Geoff Livingston and Jason Falls have both posted some pretty passionate responses to the latest major poke in the eye at the public relations industry. Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has begun a public blacklist of PR folks who’ve not followed her “rules of engagement” for contacting her, similar to Chris Anderson’s public blacklist from a few months ago.
Credit: IrisDragon.
Neither Geoff or Jason are very supportive of Gina’s list and offer their own insights into the PR profession while pointing out that bloggers aren’t always perfect either.
Now, I’m neither a writer or blogger as accomplished as Trapani or Anderson. Moreover, my only experience with public relations is:
- when I was responsible for public relations for my local Toastmasters club
- anything I do related to my social media presence
So, as I write, I write as an outsider. I’ve had some pleasant interactions with both Jason (in person) and Geoff (online) and, of course, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Lifehacker content and have had some positive interaction with at least one person involved with Lifehacker. I like Wired.com and The Long Tail, too.
I guess I’m trying to say that I’m relatively unbiased. Or biased towards both sets of stakeholders.
The comments that I left at Geoff’s blog summarize my thoughts on this topic:
I’m of two minds about this situation where PR firms are being publicly blacklisted:
a) On one hand, the behavior of some people working in the PR industry may resemble that of the telemarketer, except E-Mail is the medium instead of the phone call. With all due respect to all those people who are trying to make a living as telemarketers, virtually no one wants to speak to a telemarketer and, taken in the aggregate, they disrupt one’s life with little chance of finding a receptive listener. A similar thing happens with the mass E-Mail campaigns used by some PR people, or so I understand. Eventually disruptions will produce a negative response.
b) On the other hand, many beginning bloggers and journalists have probably been in the same situation as both the telemarketer and the faceless PR employee: no one knows you, no one cares about you, and no one has time to talk to you, let alone read your blog. I’ve been there and it took months of work to start to build a network of contacts. You can become quite desperate to make contacts and you may try mass-marketing techniques because you’re willing to try anything. And you’ll make mistakes, like not checking to see how a blogger, professional or entrepreneur prefers to be contacted, or spamming a bit as your frustration and impatience wear thin when you don’t get a response.
I’ve tried to be balanced so far. However, I do tip in one direction with my next comment:
The sad thing, of course, is that some people forget how hard it was in the beginning after they’ve passed through that part of the Dip and become intolerant of the “noob”. Or maybe their impatience of the successful person is genuine when they feel that they aren’t being listened to. Nonetheless, there may be a hint of hypocricy in the behaviour of the journalist, professional, or entrepreneur who erects barriers to communication and, worse still, publicly flogs someone who screws up.
This position is somewhat consistent with my Role Model 3.0 post and follow-up to that post from a couple of weeks ago. On one hand, I argued that accessibility and two-way communication of some sort is a hallmark of the modern role model or thought leader. On the other, I acknowledged that these people have pressures on them that many of us don’t have to deal with, as was pointed out to me in a private conversation with a successful blogger (pun intended).
I tried to look at it again from another angle:
Just like in social media, would it not make sense to try to build contacts among the more accessible bloggers and journalists instead of trying to go directly to the Trapanis and Andersons of the world? In fairness to them, why would they want to talk to new sources if they’ve already built a somewhat trusted network of contacts, especially if the new source doesn’t respect the rules of engagement ?
However, I still come back to this:
- If you’re going to blog under your own name and identity and make public various ways that you can be contacted… it’s only a matter of time before they’re used, regardless if you have “rules of engagement”.
- If you make an extreme response to something, expect an extreme reaction.
- Remember that at one point in time, nobody online knew who you were, didn’t want to listen to you, and didn’t want to know you unless you had a previously established reputation offline. And that didn’t start out full-blown, either.
- Everyone practices public relations, marketing, sales, etc. whether it’s a role or a full-fledged job.
So, what do you think? Is PR a virus that must be destroyed? Are PR people “just folks”? Are bloggers and journalists “just folks”, too, or are we getting too big for our britches?
