Theory N’ Practice

I was just about to write part II to the All Access Media post when I came across an interesting reflection of the state of PR practice today. Listing 10 Reasons Your Blog-Exploiting Buzz Campaign Will Fail, FlagrantDisregard.com’s blogger, John, goes on an insightful rant against PR professionals exploiting Bloggers to get cheap PR (read: marketing, not PR) from the next generation of journalists.

First: an apology to John. No, this isn’t what us self-respecting PR professionals do. It’s what marketers disguised as PR people do.

Second: A soap-box rant. Too many PR practitioners operate from this out-dated mindset that all you need is to get the word out there and the public will follow. This is the P.T. Barnum mentality, where ”a sucker is born every minute” and will eventually give in if giv-en enough stimuli.

In a media environment in which the citizen journalist is more and more validated as the preferred news source, you’d think that PR professionals would do a better job of maintaining relationships with their “key publics”…No self-respecting editor or journalist would put up with the kind of marketing-disguised-as-PR job that John denounced on his blog, so why dumb down the industry just because new players have entered the market?

It’s only one more reason why I’ll always stick to my contention that Public Relations is not about messages but about behavior–the relationship you build with people who affect and are affected by your organization’s decisions. PR is not about flooding media with messages about a company’s product or service, that’s marketing.