Note to the PR folks who read this blog:
Click on over to Shel Israel’s post, The New PR Practitioner, at Global Neighbourhoods. It’s worth your read. (Anal-retentive grammarian types — and you know who you are — please ignore Israel’s typos long enough to soak in the overall message. It’s important that you do.)
Israel has a solid PR agency background. He cut his teeth at Regis McKenna Inc., where “we were taught to be trusted sources of information for the press and analysts who could most influence our clients relationships with customers and prospects.” So he knows whereof he speaks. And this background gives him no small insight into the issues facing the modern-day PR agency.
That insight translates nicely into higher ed PR. Oh, sure, we don’t pitch as aggressively as a lot of the agency folk, and unlike many of our corporate colleagues we’re more interested in getting coverage for our institutions rather than keeping their names out of the press. But with the rise of social media, our role is evolving, and the very nature of our work — at institutions of higher learning, where online access is ubiquitous — ought to prompt a greater sense of urgency among us than our agency and corporate brethren.
Folks, we need to get this:
PR people have a future as the same kind of trusted resources we were back in the days of Regis McKenna. except now we can use blogging and social media. We get to establish our own credibility over time and when we discuss our own clients on our blogs, we are trusted sources of information relevant to our audiences. …
[I]f you are in the PR proffesion … you will not succeed if you focus on smiling and dialing a media list of strangers, if you are intent in inject hubris into what you have to say or write. If you think you can succeed by being just cute or clever, you are living in the wrong Era.
Today, you need to join the conversation. You are part of the news distribution system, not just for your clients, but for the community where your clients would like to flourish.
This to me is very liberating. The PR people I know and respect are all interesting people and great story teller. They often know so much more than their clients allow them to express. We are now in a Conversational Era. It looks like we will be in this Era for some time to come, and the best and brightest of the PR professionals will join in that conversation, while others will just be left behind.
So. What are we doing to build those relationships? How are we becoming those trusted sources of influence and information? How are we joining in on the conversation in this Conversational Era?
Andy writes! 
Total crap.
Here’s a better read, i.e. sans the Kool-aid: Is PR Too Stupid for Conversational Marketing? (http://tinyurl.com/24fhbn )
EXCERPT
5 good reasons why PR is incompatible
“Conversational Marketing  now does that sound cool or what? It’s certainly all the buzz around the water cooler here lately. Just last week Jeff Jarvis touched on it in a great interview of David Weinberger from the Always On Conference. And surely we’ve all seen Joe Jaffe’s Social Media Survey making the rounds. Good? Maybe not. Looks like we are about to replay the Wikipedia debacle actually, i.e. a HUGE opportunity where the PR industry is prematurely locked out. That has a few industry experts scratching their heads and asking why. Here we try to answer that. Among other things, we might just be too stupid for Conversational Marketing.
http://www.strumpette.com/archives/300-Is-PR-Too-Stupid-for-Conversational-Marketing.html
Total crap, Amanda? Methinks you wax hyperbolic — something you do quite well at Strumpette. I can see your point of view, though. You’re looking through the PR agency lens, whereas I’m approaching PR from a different school entirely. Colleges and universities are nothing like the corporate world, and many campus PR offices are less like PR agencies than they are like extensions of academia, where discussion, debate and the unfettered exchange of ideas was popular long before the blogosphere came along.
Since it’s Monday, and I’m waiting for the IT guy to come over and switch out my computer, let me offer my take on each of your five points on why PR is incompatible with this conversational era (or “conversational marketing” [CM] as you put it):
1. Totally green ethical organizations are very very rare. Excuse me but promoting a company is only half the likely function of PR. We are advocates proactively as well as defensively. We live in an age where pretty much everything will kill ya; and corporate weasels doing the perp walk on the nightly news is a veritable parade. That said, by definition, a PR person has too much of an agenda to participate in CM.
So, who doesn’t have an agenda, hidden or otherwise? If PR people are supposed to represent their organizations, they should represent in every possible medium. That doesn’t mean PR people should always be talking, but they should be there. Part of the conversation is listening. Besides, your point assumes the company (or in my case, the university) has no role as a corporate citizen, and thus no stake in a community. That simply is not true — at least in the case of universities, as I suspect that same can be said for most companies.
2. Today, the savvy social media participant strongly rejects even the hint of PR’s MO, “influence.” Why? Because we are all empowered now. We make our own choices and are offended when others try to make them for us.
Partial crap. You’re equating influence with making decisions for others.
3. From a business service buyer perspective, devoid of “targeted influence,†it’s just a bit too kinda-sorta-maybe-California. It’s too amorphous for people writing checks to buy and it’s too amorphous to measure results. …[snip]… [Y]ou’ve got fake people doing fake things of undetermined value delivered… maybe. No thanks. That engagement is too hard to sell and too easy to lose.
OK, you’ve kinda-sorta-maybe made a good point there, in an amorphous sorta way.
4. The “true believers” in Social Media continue to gloss over the overwhelming business risk. They seem to almost deny human nature. Here, keep these in mind when considering the potential exposures inherent in CM:
a) Humans like war. With “loose lips sink ships” in mind, send out that memo and tell your organization to feel free to randomly post.
b) We love controversy almost as much as we’ve culturally become addicted to porn. Even if you don’t provide it, we spend hours imagining it. So don’t homogenize the corporation’s voice. Everybody on three… feel free to post.
e) The sound of breaking glass is… well… fun. If you give the world the opportunity to play pinata with your brand, guaranteed they will.
e) Schadenfreude (German word meaning ‘pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune’) is human nature.
Bottom line: Your “openness†is your competitor’s opportunity. Always has been.
Ecclesiastes and the Byrds said it best: There’s a time for war and a time for peace. A savvy organization will understand how open to be about an initiative, and when.
And 5., the single most important reason… the CM mind is not aligned with the PR body. Here, when you impose an ideal on a group not aligned with it all hell breaks loose. Look at Iraq. It is pure cultural arrogance to insist that democracy fits all and is best. Just look at the difficulty PR faces presently as it rises to face accountability and ethics. And now we expect them to take the intellectual leap to transcend it? C’mon. PR is just too stupid.
I love the mind-body metaphor here. My 4-miles-a-day-max body is not aligned with my triathlon mind, either. But that doesn’t mean it won’t adjust, with proper training and conditioning. So maybe the PR body needs to take up yoga to become more flexible for the CM mind. In fact, cross training would be better, because PR will still need to flex its old muscles while learning some new exercise routines. As for Iraq” Not interested in getting into politics here, but just because the U.S. didn’t get the government it wanted doesn’t mean democracy doesn’t work. Lots of Americans don’t have the government they want, either, but it has less to do with the system than the candidates.
It all boils down to accountability and ethics. Hire ethical people to be your PR staff and hold them accountable in every arena of communications and marketing. The tenor of your post throughout is that PR people cannot be trusted. That’s troubling.
Thanks for reading and posting.
Andrew,
Are you getting an error message? We use some pretty strict anti-spam measures. Perhaps you (through your ISP) are on some blacklist somewhere. Sorry.
Here, allow me to comment on your comments:
You said, “Besides, your point assumes the company (or in my case, the university) has no role as a corporate citizen, and thus no stake in a community.”
Spoken like an academic. Actually, in the real world, the evidence proves just the opposite. Bad companies do better than good companies. If behaving was profitable, you wouldn’t need PR people.
You said, “You’re equating influence with making decisions for others.”
In its purest form, “influence” does rob an audience of its ability to decide. That’s actually the goal of surreptitious selling.
You said, “A savvy organization will understand how open to be about an initiative, and when.”
Yes. Which underscores boldly why the Fortune 500 has almost totally rejected all this social media nonsense.
You said, “It all boils down to accountability and ethics. Hire ethical people to be your PR staff and hold them accountable in every arena of communications and marketing. The tenor of your post throughout is that PR people cannot be trusted. That’s troubling.”
Well, first off, I had said that PR is too stupid for conversational marketing. You’ve switched the criteria to ethics and accountability. Indeed, they might be too stupid there fundamentally, as well. And yes, I too find it most troubling.
Sincerely,
– Amanda