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By Bill Huey
In his new book about the state of PR, John Budd wonders whether practitioners have become mostly “implementers” rather than “influencers.” The old seat-at-the-table thing, though many doubt the existence of the table in the first place.
I believe PR has become a business of mostly implementers, thanks to a number of forces: PR education, demographics, the rise of marketing and the devolution of PR into a concierge function rather than that of strategic advice and counsel.
For example, PR 2.0 is simply in love with social media and its tools, as witnessed by the staggering amount of blogging, twittering, Facebooking, and MySpacing going on (full disclosure: I blog occasionally but never Twitter, as I am old-fashioned enough to believe it will make you go blind).
In some ways, this is understandable. PR is often intangible, difficult to quantify and judge with any degree of objectivity. That’s why everyone believes they can do it, just as everyone believes their child is the smartest in the playgroup and their dog is the cutest in the kennel. In PR, what doesn’t happen is often as important as what does. The plant didn’t close. The product wasn’t recalled. The announced protest never materialized.
In fact, the practice of PR often requires a good measure of what Keats termed negative capability, which he defined in a letter to his brothers: “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This trait has always made some people nervous, and it drives people whose paramount skill is present value analysis absolutely cuckoo.
Social media, on the other hand, is highly transactional, very tangible, and offers potential for immediate feedback—something the Millennial Generation is believed to require like oxygen. The gadgets are cool, and you can make silent fun of people at boring meetings. And the global reach is tremendous—much better than ham radio without the unsightly tower behind the house.
Are these useful communications tools? Sure, just as PowerPoint and spell check are useful. But they are no substitute for thinking, and make poor levers for the heavy lifting required to resolve difficult business problems or intractable societal issues.
What’s worse, they are agents of marginalization, pushing PR people further into the concierge role of dropping everything when the boss wants 250 engraved invitations for the Christmas party at his home, or a vice president wants a speech written for a charity event his wife is chairing. This noxious trend is exacerbated by the fact that employees are expected to be accessible and responsive 24/7. regardless of the trivial nature of the request.
We are Twittering while Rome burns, abdicating the role of strategic advisor for that of media trafficker, internal communications drone, or party planner. Is it a wonder there are no PR intellectuals? Is it any wonder that celebrity publicist Cindy Berger, describing her selection of a career, tells CNN:
“I graduated college and I was laying [sic] in a friend's pool reading Cosmopolitan magazine, drinking a can of Tab. And there was an article about celebrity publicists.
And I thought, my God, that's what I want to do. That's it.”
While on the subject of Rome, I turn to our Italian colleague Toni Muzi Falconi for a portion of his Christmas blog that expresses the case perfectly. In the second of four requests to Santa, he beseeches:
“Please encourage my colleagues to adopt the habit of asking themselves–at least once a month–what they are doing, how they doing what they are doing, and what sense it all makes.”
Thanks, Toni. And to all a good night.
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Bill Huey is principal of Strategic Communications in Atlanta, a corporate and marketing communications consultancy he started in 1986. He can be contacted at mailto:bhuey [at] bellsouth.net. |
