I've been stewing up this all day. A blogger, who I won't name, sent me some flaming email today. It seems that he was at a blogger dinner in NYC last night and a bunch of bloggers were ranting about how PR people are all just terrible, awful people. Among the comments I read before relegating him to my spam catcher's Block Sende list was:</p>
"You insult everyone working in Marketing every day, just say you're in PR and you lie for a living."
In a way, I'm relieved. These days, I've been wondering how to make a living. Usually sweeping stereotypes hurled in my direction refer to either my religion, my politics or living in Caliornia.
Of course, anyone who has read anything I've written for the past three years, is aware that I no longer practice PR. But, that is besides the point. His comments offend me. This guy says his dad was in marketing and his work was mainly on numbers, and that's "the real marketing." PR is some inferior, dirty little something.
My succinct answer: Bullshit. You don't know what your talking about and you show your ignorance whenever your fingers collide with your keyboard.
I was in PR for more than 20 years, and am proud of the work I did. The majority of people I knew and worked with were good and honest people who, if anything, were guilty of trying too hard to please both clients and the media. PR people generally counsel clients to come clean on controversial news. Get bad news out and get on with it. Tell the public your sorry, when you've done wrong and make sure you repeat the mistake again. Cover ups never last--so come clean up front. Yep, we had our shady characters and over a beer and in private I'll share a few stories with some of you. Every industry has liars. Every industry industry has people who open their mouths and display ignorance.
It's ironic. Last week, I was getting lambasted for speculating that many PR practitioners may find themselves out of jobs because their business models are broken in terms of media relations, the mainstay of most PR practices. I didn;t say it in malice, but as an observation, that that will be expanded upon in the book I'm writing on business blogging with Scoble.
I've also, been recently taken to task for asserting press releases have lost credibility. But not because PR people are lying. The problem is committee review of them. They are written, refined, rewritten and repolished. They obfuscate, hedge and hyperbolate. They come accross as pompous gibberish, because too many hands had to insert too many adjectives, not because of inherant dishonesty.
Any way, I'm ranting a bit. Most of what I say here, I've already said previously. But this guy really pissed me off. Talk about misleading. He mentioned a particularly well-known person who attended this blogger dinner, making it sound like the view he was emailing me was the view of that famous person. When I pushed back on him, he admitted that person did not even participate in this PR-flogging conversation. He was just somewhere at the table.
Sounds like a little of that old black PR magic to me, wouldn't you say?
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