This is so AWESOME it’s LEGENDARY!
It captures exactly how I feel when I get yet another request from yet another clueless PR firm asking me to blog about something completely unrelated to the focus of Sourcing Innovation, under embargo, and says exactly what I want to say.
From now on, when you ask me to cover Economic Freedom Day (WTF is that?), the latest financial results of a Healthcare conglomerate, or the viewpoints of your Olympic sponsor, I’m just going to point you to this (NSFW).
As my regular readers know, I’m not a big fan of PR. (See Blogger Relations I, II, and III.) Most PR people just waste my time, sending me invitations to blog about charity events, the Miss America contest, or the latest self help book by the guru of the day. And those are the better ones. Others offer to schedule meetings the week after I’ve left the city, or schedule meetings without checking if the person they’re scheduling can actually make it, and then don’t tell me the meeting isn’t happening until the call doesn’t happen, or, in a few cases, I show up to an office and no one’s there. And while I will admit that there are a few acute professionals who defy the norm and deserve all the respect we can muster, it seems that I have the bad luck of getting, more often than not, the attention of those who were, obviously, last in their class.
But I’ve had a hard time putting my figure on what really bugs me about most PR professionals, until I stumbled across this article on “48 Guerrilla Marketing Tips from Top PR Pros” on OpenForum.com. The article, which summarized the advice of 48 PR professionals, went something like this:
In short, an astonishing 73% think Twitter, which will make a twit out of you, is a PR strategy — and they think it’s a good one at that! Of the remaining 27%, 17% are promoting social media and/or SEO. Of the remaining 10%, 2% are recommending you convince someone else to offer value to your customers and 2% are recommending you appeal to University students (who may or may not graduate and get good paying jobs, and, therefore, may or may not be able to afford your products). This leaves a mere 6% who offer, at least in my view, worthwhile advice of having a unique voice, providing value, and thinking before you speak. However, not a single PR professional said the one, and only one, thing I want to hear. Good content. How can you have good copy without good content? I just don’t get it.