[Needle-pusher Shel Holtz. Photo by Shel]
I am a recovering publicist.
I have taken the ten-step cure offered by Hype-Enders and I pitch no more.
More seriously I spent over 25 years of my life as a PR practitioner. I conducted myself and the agency I headed with ethics and pride and helped me technology startups build interest and enthusiasm for the products I helped them introduce. There were many who did the same during my tenure in my profession and I find it boring and inaccurate when I see epitaphs hurled at the profession.
Simultaneously, as a writer I get more than a few really bad pitches and emails about subjects that do not interest me. I bristle that I'm pitched by people who seem totally ignorant of what I do and see no problem with wasting my time so that they can bill those minutes to their clients.
There's nothing new about this. PR has always had a lot of bad practitioners. Mst of them untrained rather than unskilled a few of them just plain unethical, but that can be said about just about any field.
It's just not an issue I pay a lot of attention to anymore. But today, several really smart people, some of who are my favorites in social media, such as Shel Holtz, KD Paine and Todd Defren,did a good job of refreshing the old dialog about what PR is, how it should be measured and why its practitioners are or are not needed in this emerging Conversational Era in which social media's importance is on a trajectory to eclipse traditional media, and probably has already done so in most PR categories.
Shel Holtz emphasized that PR is not necessarily evaluated by sales, but it has to move the needle. I jumped in and said that personally I prefer a good conversation, to which he retorted that no one ever paid him to have a good conversation.
Perhaps, but perhaps not.
Shel, of course has to have a better program objective than "nice chats," in his proposals to corporate clients. And KD Paine, generally recognized as the social media measurement goddess needs something more quantifiable than a nice conversation to measure the program.
But how much of the success of a PR program really is the indirect result of precisely that? When Shel calls up an editor, one he may have known for several years, what is the value of the fact that editor--or analyst, or blogger--remembers having good chat with Shel.
Before he makes the money call and before KD measures the effectiveness of that money call, theree were other conversations, conversations that built relationships between people, relationships that were built so that the money call, that was made for specific, measurable business purposes was even contemplated.
This seems obvious when you read it I bet. It seems obvious to me. The mystery is why the "just a good conversation part" gets so often overlooked and undervalued?
It's why people glibly discount talking about what you had for lunch, when in fact business conversations start with pleasantries like lunch, or weather or local sports. It's why so many of us have found a strong preference for conversational media over broadcast media.
We like good conversations. Sometimes, good conversations lead to big business and sometimes they lay dormant for long periods of time before business rises unexpectedly as a result.
Without good conversations upon which relationships and credibility get built Shel's needle might remain unmoved.
When I was in that business I thought the keyword was relations. Social media had not come along yet and now that its here you can build these relations faster and more often than was previously the case. We are in a conversational era and having conversations with customers is a highly effective way to achieve in possible PR goal that I can think of.
And to me, the ultimate goal of any PR program--including those that support sales--are relationships
To me PR folk have to be good at both ends of a conversation and social media is a tool in which several of them, such as Todd and Shel excel. The Conversational Era was made for PR people who understand that tools of their business have changed and the results can be--forgive me KD--immeasurable.
