Still more on Bloggers vs PR flacks
Stowe Boyd wades into the stormy seas between bloggers and PR flacks and as usual, he gets it right:
The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.
Stowe argues that bloggers need to stand up and say “no mas” and then be explicit to PR folks in how they want to be pitched. He’s got a point, but I would flip it around and put the onus on us, the PR folks in the trenches.
We need to get ourselves smarter. And we need to get our fellows smarter. And we need to keep getting even smarter. We have to understand that public relations is about relations and if you wouldn’t ‘relate’ to your friends or loved ones that way, why on Earth would you ‘relate’ like that to some blogger or journalist who could make or break your client.
Update: in the comments, Bob LeDrew points out, quite correctly:
We also need to get our CLIENTS smarter. Or maybe, if there’s no other choice, to get smarter clients.
Well, yeah. But in any case, we need to develop backbones and tell our clients the way things should be done. We aren’t paid just to say ‘yes.’
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We also need to get our CLIENTS smarter. Or maybe, if there’s no other choice, to get smarter clients.