Murphy's Law

Yesterday, Adam Sternbergh wrote a piece for the New York Times on how PR people are portrayed on the big screen.  The article is an interesting read and follows the release of “Phone Booth” and Al Pacino’s new film, “People I know”.

Publicists, the “power girls” notwithstanding, have never been fans of scrutiny. They prefer to work just outside the spotlight. This is because they’ve always understood what the rest of us temporarily forgot: that their business is inherently unglamorous and, yes, occasionally ugly. It just looked pretty for a moment.

Some supplementary thoughts are online here.

PR Opinions will be in hiatus until April 28, 2003 while I am travelling and taking some much needed R&R.  Posting will restart promptly upon my return. 

 

The Chicago Tribune has an interesting article by Maureen Ryan on the struggle publishers and broadcasters are having understanding and managing blogging.

Let’s be honest for a moment.  When you are under pressure, which comes with the profession, sometimes you don’t pay enough attention to your writing style.  Sometimes the most appalling “corporate-isms” sneak into your press releases, backgrounders etc.

Well there’s a website that serves as a welcome reminder to us all.  Corporate Babble provides loads of real examples of corporate speak.  It’s worth a visit – though not if you have an aversion to words like “solutions”, “strategic” etc.

Thanks to the Holmes Report for the link.

As you probably know most media outlets pre-prepare obituaries of prominent world figures.  Then when they pass away, the panic in researching and creating content is reduced.  While this is understandable, it’s probably recommended that they keep this content secreted away until the time is right. Enter the Internet.

Someone on CNN’s web team was obviously playing around, because the CNN website published a load of premature obituaries… and of course The Smoking Gun grabbed them for prosperity. I’m sure Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, Bob Hope and Nelson Mandela will all be interested in how CNN will remember them.

Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link!

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.