There are scores of self-serving, PR agency-written blogs out there today about the emergence of (*gag*) “PR 2.0″ - pontificating on the power of blogging, tagging, podcasting, social networking and wikis for generating buzz and credibility. Very few give any sort of valuable context about when it actually makes sense (or doesn’t make sense) to employ these approaches. Rather - there’s this sort of unflinching awe and respect for how all of these new mechanisms are ushering in a brand new and better world of PR.
I’m not trying to argue against the power of these new tools in amplifying buzz and credibility (when leveraged correctly). But I do think that the majority of content that companies (and their PR firms) are cramming into them is crap. And as David Holtzman noted yesterday, “buzz is proportional to the entertainment quality of the content, not the money spent” (nor, I’d offer, simply the delivery mechanism).
Case in point: I was at a very technical Java event last year where Sun Microsystems had sponsored lunch for the hundreds of attendees. The sponsorship included a speaking opportunity in front of the ‘captivated’ audience of Java developers. Now one would think that Sun (as the original developer of Java) would understand its own developer community. But the talk was delivered by a marketing person who went off the deep end with a lame “age of participation” infomercial. I sat there and watched the developers at my particular table rolling their eyes and giving other (more offensive) universal gestures. And it just really confused me that Sun didn’t know its own technical community well enough (at a VERY technical event) not to parade out a tired infomercial.
In many cases, the new “PR 2.0″ tools have simply made it easier for companies to embarrass themselves in front of their core constituents.
Remember how your skin crawled when one of your parents would try to act “cool” around your friends? That’s how I usually feel when I read a corporate blog or (in extremely rare occasions) listen to a corporate podcast. Most have this very disingenuous / advertorial tone … and frankly, do more harm than good. For decades (esp. via press releases) the vast majority of companies have proven incapable of expressing themselves in interesting ways (see Tom Foremski’s “Die Press Release! Die! Die! Die!“).
As fast as the technologies that power corporate journalism might evolve, 99% of companies out there will continue to fail to tell their stories in an interesting or credible way.
Related reading:
- A PR Guy’s Musings: “Big PR Firm Falls for the PR 2.0 Hype“
- Media Guerrilla: “New School PR & Thinking Like a Media Network“
- Silicon Valley Watcher: “Media Industry is Going to Hell in a Handbasket - Where is PR Industry’s Handbasket?“
- SHIFT Communications “PR 2.o Communications Reference Guide”
PR 2.0 button courtesy of b_d_solis’ photostream on flickr creative commons.
