A lot of things happened during the period from 1981 to 2001 when I was a tech PR practitioner. At the beginning, technology was this tiny niche. The IBM PC had just been introduced and it remained unclear if the new PC would beat Apple Computer in the marketplace. Microsoft was the No. 2 OS software company and most people felt that having killer apps was much more lucrative and strategically important.
I worked for legendary Regis McKenna, Inc. (RMI). Employees sometimes called the University of Regis, because so many of us learned a great deal from the marketing guru, then moved on, hopefully to do great things of our own. Regis taught us that the newsclip was not the key to PR success. The secret sauce was to build relationships with people who would make a difference to your client and to become a credible source of insight and information to them. Key influencers included investors, analysts, editors and individuals vaguely labeled “influencers.”
We didn't call editors just to pitch our client's virtues, but simply to keep up with what was going on with them and to chat about what were doing. When editors were stuck on a story, they turned to the Regis mid-level operatives for fresh leads and new angles. At the time, no one called it conversational marketing, but in fact that is what it was.
I was very good at it, mostly because I had been a reporter and editor and I now treated reporters and editors as my customers. Clients? They would come and go, but the relationships with some of these editors would last longer than my PR career did.
With a very few painful exceptions, I never overstated what my client’s news worth. When I started my own PR agency, I told operatives they could be fired for intentionally misleading the press. I taught clients to speak in respectful terms about their competitors, but to be able to point out your own competitive advantage.
But something happened during the dot com boom and everything changed. Tech PR shunted relationship marketing and adopted a more aggressive style called "buzz marketing. " Suddenly PR became pushy. Operatives were hired for their physical endowments and for their abilitis in tele-sales. An all-too-clever new breed of marketing hot shots necame our clients and the disdainfully saw customers--not as someone to understand and serve--but merely as “sticky eyeballs.”
The purpose of press coverage was no longer to build interest, enthusiasm and awareness of client products and services, but to be able to drop a stack on the table during board meetings.
The dot com era was very good to me financially. SIPR had always specialized in start ups, start ups were breeding like rabbits on sex drugs. For a while, it seemed like entrepreneurs were lining up at my door, waving money in my face. But all the while, there was this queasy feeling in my stomach. Something was wrong with what was going on, and like most viewers of the emperor parading without clothes, I saw something was missing, but did not say so, because the money was coming in and I was fearful people would think that I just didn't get it.
Even before the bubble burst, the word-of-mouth food chains broke. They just couldn't scale. The techniques I had used for more than two decades as a PR professional just couldn't influence the new, huge global markets. The same with news publications, whose models would themselves soon break. In the late 90s, there were too many editors and too many publications growing obese from too much advertising being placed on money that came from too few earned dollars. Too many PR people were pitching, pushing, emailing, calling, press releasing and gimmicking to reach editors who were born yesterday and did not know they were supposed to ask tough questions.
By the time, I stepped out of SIPR, the agency I founded and ran for 20 years, I no longer knew who to influence. I've wondered if PR was dead, and I've concluded that the way I practiced it probably is. But what was at the core of it is being revived through blogging and other social media. The worst of the practitioners are gone, as are some if it's best.
But blogging now makes word-of-mouth scalable in new ways. It also filters out bullshit with great efficiency. It is also an efficient way to rank high with the most efficient way of scoring high on the most efficient placement of all--the Google Search results.
It seems to me that PR will not die, but will continue to experience a fundamental change. The language, the tactics and the delivery mechanisms will all change.
The Red Couch will deal with these issues. We also will invite case studies of how PR operatives will successfully adapt and point out cases of operatives who try to game the blogging system and fail to do so.
