Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The kind of thing Jerry's talking about strikes me as no great epiphany.

Not that he was trotting out well-worn platitudes, or anything - what he says is both smart, insightful, and absolutely right on the money.

But I've come to realise over the years that the thing I got into Public Relations to do is exactly the opposite of what most PR people, and pretty much all PR firms think they're in business to do.

To me, and to a few of the PR people I've met along the way (Jeneane Sessum, Steve Rubel, Renee Blodgett, Ursula Herrick, Tom Murphy, and others), PR has ALWAYS been about fostering better public relationships. That's what we do. Or some of us.

Jerry’s four-part manifesto for better PR is a literal job description for the best people in this business. I’m not trying to be defensive, or (I hope) self-aggrandizing here – it’s just the extraordinarily bleeding obvious to me that the job Jerry describes is precisely what I've been trying to do for the last N years.

Jerry says: "...your PR team would improve disclosure, increase transparency, train everyone, seek opportunities, make introductions and then get out of the way."

That's EXACTLY what the best PR people (IMHO) already do. The key part being the "get out of the way" bit (see: http://tinyurl.com/b6xbx and also http://tinyurl.com/c267y).

Sadly, the people who understand this have been, for a long time, a tiny endangered minority.

Flacks catch a lot of flak. Engineers, reporters, analysts, sales people, paying punters - they all stick it to PR people, and rightly so. Most of us are complete fucking idiots.

Chris Pirillo calls us all "Parrots", saying - ""By definition, they've already lost. PR is all about spin - it's all about telling the world that your shit don't stink. If a parrot tried to abandon that "tenet", (a) his or her head would explode; and (b) they'd get fired. Parrots long for the viral nature of blogging, but for that to happen, they have to let go of one thing that keeps 'em in business: control."

He's right, of course - about the majority anyway. So the “profession” get a lot of shit from a lot of people, and it's generally fair. Heck – I once tried doing PR for a law firm. That’s lower than pondscum – it’s the kind of thing any self-respecting pondscum would try to scrape off the sole of its shoe. I realised pretty quickly that it was a dumb thing to be doing, so I just stopped doing it.

The good news is that the Web, and more particularly the rise of blogging, is starting to give us back the job we thought we were signing up for in the first place. Those other PR parrots, who get off on the cynical spin control aspect of the gig – they’re toast.

The simple fact is that the other kind or PR (PR as it is practiced by 90% of the parrots in the business) is dead.

Hung by the web, drawn by the cluetrain, quartered by the blogosphere.

Good riddance.

Markets are conversations; great PR is about enabling great conversations. Some of the best PR folk are truly gifted conversationalists. Is it just accidental that the "markets=conversations" meme was first promulgated by someone who, in his time, kicked ass as a PR guy?

I've been following all the PR/Blogging threads in the last week or so and trying to figure out what my take on all this is. I feel I really ought to have something of value to add to the conversation, but I'm not sure I do. Saying "yes, of course" is little more than filler - but that's about the best I can muster.

We know PR is broken - despite what some senior flacks might think (http://tinyurl.com/8cf6j). We already know that what we do for a living is something other than what most people think of when they hear "PR", and we’re happy to go on doing it. So a lot of people will continue to think we’re shills and shysters long after the last of the PR parrots has squawked his or her last. It goes with the territory.

Don't know if this makes much sense. It's late, I've been reading too many blogs, and trading crazed emails with Rageboy. Seemed to make sense when I started writing this, but now...

Time for me to get out of the way.

(It's the second time I'm trying to post this comment; maybe this time will work :)

I'm quite sure that the idea of public relationships is older. An example can be found in Center & Jackson's "Public Relations Practices: Managerial Case Studies and Problems" (5th edition, 1995):

"The proper term for the desired outcome of public relations practice is public relationships. An organization with effective public relations will attain positive public relationships."

There are many articles focused on the relational perspective in PR. John A. Ledingham has a comprehensive literature review on this subject in his article, Explicating Relationship Management as a General Theory of Public Relations, Journal of Public Relations Research, 2003 (unfortunately, only the abstract is available online, but I guess that you could ask the author to send you a reprint).

An idea that, I think, is more relevant for the way PR is changing, is that of dialogic public relations. The best article (I know of) on this topic is Michael L. Kent and Maureen Taylor's (PDF!) Toward a dialogic theory of public relations, Public Relations Review, Volume 28, Issue 1 , February 2002.

Hope this helps :)