PR Apocalypse Now

There was a new round of teeth gnashing over the state and future of PR driven by posts on some of the highest profile blogs earlier this week.

Anyone who cares about the field should have a quick read here if you haven’t already tuned into the dialog.  The posts, combined with what must be hundreds of comments, collectively showed an intense debate and many different sides of the issue.  Commenters included names you will recognize  – those who have been vocal about PR’s evolving role – and many others.

Here’s a blow by blow (not literally, but almost) account and analysis:

First Rubel riffed off Scoble’s post about a PR-less launch, and the diminishing need for PR to help bloggers find stories (Scoble’s post is a good read on how information flows and people find stories to write about these days).

Steve Rubel said in his post Does the Thrill of the Chase Make PR Obsolete?

It’s my view that increasingly, bloggers (and maybe journos too) simply
don’t want our help. Many bloggers – particularly those who cover tech
– love to discover new things and experience them on their own, unaided
by PR.

So you have Rubel, one of the top bloggers who also happens to work in
the field for one of the largest agencies, openly questioning the
relevancy of PR for bloggers and journalists.

(OK, I have sometimes been critical of the field, and also work in it, but have never questioned our relevancy and besides I don’t have nearly the megaphone that Rubel does).

He ends his post on a note of “adapt or die” which I can’t argue with, that has formed the basis of my PR Death Watch series.

Mark Hopkins on Mashable had some positive things to say about PR’s evolving role, and how we can adapt, in his post The Changing Role of Public Relations:

Those that position themselves in the mindset that they aren’t
gatekeepers for information but connectors for entrepreneurs and
resources for journalists will achieve the most success for the clients
they do represent.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch said in his provocatively titled post The PR Roadblock on the Road to Blissful Blogging:

I can’t speak for big media who’ve been in the game for
years and years, but from my experience blogging for a few years, I agree that PR as a profession is broken…  PR is the last refuge when I am attacking a story…  they keep trying to put out the fires I am starting.

What I think is happening is that the over eager (and admittedly sometimes clueless) PR hordes are colliding with the realities of a social media dominated world (in which people just to have to tell the world exactly what is on their minds, no holding back, need to fill all those Tweets and posts) creating a caustic brew that I fully expect will implode in an apocalypse at any time.

The blogosphere and PR communities will square off, breaking into small camps that take up crude weapons, duking it out, Road Warrior style, until one side kills off the other (actually, that would be  something as many PR people are themselves bloggers these days).

Seriously, like the debate over pitch spam, it gets tiresome after awhile and one hopes that we all learn our lessons, adapt, and just move on.

I also think this increasingly points to the need for evolving approaches to PR measurement.

It is simple math, as media multiplies, attention divides, and it will increasingly become more of a challenge for PR to prove its value.

When compared with other marketing vehicles, PR has been shown to deliver outsized returns and those who know what they are doing will continue to do so.  Nothing like good solid ROI to silence the critics and prove value.