Are PR professionals afraid of the “New Rules”?

If you haven’t read “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” by David Meerman Scott, you’re missing out on a top guide on how public relations has changed and “how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video and viral marketing” to reach your buyers directly.  You can find the book at his website www.webinknow.com or from Amazon and other online bookstores.

I re-read the book this past weekend (the revised 2010 edition), and there’s one section that I didn’t feel represented PR professionals properly – or, at least, not the PR professionals I know, most of whom are in Arizona.    In chapter 7, “The New Rules of News Releases,” he writes that “many PR professionals have a fear of the unknown. They don’t understand how to communicate directly with consumers and want to live in the past, when there was no choice but to use the media as a mouthpiece….I also think there’s a widely held view about the purity of the press release as a tool for the press.  PR professionals don’t want to know that hundreds of millions of people have the power to read their releases directly.  It’s easier to imagine  a closed audience of a dozen reporters.”

The book is brilliant and has helped completely change the way we look at public relations. I don’t think he has quite captured the issue here, however. Granted, he travels a lot more than I do and talks to way more PR people, so he’s probably a better authority. I’m just going on what I know about myself and the people in my networks. I don’t see fear of the unknown, and I don’t see an inability to communicate directly with consumers. What I do see are professionals who take pride in their career, and who don’t like the sloppiness and lack of fact checking that often happens when anyone and everyone can issue a news release. There really isn’t an editorial function anymore for what’s put out online. Most PR people I know are excited about social media and while they recognize there’s more due diligence involved in reaching so many more segmented audiences, they appreciate the convenience and reach of social media tools.

A recent incident involving NBC Anchor Brian Williams is perhaps one example that struck me about the lack of verification that most untrained people would conduct. Apparently a rumor circulated that Chief Justice John Roberts was going to leave office, according to a report on RadarOnline.  The rumor actually started in a first year law class at Georgetown University as part of a lecture about the necessity of verifying the credibility of legal informants. Fortunately, Brian Williams double checked the story before breaking it.

Now that the floodgates are open, we can’t hold back anything on the Internet, so while the benefit is that many more stories can get out there and conversations can be initiated between companies and their customers directly, true PR professionals fear not the unknown, but the deterioration of the integrity of information.

This isn’t to say that all PR professionals hold themselves to a high standard, but it is part of the ethics code for the profession. Wire services like Businesswire are quick to proofread releases and keep an extra layer of precaution before a release goes “live,” but so many more companies and individuals are using free press release sites that have no editorial function. The result can be a lot of promotional crap out there – crap that doesn’t instigate conversations, but is just annoying. This is what I fear – not that anyone can read a release, but that anyone can write one.   It brings down the whole profession.