I’ve been following the discussions between Shel Israel and Mike Manuel over the past week or so.
Somewhere in the middle there’s a straw man being tossed around.
The “traditional PR” guy, you know the one. He’s the guy shouting into the phone and taking reporters out to lunch. Or the recent college graduate who watched one too many episodes of Melrose Place and thought she’d grow up to be Amanda Woodward.
Yes, this person exists. But there is an entire range of choices between the ‘traditional PR’ that Shel says a start-up can do without and those of us who know blogs are not to be spammed. If a start-up is looking at a ‘traditional PR agency’ I’d agree with Shel. If they were talking to Voce or PAN, I’d say they are making a smart move.
So let’s retire the image of the hard driving PRbot. It’s bad enough that their economic model makes the RIAA look nimble, do we have to kick them when they’re down as well?
Pay attention to this one folks. Mike Arrington has compiled a list of pointers for tech companies contempleting their launch.
Back in the olden days - the 90s - we had the ’stealth mode’ where a client would retain a fancy pants PR agency to get lots of press attention but not give away what the company actually did. That worked for about six months in 1997 and then quickly gave way to the phrase ‘vaporware.’
Now we have endless betas, invite-only alphas and pre-release pre-alphas.
The more things change…
The life of the independent PR consultant / practitioner / whatever just got a bit easier.
Unless, of course, this has been around for a while. In which case, where have you been all year when I was IMing friends working in agencies trying to pull reporters’ phone numbers out of them?
Thank you Bacon’s!
Yesterday I got my hot little hands on Peppercom’s corporate blogging survey.
I admit to being completely agnostic on the subject of corporate blogs, character blogs, alien blogs, etc. If corporate interests want to blog, well welcome to the party. If they do it in an open and conversaional manner, that’s great. If they don’t, well they’ll be found out soon enough by the rest of the blogosphere.
My own take on this is that most agency and internal communications people look at blogs as just another channel to spam up, just like they do everything else. Maybe it’s my experience in agency life. I’ll get to that in a later entry.
One number in the survey jumped out at me and almost gives me hope for the future of corporate blogging. Of the two groups surveyed (’internal’ or PR people in agencies, and ‘external’ or PR and communications staff at companies) clear majorties indicated that self-promotion and and obvious ghost writing would be mistakes. And both groups were postive about a blog’s impact on their company’s reputation as a thought leader and its usefulness in dialogue with stakeholders.
I think we’re probably entering a point where the rank and file in most agencies either ‘get it’ or are at least aware of social media. As these folks move up the ranks, we might see more and more agencies embracing social media, instead of running away.
Steve Cody’s (aka managing partner of Peppercom) take is here
WordPress is now thisclose to their 2.0 release.
Details on the blog.
I’ve been on WordPress for a couple of years now. I can’t say enough what an improvement it is over any other blogging platform. Anyone who’s still using any other blogging platform, and I can’t imagine why you would be, should take this opportunity to make the jump.
After all, 906,383 bloggers (and counting) can’t be all wrong.
