In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need PR people. You could write up your news yourself, send it out, and the world would take due notice of it.
This being an imperfect world, you’re still usually going to be better off working with PR pros who can help you navigate the highways and byways of generating publicity rather than trying to do it yourself. Unless you are a natural publicity machine, you are going to find that doing your own PR will be incredibly time-consuming and not very successful.
In fact, trying to do your own PR might be a good way to get an appreciation of what PR people do and how hard it can be sometimes.
Some business people, however, are also naturals at self-promotion. Case in point: Jason Calacanis, a minor celebrity in the Internet space, who is mostly known, as far as I can tell, for being known.
Jason has weighed in on the question of whether start-ups need PR people or outside agencies to become known, and his answer is “no.” Here’s a link to his post. It actually has some very salient points in it, and some good tips for people who care about communications and PR.
And that’s the point. The typical start-up management team consists of hard-core business people who know about technology, operations, sales, business development — and usually not PR. And just because they read a post by a natural like Calacanis, they’re not going to suddenly become glib. Ain’t gonna happen.
One of the biggies of the PR business, Richard Edelman, got his dander up about Calacanis’ post and took his best shot at shooting it down.
Richard (in the PR world, everyone knows him as “Richard”) makes the key economic point that Calacanis misses:
“Most smart businesspeople involved in start-ups recognize what Adam Smith did in the mid 1700s, that specialization leads to better outcomes for all concerned. “
In the end, that’s why you need PR people. Because just like you don’t churn your own butter or butcher your own meat, you don’t need the headache of doing your own PR.
