I was talking to Chris Shipley on the phone earlier today. It was a great way to avoid writing my Conferenza column on BlogOn, which Shipley's Guidewire Group had produced. We got to talking about how what I had said as a panelist at BlogOn had been misquoted and had offended some of the PR practitioners at the conference.
She knows that I take more than a little pride in the work I did and the clients I served during my years as a PR operative and executive. She knows also that I feel that I have a great deal to say to the PR industry in general and the tech and startup sectors in particular. But Chris actually asked me a question that is very rarely asked, which is why did I actually stop doing it.
Yeah, it was because the dotcom era had gone, but I had rebuilt my small agency twice before and I probably had it in me to do so again. Yeah it was because the arrogance of clients had increased along with a shallowness for their own customers. That was all a part of it. Yeah, clients who had bellied up and could not pay me were using a non-performance clause in contracts that was bullshit and they knew it.
But there were still more reasons and in retrospect, they were bigger. Almost every time I told someone that I was in PR, they made some joke about my ethics. Every time I felt I had something that contributed to the conversation, I was taken less seriously than I should have been taken because I was a PR guy.
I had spent the end of my younger and most of my middle years in PR. My best friends, my greatest business successes were in PR. Lessons for life and business were intertwined in PR and yes some of my best friends and most respected colleagues were in PR and for that reason, what I had to say was being discounted.
At BlogOn, I had said something very close to this: "I feel that blogging has already reached its tipping point,and those of you who are in the communications business need to adapt. Many in PR already have and they are doing a superior job of communicating for both themselves and their clients. But others think they can just keep on doing whatever it is they have been doing and I think you need to realize that you are in a change-or-die situation. I say this without glee, but for those of you who insist on continuing with "Command and Control" tactics, I see a future in the restaurant service industry."
One PR person said I had accused PR of trying to "control the media." I did not. Another in the room asserted that I had called PR people "evil." I never would. Spencer F. Katt, eWeek's aging feline gossip-monger accused me of saying that "all PR people had futures as waiters." I did not.
I care a great deal about the PR industry. I think it has some serious house cleaning to do, but most practitioners have integrity. In fact, if PR folk have a real problem is they try to hard to please both clients and the press. But the industry has a terrible image problem. As the Edelman Barometer finds each year--they are rated below lawyers for credibility. The irony is that they are in the image industry. There needs to be some objective self-examination ac cross the industry. There needs to be some tough listening.
I am not a voice in the wilderness. I talk with a good many senior PR people for several respected agencies. To varying degrees they feel their existing business models are either damaged or obsolete. They think they have time to change them, but not a whole lot.
And now that I call myself, a "recovering publicist," maybe I'll be taken more seriously.
