Citizen Journalist, PR Guy. What's in a name?

Words mean a difference to me. I don't think it's just because I'm a writer.

I felt my feathers ruffle during an ICE 07 panel talk called, "Citizen Journalism: Weapon of Mass destruction?" when panelists agreed that the term "Citizen Journalist," was inaccurate. When I asked a floor question, that was a bit contentious," panelist Angus Frame, editor, of globeandmail.com, Canada's national newspaper retorted, "what difference does it make?

To me it makes a great deal of difference. To discount the term, implies we bloggers are somehow less. While a great deal has been said about the structural differences between professional news gatherers and bloggers, the word "citizen" is too often overlooked. We are volunteers, just like "citizen soldiers" were. We lack the training and discipline.  We are often inaccurate, but we have a lot of feet on a lot of streets and we are changing what the public comes to know. Citizen Journalism predates blogging.  Abraham Zapruder's film of the JFK assassination was a citizen journalist and so was George Holliday's video of the Rodney King's beating.

The whole experience got me to thinking how often many of us struggle with terms. Despite the impression  that authors become fabulously wealthy, my primary source of revenue still comes from consulting. In the process of being selected, I have to struggle with the terminology surrounding just what it is I do.

For years, I was perfectly content to be called a "marketing consultant" or "PR executive." Less formally, you could call me a marketing or PR guy. It was what I did.

But it's not what I do anymore.  When business prospects use those terms for me, I get uncomfortable. Yet I am well aware, Ican rarely get hired by telling people what I do not do.

A marketing guy figures out messages and the devises ways to insert them into people's foreheads, even people who do not wish to have them inserted. This is no longer what I do.

Lately, I’ve started calling myself a “markets guy,” which is someone who finds markets relevant to a business and joins or starts conversations that are useful or interesting to those markets. If you think about it, this is very different.

I've had a great deal of struggle with the term “public relations.” The profession, as practiced by a great many people today is not about relationships with the public.  It is more about taking messages from clients and injecting them into the markets, often via the media.  Such a routing creates the impression that these marketing messages are more credible. There remains some truth to that, but again, it  is not what I do.

Yet I am all about public relations. The term literally implies developing relationships with your public. Social media makes it efficient, effective and scalable to have transparent relationships with verylarge numbers of people.  If you think about it, these are public relationships.

Maybe in all cases, I'm just mincing words.  But then, words are very important to most people.

Comments

[Connie Reece]

Shel, what do you think of the term "conversational marketing" as a description? My understanding of it is similar to your "markets guy" tag -- finding markets and starting conversations.

[Heather Yaxley]

I'm passionate about working in public relations exactly as you describe it as meaning developing relations with publics. Social media enables us to do that more directly, openly and honestly than ever - so it ought to be the time of public relations.

However, I am becoming increasingly frustrated with people who say they are in public relations yet in reality are spinning, hustling, lying, engaged in propaganda, manipulation and worse. Many practitioners - and academics - seem to lack ethics and deny that public relations can be a moral practice, which is so depressing as I believe it to be untrue.

Yet, I continue to believe that we must claim public relations for ourselves and keep championing that it really does mean what it says.