PR is an honorable profession
Sunday, May 25th, 2008What a relief to read Brian Solis’ TechCrunch post on the role of PR in Web 2.0. I’m sick of the “how dare you try to contact me” attitude of so many A-listers. The “just be cool and hang out at Valley parties” approach is not only elitist, it is damaging to the active economy that we need to develop on the Web. Companies have a right to try and get their message out to potential customers, and to use professionals to help them do it. That doesn’t excuse sloppy PR efforts, but as Brian shows, there are acceptable ways of doing it, and being paid to do it for others is a job that deserves more respect. A-list bloggers forget that they are supposed to act as conduits for information flowing to their readers, not gatekeepers blocking anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of coolness. That is why I find the following advice from Brian to be the most important part of his post:
The best communications strategies will envelop not only authorities in new and traditional media, but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve. The Magic Middle, as David Sifry defined it, are the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail and they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly in a true peer-to-peer approach.