PR biz pundit Paul Holmes wonders what to make of all bad PR that the profession has been getting in the Internet lately. In just the last few months, supposedly independent pro-Wal-Mart blogs were traced back to its PR agency, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia banned flacks from submitting information because of all the spin, and social networks like Second Life have revolted against the marketing agendas of their corporate owners.
Earlier this year, a PR agency working for oil companies was outed as the creator of a “viral” video that mocked the environmental claims of Al Gore. The video was posted to You Tube as the work of a 29-year-old amateur filmmaker.
For his newsletter, The Holmes Report, Paul asked if I thought “whether PR is in the process of missing or messing up the opportunity afforded by the blogopshere, and what should be done.”
Here’s my answer, most of which appears in the article:
Paul:
The degree to which so many PR people try to exploit social media underscores how much this has become an industry of shills, rather than a profession of advocates.
It’s not a big mystery that much of what we call public relations is really just another form of marketing promotion. Where advertising is the rattling of the stick in the swill bucket, PR has too often become the practice of disguising the stick to look like a pig that other pigs want to date.
So what do we do about it? That’s a rhetorical question because there’s no “we.” The ethics of transparency and attribution have always been considerations in communications strategy. Yet there will always be people who for whatever reason instead choose obfuscation and misrepresentation. Some of those people are flacks. And some of those people are politicians, lawyers, CEOs, fundraisers, reporters, religious leaders and documentary film-makers.
Truth can’t be regulated. But it can be commoditized. And that’s what the social media movement is doing to the role of public relations. For every blog that tries to hide its identity, there are dozens more that expose the agenda. For every billionaire that tries to fool communities into being consumers, there are millions who leave to create a new network somewhere else.
Social media has empowered the public to create a fork in the road for the PR industry. One road uses the tools of the information age to build credibility and engagement with people who matter most. The other uses those tools to concoct more scams to put lipstick on the pig.
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Scatterbox: Being source-outed is becoming the classic PR problem of our age.
