You have to graft for the basics. As the old saying goes, what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.

Of course the dot com boom accentuated this process because some people jumped jobs for better positions rather than doing it the hard way. They still don’t have the basics.

This opinion piece was prompted by a new book, called “The Devil Wears Prada”. Author Lauren Weiberger has written a fictional novel based on her year as assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour.  The book pulls no fictional punches and attempts to skewer the fictional editor.

Kate Betts, who herself worked at Vogue, reviews the book in the New York Times and I can’t help but agree with her opinion on the book:

“Having worked at Vogue myself for eight years and having been mentored by Anna Wintour, I have to say Weisberger could have learned a few things in the year she sold her soul to the devil of fashion for $32,500. She had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing.”

You can’t barter, buy or take a loan of experience.  You can only live it. What you might consider a pain in the butt, might actually stand to you in a difficult situation at a later date.  We all want to grow up fast, but make sure you are taking the right short cuts. That’s all.

Link provided by the ever excellent AdRants. Does this make sense to anyone or am I being an old-fogey (before my time)?

Whatever your views of the war in Iraq, you had to be amused by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi PRO (for use of a better term), who provided the ultimate showcase of how not to communicate with the public in his final days in office.

The press conference where he declared that  “there are no American infidels in Baghdad” even though US tanks were surrounding the building in which he was giving the press briefing, gets full marks for perseverence but no marks for style, content or delivery.

It seems that  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (a.k.a Comical Ali or Baghdad Bob – depending on what you read) has caught the imagination of the Internet.  There are a growing number of articles about him, specific fan websites and you can even buy your own commemorative t-shirt.

Of course as we all know when the PR person becomes the story something has gone horribly wrong….

RELATED LINKS: Time | Geek.com | CNN | The Post and Courier | CBS News | Globe and Mail | York Daily Record | News24 | Herald Tribune |

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…