I still get a lot of PR related publications; it seems almost impossible to opt-out of them even though I have not been in this world for more than a decade.
In general, let me say. I don’t think the PR industry still really gets the new world of digital media (or wants to get). They talk a good talk but under it all are threatened by the devastating impact self-publishing is having on traditional billing.
I did get an interesting email today though, from PR News. To summarize, even though daily there are more than 55 million updates on Facebook, 27 million tweets and three years of video content uploaded to YouTube, the majority of PR people still use print, TV and blog clippings as their major source of message measurement.
Shame on you.
Their advice is threefold. One, stop the clip book and get a real-time monitoring tool an analyze all the content types. Two, start listening to the tone of the conversation. Three, listen to the context .. analyze the themes into which the conversations fall.
They also say that PR people do two basic things .. ‘get the message out’ and ‘measure if they got the message out.’ If this is true, then most of the PR industry is only doing half of its job.
New bottles, old wine. The PR ‘industry’ has always been peppered with practitioners who do 50% of a decent job (at best).
That’s the problem with any field where there is no barrier to entry, no genuine professional qualification, and a very subjective view of performance.
Some folk are brilliant and at the other end of the normal distribution curve, some are plain dreadful.
And in the middle are a range of capabilities, all trying to come to terms with a new way of working. Which is no different from the news business, print journalism, book publishing, retailing, education…
Anyway, don’t blame the PR consultants – blame the Clients. Why do you need to outsource online media monitoring anyway?
Because the agency persuaded you that the 40k a month you are spending on them needs to be spent on social media too rather than cut … And to ‘pitch’ bloggers rather than engage them online in a dialog ..