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Axed professions
Posted by Adriana Cronin-Lukas
Monday, July 19, 2004 @ 11:18 AM
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Steve Rubel posts a few good links that presumably fell through the cracks of his inbox/news reader but are worth retrieving. My favourite one is After The Lawyers, Can We Kill All PR People? I know, how predictable of me.

I would really like to believe that not all PR people are this bad, but I'm beginning to lose faith. Last year, I wrote up a longer piece about PR people who don't understand blogs and tried to do things like trick bloggers into writing about the companies they represented.

A healthy rant follows. The best bit is:

...Also, don't claim that you "did online PR before the Internet." You didn't. The internet was there before you were. This isn't difficult, but bloggers are not traditional press. While some of them may accept press releases, the fact that you can't bother to take the briefest amount of time to figure out what kind of publication we are suggests you're not so tech savvy after all.

Ouch. Check out the comments to the post, they actually identify the PR company with the pompous claim.



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Comments

One company I worked for once paid a consultant a day rate of hundreds of pounds sterling per day for a month's worth of work on a 'crisis management' plan for our website.

His advice? If anything goes wrong with the website, fob the customer off with marketing robot-speak. And if anything else goes wrong in the company, slap a press release that was written by a marketing robot up on the website.

That's an example of what these people think constitutes 'online PR'.

And yes, I know you love that title, Adriana. I think our resident lawyer and tBBC partner David may take exception to the first part of it, though. [insert smiley here] My own preference would be "After All PR People, Can We Kill All HR People?" But that's another post for another day...

Posted by: Jackie Danicki at July 19, 2004 12:02 PM

These people are flopping around like the fish out of water they are. They're desperate to justify their existence. They can see that more and more people are catching on to the fact that the emporer is in fact nekkid as a jaybird. They are not long for this wretched rock.

That's the good news.

The bad news is, too many people still buy their line of crap. Keep spreading the news that it's just that: crap.

Posted by: Andy Carle at July 19, 2004 12:47 PM

Oh, so I'm not the only one who doesn't like HR people?

The fact is that anyone can get into PR, and so a lot of people do, and do it badly. (Just like HR as it happens!)

Posted by: Kirsty McDonald at July 19, 2004 03:33 PM

Spot-on, Kirsty. And that is why, under the auspices of "elevating the profession," we have - in Britain, at least - professional bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing that are trying to make it even more difficult for anyone to get into marketing. If you haven't taken the (very expensive, long, drawn-out) courses and gained your (very expensive, worthless) qualifications, they don't want you to be able to work in marketing. (The CIPD - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development - has executed exactly the same scam with HR.) It's amazing to me that more people aren't up in arms about the degree to which the CIM wants to be able to control the employment market in this area - and all for its own financial benefit.

I can feel a proper blog post forming on this one...

Posted by: Jackie Danicki at July 19, 2004 03:45 PM


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