PR is dead

For newcomers to the debate, here's another version of the PR is dead/ towards The New Public Relations line, this time aimed primarily at the trade press.

The New Public Relations · The new PR pipeline is a lot shorter, simpler, and wider:

Senior management works out a company’s goals and messages

Management works hard to make sure that the employees understand them

The people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly

Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies, at Sun Microsystems, concedes "we still need events—conferences, unConferences, seminars, beer bashes—and they take a lot of organizing and stick-handling and I suspect that PR pros have the right sort of social-convener skills to deliver value from such things."

"I’m not against information intermediaries; but the days of command-and-control PR are pretty well over. We, the bloggers, are going to go on telling the world what we’re doing for a living and why it matters, and we’re going to do it in our own voices...

He concedes that information professionals can "aggregate us or repurpose us or debate with us or debunk us".

It is an interesting but narrow reading. Yes, blogs are allowing more employees to make their voices heard, but this does not get around sopme major stumbling blocks, nto least that many employees (unlike Tim) won't have clear, interesting voices, or the inclination to use those voices. And even if they do, without aggregators, who ever is going to listen? Any organisation that allowed its message to be articulated in this laissez-faire, uncoordinated way would put itself at a slight disadvantage.

"Take up of our new XYZ service is pretty low." "Who blogged about it?" "Well, I thought you would..."

Related posts:

• PR is Dead byRoland Tanglao, GPRBW1
• After careful consideration, I still think PR is Dead, by Dave Taylor
• PR, Blogging and the New PR Meme, by Jeremy Pepper
• PR pros as translators
• Whoring for fun and profit
• All neatly summed up by Stuart Bruce