Most of the time I’m very proud to identify myself as a PR guy. Then some scandal involving a celebrity happens and I’m sorely tempted to turn off the television set for a week just so I can avoid seeing any other PR guys. Take, for example, the affair of the famous golfer that broke in November. Almost instantly every cable network trotted out “PR experts,” all of whom were doling out the same rather insipid advice about how the celebrity should handle the situation. It occurred to me that most professionals in any category would never dream of offering unasked-for counsel to a total stranger on national television. Todd Defren has recently compared the respective standing of lawyers and PR people in the public eye. The problem is that the Clarence Darrows of all professions are less likely to be recognized than their Nancy Graces. And PR is all about publicity, so perhaps it’s inevitable that more than its share of practitioners assume the role of professional busybodies—forgetting perhaps that busybodies aren’t liked or respected very much by anyone. The nadir of this latest scandal from my point of view was this blog post, in which the author, not content to provide unasked for advice to the golfing star, directs his words of wisdom at the same time to the President of the United States. Appalling as that is, on so many levels, I’m sure the guy was only trying to be helpful. Yet PR as a profession can only gain in stature when more of its practitioners learn that sometimes the most helpful thing is to keep their own counsel and butt out of situations that are none of their business.
Are you concerned about how green your workplace is? I’m not talking about the more obvious (and potentially higher-profile) green issues such as the sustainability of your building’s construction or the environmental impact of your company’s products, manufacturing processes, and packaging/shipping methods. I’m asking just how green your office is from day to day.
There hasn’t been this much hype about a new internet phenomenon since … I don’t know, maybe the dot-com bubble when everyone rushed out and changed their company name to “Something.com”, and had to hire an “Internet-specialist PR firm.” Right now “Social Media” is getting that same kind of attention. Will it live up to it? Should we all be jumping on the bandwagon?
One of my jobs at Wall Street is to maintain a list of the agency’s clients, including a short summary of what they do and a link to their company web sites. In adding NOA Audio Solutions to the list last week, I was gratified in more ways than one. First, it was nice to see that this is the eighth account Wall Street has added since the beginning of this year—a good accomplishment for an agency our size in the context of an economic downturn. Secondly, I was pleased that it was necessary to go no further than the first sentence on the NOA Audio web site to find a concise statement of what the company does: “NOA provides software and hardware tools for digitizing and managing archive essence material with a focus on audio archives.” Wow. If only every technology company were this clear and succinct about what they make and what it’s for. Then a lot more of them would be successful! After all, if you can’t explain what your company does in 25 or fewer meaningful words, then maybe it’s not such a necessity after all. How lucky we are to have clients like NOA Audio who have a clear idea of what they’re doing and can describe it without resorting to buzzwords. It makes our job so much easier. But don’t tell anyone I said that.
Many companies have either cut advertising or drastically reduced their spend in the trades for obvious reasons…. the economy. However, I’d like to make a case for why it is important to try to find the funds to continue to advertise, even just a little bit, in the trades – even in tough times.