More Mesh

In today’s morning session at Mesh, Richard Edelman, of the eponymous agency, was intelligent, articulate and insightful.

And he offered a wonderful description of the PR practitioner’s role: advisor, conscience, connector to influencers, source of creative ideas.

By contrast, I was somewhat taken aback by Mike Arrington’s assertion yesterday (and I’m paraphrasing) that while he strives for credibility, sometimes he’ll write outrageous things to drive traffic to his site.

Sounds less like a trusted source and more like supermarket-tabloid journalism to me (with apologies to publications that make no bones about what they are).

Fresh from Mesh

This is my first mobile post (just to see if I can do it) from day one of the Mesh conference.

Random thoughts:

- Blogosphere seems to be divided into two camps: the wild west where pretty much anything goes and then the same thing, but with product placement.

- Biggest differences between social media and MSM is social media is much faster and often doesn’t fact check.

- Biggest similarity is both are looking for a gem of a story.

- PR challenge is how to react quickly (‘InstaPR’) knowing we’re pitching to infuencers who may be mis- un- or less informed than MSM, but who, within their networks, have a lot of clout.

- Overheard: ‘I had a meeting at the World Trade Centre the morning of…but it was too early so I cancelled it.’

- Blogcognition – being recognized for something you wrote on your blog. (Someone actually said to me, ‘Oh you’re that blogger…’ Hey, there’s a first time for everything.)

Transparent talk

There’s so much talk about the importance of transparency in the communications business these days.

And that’s great. My approach as a PR person has always been to disclose who I am, who I represent and what I’m asking up front.

Then, it’s up to the person being pitched, whether MSM or social media, to say – and here I’ll quote Meat Loaf from Paradise by the Dashboard Light – ‘…Yes or No’.

It seems pretty straightforward and simple to me.

Transparent, even.

Monitoring the monitor

I (and probably numerous other Canadian PR people) received a letter recently from the company-formerly-known-as-Bowdens*, informing me that they changed their name.

And while I appreciated the news, I wondered how this might affect my agency.

It didn’t take long to find out. There, in the third paragraph, was the promise that I would continue to receive the same ‘Bowdens experience’ I had come to ‘know and trust’.

I wanted to scream.

To me the ‘Bowdens experience’ has been synonymous with mediocre service, missed obvious clips and the phrase ‘if you can tell me what network it was on and the time it aired, we’ll try to find it for you’. I’ve heard similar comments from other Canadian PR practitioners and some Americans, too.

To add salt to the wound, I received this same letter no less than a dozen times (in various bills). Once would have been fine thank you very much. But that wasn’t good enough for the company-formerly-known-as-Bowdens. They had to reinforce their ‘experience’ again and again.

Which only made my frustration grow.

Then around that same time, the company told us that the only good rep we’d ever had in all our dealings with them had been ‘reassigned’. Was she shipped to the Gulag? Where do they come up with this stuff?

Consistently low quality service is something I have complained about to the company-formerly-known-as-Bowdens for many years, regularly calling the president with my gripes. The difference is that before I grudgingly accepted their limitations as someone might accept an inept bureaucrat in Eastern Europe circa 1974. I now think that they’re so out of touch with the industry that they’re marketing their incompetence as a plus.

Will they ever change? I’m not holding my breath.

But there’s one thing I’m pretty sure of: they won’t catch this clip.

*Please note: I’m not including a link because I don’t want to drive traffic to their site.

In praise of news releases

Call me old fashioned but I really like news releases.

I’m talking about the one to two page documents, usually written by PR people, that have a headline, subhead, dateline, the words ‘for immediate release’ (they still thrill me), a story (information and quotes), boilerplate and contact information.

The relevance of news releases has been much debated in the blogosphere with comments suggesting they’re passé, written in indecipherable ‘corporate-speak’, need to be revved up with more links and so on.

My take is that even in the hyper-conversational world of blogs and social media, news releases still have an important place and value.

They’re a great leveler of the corporate playing field. They help define the scope of a business communication, contain useful information that sets the stage for more dialogue (including facts about the company, names of spokespersons) and tell you who to call if you want to follow up.

Think of them as conversation starters. We put them out there and you can decide to participate, dig deeper or ignore us. You can also read between the lines and I would encourage you to do that too.

For more information on this post or to continue the discussion, contact…me.