So Steve Rubel gets up at Gnomedex and says something along the lines of, “Blogging is PR with candor.” I wasn’t there, but I’ve read the reports of people who were.
Blogging certain can be PR with candor, although there’s nothing to stop a blogger from being less than candid in his blog. Further, I’ve seen plenty of candid PR that was produced without blogs. The notion that PR simply cannot be candid without blogs is absurd. I don’t think that’s what Steve meant at all. (I doubt that Steve is lobbying for his employer, Cooper Katz, to eliminate all of its efforts and provide no services other than blogging to its clients.) But some apparently took it that way.
Like Todd Cochrane, who wrote in Geek News Central, “companies probably would be better in firing most of their PR people, and hiring bloggers as Marqui did in their paid to blog program.”
Now, let me state straight up that I’m a Todd Cochrane fan. I listen to the Geek News Central podcast religiously, and the blog is among the feeds that are in my A-list folders. But a statement like this displays an appalling ignorance of what PR people do day in and day out. Did Todd read Scott Cutlip’s or Fraser Seitel’s PR textbook before blanketly suggesting that companies can replace public relations professionals with blogs? It’s not just Todd, of course. Most critics of PR know little of the profession.
(This isn’t the place, by the way, to address the ethics of Marqui’s paid-to-blog program.)
Public relations is, as I’ve defined it before, the practice of managing an organization’s relationships with various constituent audiences, notably those whose opinions and behaviors affect the organization’s ability to execute its strategic plan. It’s also about influence, and not in a negative, manipulative way. For example, I have colleagues who work for a major global PR firm on an account for a government agency designed to influence young teens to commit to remaining drug-free. (Now there’s a nefarious goal if ever there was one.) The research they did was extensive, leading to strategies that would be effective with the target audience. Their implementation has been evolutionary and crafted with the peak of professionalism. Their metrics are sophisticated and help them assess the degrees of success and adjust their efforts to produce even better results.
If we listen to Todd, all this could be replaced with a blog or two.
Todd and the legions of others who proclaim blogging the future of organizational communications are blissfully unaware of the tens of thousands of highly professional public relations practitioners who work in relative obscurity producing outstanding results for their organizations through the ethical implementation of tactics based on strategies designed to deliver specific outcomes. And, believe it or not, many of those tactics are based on a foundation of openness, transparency, and candor.
I understand the nature of evangelism and you’ll find no bigger supporter of blogs as a PR tool than me. But I get weary of hearing proclamations that blogs spell the end of public relations. I wish those making such assertions would make at least a token effort to learn something about the profession they’re so easily dismissing before calling for its eradication.
But this has always been true: When you’re selling hammers, every problem looks like a nail.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
