I have wanted to take a look at the state of the PR out in the wilds for some time, but was moved to action recently after listening in on a conference call seminar discussion that talked PR and the PR process with some prominent bloggers. The mix was interesting and included some traditional journalists that have joined us on the dark side. Now, being an old PR workhorse like I am, I was interested in hearing about some prevailing opinion on the Blog/PR interface. I obviously had my own preconceived notions of what good PR is and isn’t and being an expert on dealing with journalists, I was eager to see what the requirements were, directly from the horses mouth.

Before I cover that let me step back and talk about some of the processes I used to use to create successful PR. When I started with one of the very first performance-based firms back in the mid-nineties, the old boys club still held sway. That brand of media relations was all about the relationship, and relationship was king. No body made promises for PR performance prior to this time. It was conditioned into the corporate mentality that it was unethical to make promises for PR results. So, for most in the industry, who you knew in media represented your PR clout and thus your position in the public relations pecking order. Of course, the media played right along! They supported this elitist attitude and propagated it widely throughout it the industry.

Well, the PR visionary I worked with built a business on thumbing his nose at the old boy conventions and offered a performance guarantee in writing. Crazy huh! But by working hard, generating the highest quality editorial possible, he generated success and met those guarantees. Also, by giving editors what they wanted, when they wanted and by becoming master of the pitch, he also negated the ‘need’ for the old boys relationship. Story was king and we developed a new brand of media relationship that straddled the old with something new. We didn’t call on favors, we offered content, provided go to resources, knew journalists beats intimately! We became topic and brand experts and an extension of the knowledge leaders that were our clients. Our elbow grease and disdain for the old boys approach was embraced by the tech and manufacturing media we dealt with and generated a great deal of PR for our clients. In the case of me and my team, over 5000 placements as both an in the trenches AE and as an account director in less than a decade, a feat to which few in the industry could lay claim, particularly at the boutique firm level.

So, obviously I generated a ton of PR! Over my tenure, I clearly saw the shift in media relations move inexorably toward the current faceless, voiceless, spamalicious email orgy of spaghetti sticking to the wall. Ironically, and at the time unknowingly, I even helped propagate the trend of E-PR. That work may have even paved the way to my current position with one of the leading companies generating this automated paradigm shift in media relations interaction. Nowadays, a PR exec in the trenches may rarely pick up a telephone. They will often look at and work in outlook all day. They will craft the next stale press release and hunt the Web for new mentions tied to their clients. Actually, (wink wink) many even have the benefit of the latest on-demand software tools to make their job even easier. So, why the lengthy digression? Why the disdain? It’s necessary back-story, trust me.

Alright, so I’m listening to the bloggers talking about what they do and whom they serve and what’s different about the space compared to more mainstream media and many of the responses were expected. Of course, the fragmentation of the topics they handle, the niche nature of their readers and the real-time scale that they report they’re content on were all covered. But what I started noticing with surprise was the disdain and even contempt that these bloggers had when discussing how to deal with PR people and the PR process. As many of these bloggers had once been traditional journalists I couldn’t really attribute most of this attitude to lack of experience with PR nor the holier-than-thou mentality that many pure bloggers possess.

As the seminar continued the bloggers kept reiterating that PR people needed to do their homework, they needed to spend time at the bloggers site, understand their readers, not spam them off topic content or advertorial content and do all the things a PR pro worth their salt would do. But apparently they kept stressing that they needed to do all the things they WERE’NT doing. I kept listening with incomprehension until we got to the Q&A portion of the conference call and the questions rolled in from the professionals listening in, and then I had my light bulb epiphany. These PR people weren’t asking blog specific questions, they were asking fundamental and rudimentary questions about how to do non-spamalicious, strategic, conventional PR! I was floored! I laughed out loud which garnered quizzical looks from my co-workers who were sitting in on the show.

For those of you that have those big picture revelations, you know the simplest answers and connections are often the truest. Laid on in front of me was the progression PR has taken in the last 15 years and it was a FUNNY progression. Obviously, the paradigm away from the old boys network that the information age and PR people like myself helped propagate had swung the pendulum too far the other way and became the defacto norm long before blogging came along. Now the bloggers were highlighting why it was broken. When I was in the trenches and it got to the point where journalists could get, generate, research, compile content and in many instances pay lip service to NO ONE! ‘Just send me an e-mail’ soon became the cry of media across the board. It was a blow to the hybrid process we created. The days of relying on us PR types for a great deal of content, mostly came to an end. I remember fondly the obsolete days of last minute calls from desperate editors with pages to fill and begging for top tier content. Hah! But soon, the Internet was the teat from whence all media milk flowed. Between the journalist defection from the PR camp and the development of software tools to make their jobs more effecient, it seems the “dumbing down” of PR began.

As spaghetti PR continued to evolve and media kept pushing us to arms length, the blogsphere developed its own voice and ironically it was a voice of individuals, much like conventional media used to be. As thought leadership never dies, it just migrates and evolves, blogging eventually took the baton pass from conventional media and exploded on the scene and so what was old is new again. Everybody was a journalist and for many, a journalist with cloutin the real world as well as on the Internets. As with all media, blogs became a big blip on the PR radar, but unlike the current paradigm traditional media enjoyed and cultivated with its faceless spaghetti process, blogs were the quintessential one-man razor niche shop and as such demanded by necessity the old ‘attention to detail’ PR days. Ironically, bloggers said to PR what traditional media was trying to suppress in recent years – You have value, but you need to demonstrate that value.

They were clear, to hear me is to know me, and the more you read, the more you comment and the more you study, the more you’ll reach them and the more they will listen. The irony of it all is that the bloggers aren’t asking for anything new, difficult or revolutionary … just a little more creativity, attention to detail and stories they could really use. It warms the cockles of this old PR heart to see the craft of creative media relations being kept alive by the budding new guard of media. Next week I will cover the future of PR.