Category: public relations

Friday Five, post-Thanksgiving edition, a day late: reading for tech-savvy PR and a request for input

The Thanksgiving holiday and an over-indulgence of turkey, football and college basketball has thrown off my circadian rhythms. So I’m a day late with this week’s Friday Five. Technically, I should’ve taken the week off, but this particular topic is timely, as it relates to the Advanced PR Institute I’ll be helping out with on Dec. 3-4. (“Developing a Technology-Savvy Communications Approach” is the theme for this institute, and if you would like to attend, there’s still time to register if you hurry.) Anyway, my co-faculty and I discussed some pre-reading for the conference participants to help bring them up to speed on the impact of new technology on PR, and we came up with this list of materials:

1. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing, by Lois Kelly. (Executive summary available online. So is my review of the book.)

2. The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The whole book is now available online.

3. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (I also reviewed this book.)

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott. The introduction and chapter 1 are available online (PDF).

5. Now it’s your turn. What other book about technology, social networking, the web 2.0 world, etc., would be on your list of recommended reading for higher ed PR folks? Leave your recommendations in the comments below and I’ll be sure to share these recommendations with the folks in Austin on Dec. 3-4.

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Now playing: The National – Apartment Story
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Let’s blame marketing for PR’s rep slippage

The folks at PR Conversations are talking about how marketing is eroding public relation’s reputation. Poster Heather Yaxley establishes the premise this way:

Can we blame PR’s poor reputation on an increased focus on promotional communications for competitive differentiation (the reductionist view of PR as solely a subset of marketing)?

As a tactical function, PR is reduced to generating “free advertising”. That means evaluation ranges from calculating advertising value equivalent (AVE) to demands to prove return on investment in terms of sales generated from media coverage.

At the other end, those championing PR as a strategic management function seek to distance themselves from the press agents. But in doing so, aren’t they ignoring PR’s proven ability to achieve marketing objectives, either alone or as part of an integrated approach?

I’m not sure PR folks can blame marketing entirely, or that PR ever needed marketing’s help to sully our rep. But it’s making for some interesting commentary.

Part of the problem for PR practitioners, methinks, has to do with the fact that many of them come to the business from journalism. Since many journalists — not all, but many — enter the craft with a moralistic sense that they are on a crusade to speak truth to power, when they enter the PR side, they experience some cognitive dissonance. They (we) still want to present the truth, but now they’re doing so from a different perspective: as representatives of organizations or institutions that may not share those same moralistic values that drove the PR person toward a journalism career in the first place.

Maybe PR folks should just get used to the fact that we’re in the marketing business.

After all, how many times do you hear marketing people complain that PR is tainting their image?

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Now playing: Bruce Springsteen – Radio Nowhere
via FoxyTunes