[0]

Dan Gillmore got an email PR pitch for a company that’s monitoring online discussions on behalf of corporate clients, which contained such pearls as this:

“(PR client) is a market intelligence and media analysis services firm. (PR client) is working with F1000 companies who are using our services to Manage and Monitor Digital Influencers (such as blogs, message boards, user groups, complaint sites, etc.) as an intelligence and threat awareness tool. (Person’s name), CEO could talk to you about ‘What F1000 Companies are doing to take action against bloggers’ and ‘How companies are taking steps to protect their corporate reputations from bloggers/digital influencers.’”

and he is not impressed.

This is a remarkably myopic view of the blogosphere, but it reflects what I frequently hear from PR folks.

So it seems that enlightened PR professionals are indeed few and far between.

One of the ‘original flavour’ ones lets himself heard in the comments:

FactOne: Bloggers most often do not hold Journalism degrees and are therefore not schooled properly

Fact Two: Bloggers most often are not affiliated with a news outlet and are therefore not required to adhere to journalistic ethics and standards

Fact Three: Shock and sensationalism are the Mother’s Milk of most blogs.

Fact One: Schooled properly in what? Disguising (very thinly) their biases? How exactly does a journalism degree make a journalist out of anyone?

Fact Two: Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, Maureen Dowd and many others are affiliated with major news outlets but that did not seem to help them adhere to journalistic ethics and standards, whatever that means…

Fact Three: Oh yeah, and newspapers shy away from scandal and sensation. Anybody told them?

This is what Steve Hall of Adrants has to say about this:

The key element that public relations professionals do not understand about blogging and all Citizen’s Media is that conversation can not be manage[d] - it can be joined.

Any company that thinks they can “manage” the conversations taking place through weblogs and other conversation-enabled media is asking for a backlash so powerful, the company could be brought to its knees. In this country and in any free country, people are not told what to say, they are asked why they said it and asked to converse about it. If a public relations entity seeks to influence thought, it should enter the conversation - not attempt to ban the conversation. (Make sure you read the insanely short-sited comment from Flackboy Kevin)

Many commenters descent on that Flackboy Kevin, here is one that puts it nicely:

PR is so often about lying to look good in the face of contrary facts that many of us look to blogs to get a much more honest story. You should know about this phenomenon, because it’s like the difference between a spashy ad campaign and word of mouth. Which one has staying power and why? Answer that and you’ll understand blogs.